This Portland Elementary School-Turned-Restaurant Is Haunted By an Undead Boy

We headed to a haunted 100-year-old elementary school building in Portland, Oregon that is now home to a restaurant, four bars, a theater, and a hotel.

The women's restroom is definitely the ghost sighting hotspot of the property. It just depends on who you talk to and how long they've been there.

I worked at the Kennedy School for two years as the hotel manager and I remember getting a few different reports during that short time. It wasn't something that occurred on a daily basis, but I was able to be a witness to it once.

I had just started the job and it was in the afternoon when I was sitting at the desk. Two older women in their 60s came running down the main hallway of the property that connected the restaurant, bars, and theater. They were both pale in the face. I then noticed that one of them was crying hysterically, so I asked if they were OK and if there was anything that I could do to help calm them down. One of them told me, "We were in the restroom down the hall and what we witnessed—we can't even describe."

I gasped and told them to please have a seat and tell me what had happened. Here I was thinking that I was being pranked. The other woman began crying hysterically and ran out the building. The older woman calmed down and told me what she saw.

"We were both washing our hands in the restroom and when we looked over to the corner of the ladies room. There was a little boy who you could completely see through. He was going around in circles, and circles, and circles. He was dripping wet. We didn't know what to do, so we immediately left the bathroom and ran out here. Whatever you need to do, you need to help that little boy and his soul. He is lost."

From there, she left. I wanted to get her name and number to follow up, but she was really freaking out. My colleague and I stood there talking and eventually went to go scope the restroom area. At that point, a huge gust of wind lifted my dress. It was a warm day. We both started shouting, "What is going on?!" The presence of whatever that was sent chills up and down my spine. Moments later, we walked inside the bathroom, but were witness to nothing.

And I never heard or saw from those women ever again.

There has also been a report of a sighting in the theater around 1 AM. An employee who was cleaning up after the last showtime saw the silhouette of a little boy wearing a baseball hat and shirt with a number ten on it. The employee giggled about it at first, thinking that the boy was just a rebellious little kid who was staying out late. But as he picked something up and looked up, the kid was nowhere to be found.

A chef who used to work in the restaurant here also saw a little boy run down the hallway very late into the evening.

There were tons of business travelers that stayed with us and complained at checkout. "We woke up a few times in the middle of the night because we thought we heard sounds of children laughing," was the common response. I realized that these people were all staying in the same room which was located right by the maypole, so they were probably hearing the sounds of the pagan maypole dance celebration that used to take place here back in the 1920s.

I started a ghost log book because we started getting so many reports. Nowadays, I'm working at Edgefield, the mother of all McMenamins-owned haunted places in Oregon. But I'll tell that story next year.

This post was originally published on October 2015.

As told to Javier Cabral