Cathedral Park

Fifteen-year-old Thelma Taylor was murdered near here in 1949. Visitors hear her screams under the St. Johns Bridge arches at night.

Cathedral Park exists today because of a fifteen-year-old girl named Thelma Anne Taylor. On August 5, 1949, she was waiting for a bus on North Fessenden Street in Portland's St. Johns neighborhood, on her way to Hillsboro to pick beans for the summer, when a twenty-two-year-old ex-convict named Morris Leland approached her. He lured her to a wooded stretch near the Willamette River, and the two slept in the woods that night. Around dawn on August 6, Taylor heard railroad workers switching cars at a nearby yard and started screaming for help. Leland struck her with a piece of steel rebar until she stopped, then stabbed her with a knife and buried her body under a pile of driftwood and logs.

This is the story Cathedral Park is built on, and the facts deserve to come before the ghost. Leland was arrested six days later on an unrelated car-theft charge, confessed without being asked while in custody, was tried in October 1949, sentenced to death in November, and executed in the gas chamber at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem on January 9, 1953. Taylor's body was found in a shallow grave near the Willamette. She was three years older than her sister Paulette, who was three at the time of the murder.

The legend says that on warm summer nights, beneath the Gothic arches of the St. Johns Bridge, you can hear a girl's voice crying out for help. Some witnesses report a specific phrase, "Help! Somebody help me, please!" carried on the wind across the river. The bridge, designed by David B. Steinman and opened on June 13, 1931, has 400-foot towers and pointed arches that funnel sound in odd ways. The Willamette adds a constant low murmur. Acoustically, this is a place that would generate eerie noises whether anything tragic had happened here or not.

The murder didn't actually happen in what is now Cathedral Park. Researcher Erik Meharry, who set up a memorial Facebook page for Taylor in 2012, traced the location through old records and confirmed it occurred about eight blocks from the bridge. The popular version of the legend had also stretched Taylor's captivity from one night to seven days. Multiple paranormal groups have since investigated the site and reached the same skeptical conclusion. Northern Woods Paranormal Research and Investigations did extensive fieldwork in 2007 and 2008, including pulling city archive records and doing excavation at the site, and ruled the haunting a legend rather than documented activity. Investigators from Sinister Coffee and Creamery visited on the seventy-first anniversary of the murder in August 2020 and attributed the recorded sounds to traffic, wind, and the bridge itself.

The most important development in this story isn't paranormal at all. In September 2012, Meharry was contacted by Paulette Jarrett, Taylor's younger sister. She shared memories of Thelma sharing gum with her, posing in their father's uniform. After the contact, Meharry asked people to leave the ghost story alone out of respect for the family. Author Colin Dickey examined the case in his 2016 book Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places and named the same tension directly: the legend that has kept Taylor's name alive has also reduced her to a cautionary folktale.

Cathedral Park itself wasn't even a park in 1949. It was acres of blackberry brambles, abandoned cars, and dumped garbage along the Willamette. The city only converted it into green space in 1980, and it now hosts the annual Cathedral Park Jazz Festival under the same arches that supposedly carry the screams. Visitors still come at night listening for them. They probably hear the wind through the bridge cables, the river moving past, and traffic above on Highway 30. Whether any of that adds up to a haunting depends on what you think a haunting is. Thelma Anne Taylor was a real teenage girl who was murdered. Her sister is still alive. The screams under the bridge belong to her, and the most useful thing visitors can do with them is remember her name.