Staff at the Grant House in Vancouver, Washington hear deliberate footsteps pacing the second-floor hall, outside quarters where General Alfred Sully is said to have paced through his last illness in 1879. A historian's camera died in there, then came back on by itself.
At the Grant House in Vancouver, Washington, the ghost keeps to the second floor. Staff and diners at the restaurant there describe footsteps in the upstairs hallway, deliberate, pacing back and forth along the eastern end of the house. People have been reporting them for decades.
Suzy Taylor, who runs the restaurant with her sister and her husband, went upstairs one day and saw someone in black crossing the hall. She went down to ask who it was. Nobody had gone up. "I was excited," she told The Columbian. "I was like, 'I just saw a ghost!' I had been skeptical before that."
The reports cluster at that end of the floor: cold spots, a tall bearded man in a long old-fashioned coat standing out on the verandas, shadowy shapes in the corners of the dining room. Taylor once watched a package of English muffins slide off a bread rack with the kitchen staff nowhere near it. She put it back and made sure it was steady. It fell again.
The man in the coat is supposed to be Alfred Sully, who commanded the post twice and died at Fort Vancouver on April 27, 1879, at 58. He was given the honors of a general officer, his body sent east to Philadelphia, flags at half mast, the officers here wearing badges of mourning for 30 days. What killed him was never pinned down. Jeff Davis, an anthropologist and retired Army major who once worked as the barracks' military historian, thinks stomach cancer; others say kidney trouble. "Sometimes he couldn't get out of bed," Davis says, "and other times he'd pace the hall at night because of the pain."
Which is the thing people upstairs say they are hearing.
The house carries a borrowed name. Ulysses S. Grant never lived in it. He arrived in 1852 as a 30-year-old quartermaster and stayed down near the river in a prefabricated house shipped around Cape Horn. Townspeople hung his name on the old post headquarters in 1879, the year the former president came back through Vancouver on a publicized visit, the year Sully died at the post. No record anyone has found says he died inside this house at all.
In October 2012, Davis spent four hours inside with a compass, an EMF meter, a digital recorder and a video camera. The camera was fully charged. It died after 20 minutes, and his backup battery was dead too. He asked his questions in five or six rounds and got nothing back on tape. The Scrabble tiles he had scattered across Sully's old living quarters lay exactly where he had dropped them.
Then, as he packed up to leave, the dead camera came back on by itself, fully charged, plugged into nothing.
