Oregon is full of haunted places and I am drawn to all of them.  I love the thrill of perhaps seeing a ghost on one of my pinhole adventures.

Last summer we camped at Little Crater Lake up on Mt Hood (not to be confused with Crater Lake,  also in Oregon but South of here) . Little Crater Lake is  haunted by the ghosts of three teenagers (one female and two males) who swim in the freezing lake and reach out their arms to passersby as if they want to be rescued. It is also haunted by a white cat that disappears when you try to approach it.

When we camped here it was September and on a Sunday night so we had the entire campground to ourselves. To say I was nervous about this would be an undstatement. I was flat out freaked out. There wasn’t even a camp host and the ranger was elsewhere. We were completely alone.

We tested fate by walking to the lake after dark, by the light of the full moon. We didn’t see teenagers crying for help. And we didn’t see a white cat. The next morning, though, we were visited by the weirdest birds. They don’t live down at the lower elevations, apparently, because they were not familiar to me. They kept creeping closer and closer to me in groups of three as I sat quietly, drinking my coffee, until I scared them away. This happened repeatedly.

The “lake” is really a small alpine pool. The water is clear and very cold. It is considered a “geological oddity” and “they” think it was created by “artesian water forcing its way through soft volcanic rock.”

It really is a beautiful, quiet place. Once I made friends with the birds.

For more info check out the USDA website.