Ghosts in Havre

Footsteps without feet, chairs that should be still rocking, doors slowly creaking open, books flying off shelves as if flung by invisible hands - these are the ghost encounters of Havre locals.

Sue Pollington is the owner of the bookstore in the Havre Atrium. Jim Griggs is a long-time Havre businessman and owner of Griggs Printing & Publishing. Kris Shaw is a professional framer, artist and co-owner of the Atrium Mall. Pollington, Griggs and Shaw all say they've been in the presence of the paranormal.

Griggs works in the Anderson Building on 5th Avenue. He's been there since 1988.

"During elections, I'd work 16-hour days and I'd hear footsteps upstairs when there was no one else in the building," he said.

He would walk upstairs to see if someone slipped into the locked building.

"We're near the railroad - you never know," Griggs said.

Off all the perimeter checks that were initiated by the mysterious footsteps upstairs, he never found a living being attached to them. Griggs concluded that the footsteps belonged to a ghost.

"I think somebody's here - it's kind of spooky," he said.

His daughter shares his sentiment. He said she refuses to be alone in the building. They've decided to call the ghost George.

Pollington and Shaw have named two of the three ghosts in the Atrium. There's Art who, coincidentally, worked in Artitudes Gallery before he died. And there's Anne, who owned the bookstore before Pollington. Anne died of cancer about three years ago, Pollington said.

Shaw, who has owned the building longer than Pollington has been in it, told Pollington that when she first started picking up on the metaphysical activity that Art said before he died, he was going to haunt the Atrium because he loved it so much.

Anne, on the other hand, is harder for Pollingotn to figure out. Why haunt the Atrium? She only spent a fraction of her life in Havre. And as a frequent traveler, one would think Anne would pick a more interesting place to haunt.

The third ghost, according to Pollington, sounds like it's doing maintenance work on the bottom floor. It doesn't have a name.

Pollington, holder of three master's degrees and two Ph.D.s, is wise to the possibility that some people might question her grasp of reality.

"Some people think this is all a bunch of crap, and that's cool - until they have an experience," she said.

Pollington grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, with ghosts, monsters and the New Jersey Devil, a time and place where "no one thought you were crazy" for believing in the paranormal.

Pollington's encounter with the ghosts in the Atrium Mall have been close. Shaw believes Art is the one who likes to push books off the shelves in Pollington's bookstore and Pollington thinks Anne was the one who threw a book at her husband.

"We were re-shelving books we found on the ground that morning and one popped out and hit him in the chest," she said.

The title of the book was "Gideon," which spooked Pollington because she has a son by that name. She called her son afterward to make sure he was all right. He was.

Shaw's encounter has been so close that she thinks she's caught it on camera. She keeps a framed picture of an apparition that looks like fingers of fire about to wrap around the doorknob in front of it.

So why the ghosts? Why are they here?

Pollington said most places with history are susceptible to paranormal activity.

"In the Northeast, at least where I was, I was surrounded by a lot of battlefields - the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. There are a lot of haunted things," Pollington said.

She said that before there was a Montana, there was a Fort Assinniboine, where people struggled and died. The friction between the Natives in the area led to bloodshed and death as well. Havre has history.

Aside from the Atrium, and Grigg's Printing, are there other places Havrerites might be likely to run into - or through - ghosts?

The Park hotel is "very haunted," Pollington said, adding the Oxford Bar has "some hauntings." The Underground Hotel and Havre's underground tunnels have hosted "lots of fights and death." They're definitely haunted. The "cute, yellow house on 4th Street that still hasn't been sold" is haunted too. She added that some of the churches are haunted, particularly "the Methodist church that's built with the Helena blue stone."

Why are the ghosts here?

"We believe ghosts are dead people, unsettled spirits who haven't left. Some people believe some ghosts are hanging around not because they want to, but because they're stuck," Pollington said.

Should people be scared of ghosts?

Like people, there are good and bad ghosts. If ghosts are disturbing people, Pollington said, she does spiritual cleansing. When her husband got hit with the book, she told the ghost it couldn't do that, or she'd banish it. No one has been hit with books since, she said.

But the books haven't stopped "falling" off the shelves, she said.

As Havre Daily News was finishing the interview with Pollington, a book from the Western section hit the floor. Pollington walked over and picked it up off the floor and turned it over. The book was Louis L'Amour's "Lonesome Gods."