The Walker-Ames House in Port Gamble, Washington has stood empty since the sawmill closed in 1995. Investigators still report children on the second floor, a boy in the basement, and a voice at the top of the stairs that gave its name as Annabelle.
The owner of the general store next door reported three small children in the upstairs windows of the Walker-Ames House in Port Gamble, Washington. A Seattle television segment later told it as two, peeking their heads over a sill. The house they were looking into is a Queen Anne mansion built in 1888 and 1889 for the sawmill manager's household, replacing a resident manager's house that had burned in 1885, and it has been locked and unoccupied since the mill shut down in 1995. The town's own investigation dossier says it flatly: managers and company employees lived here until 1995, and the house has been vacant since then, "by the living."
In January 2008, Puget Sound Ghost Hunters and AGHOST put four two-person teams inside for two nights, rotating floors every hour. Nobody was told where activity had been reported before, so the teams had to find the hot spots themselves. Two of the four smelled flowers partway up the enclosed attic stairwell, a scent that couldn't be detected at the bottom of the stairs or at the top. Near the top they logged a cold spot three degrees colder than the room, measurable to an area three feet by two, seeming to float 18 inches above the floor. In the basement, a member said something punched him in the back. There was no bruise. Most of the team didn't want to go back down there on the second night.
Their report also logs the things that stayed ordinary. Scrabble tiles laid out in a random pattern in the basement sat undisturbed from Friday night to Sunday morning. Two rubber balls left in the attic hadn't moved. The controls came back negative, and they wrote that down. But the attic door, locked, with no key provided and confirmed shut at the walk-through, was found unlocked and standing open the first night, and the team leader had sole possession of the keys.
Pete Orbea, who runs the town's ghost walks, has spent more than 1,100 hours inside the house. His most-repeated encounter is from a private tour: a woman appeared behind him at the base of the servants' staircase, eyes visible, throwing a shadow on the wall, and was gone the moment the group reacted. On a Christmas-season investigation his team heard small running footsteps cross the second floor, and Orbea says he collided with an unseen mass the size of an offensive lineman that knocked him backward. At the top of the stairs, a female voice answered his investigators and said she was a lady named Annabelle.
Annabelle. Anna. Katy. Sarah. Robert. Those are the names that keep surfacing on tape here, and nobody has matched any of them to a person known to have lived in this house. The record has the newlywed Ameses moving in with the bride's parents, and no children at all.
