Let this be a lesson to you: Tilden Randall, a downtown accountant who was passionately in love with his wife and his tobacco, expired too young — his early 50s — right at his desk, upstairs from the Luepke Florist shop at 1300 Washington St. The culprit was cardiac arrest, likely due to a lifetime of smoking.
Something about Tilden Randall’s 1963 death may have prevented him from ever leaving the office, however. The owner of the new Tap Union Freehouse in that building, Chris Daniels, says he gets a pretty strong feeling after hours that somebody is keeping him company. Somebody impatient to quit his calculations, abandon his death stick and hurry home to his widow, alas, with a bouquet from downstairs.
“I spend many a night with Tilden,” said Daniels. “Don’t tick him off with your story. I don’t want him to think we’re making fun of him.”
Far be it from us. “Ghost Stories of Vancouver,” a creatively creepy photo exhibit that goes up Saturday on the walls of the Tap Union Freehouse, is an exploration of several disturbing downtown deaths — and some dead people who maybe never got the news.
Spooky stories are always fun, according to photographer Chelsea Gaya and researcher Claire Shomphe, but there are serious messages behind this exhibit, too. Gaya and Shomphe hope that viewers will see each set of scary pictures as a cautionary tale — and consider how things have or haven’t changed in the intervening years.
“Each one has a moral aspect, a social aspect,” said Shomphe.
Facts and legends
For example, there’s the abduction and murder of 18-year-old Jo Ann Dewey, a Meadow Glade girl who got off a bus and started walking over to Providence Academy — then the St. Joseph Hospital and Nursing School — one night in March 1950. People in the nearby Central Court Apartments nearby heard her start screaming, but they didn’t act because they also heard a man saying that the screamer was his wife.
Dewey kept screaming as a car drove her away. Her body was found a week later in Skamania County. Two brothers named Wilson from the Lacamas Lake area, ex-convicts with violent histories, were arrested, convicted and executed for the crime.
“It was a murder that completely rocked Vancouver,” said Shomphe. “It sent shock waves through the community.” That’s partially because of the horror of the crime — it was considered “the crime of the decade” — but also because evidence was flimsy and circumstantial. The infamous case eventually led to smarter investigative techniques, Shomphe said.
To let Dewey live again, Gaya turned to a modeling friend: “Want to come do a photo shoot at 7 a.m., when light is right and nobody’s around?” Of course, said Solanah Cornell. The resulting photos are appropriately nightmarish — featuring a weirdly double-exposed Cornell in vintage skirt and blouse with an armload of schoolbooks. She’s framed by the words “House of Providence.” She’s glancing nervously about. She’s getting dragged out of the frame by an unidentifiable arm.
The facts of the Jo Ann Dewey case were exhaustively reported at the time. So was the 1901 double-suicide of First National Bank President Charles Brown and his manager after a bank examiner showed up. The two men walked away from the bank and reportedly gazed at their unsuspecting families through first-floor windows. Then they walked to a nearby field where their bodies were found the next day. Brown and his manager are reportedly still spotted sometimes on the first floor of the former bank at Sixth and Main (now the Firehouse Glass studio).
The legend of the Officers Row maid is vaguer. She was an Irish immigrant named either Mary or Nan, depending on your source, and a married military officer got her pregnant. Ordered to leave the house, the despondent girl climbed the stairs and hanged herself. She’s reportedly still seen and heard around the Windermere office on Officers Row, Shomphe said.
Research
Gaya and Shomphe are deeply connected with downtown Vancouver. They consult with small businesses as a firm called Spitfire; Gaya also runs her own commercial photography business, XO Chels. Photography, and said this fanciful Halloween-season project has been a nice change of pace from weddings and portraits.
If You Go
• What: “Ghost Stories of Vancouver.”
• When: Opening 6 p.m. Saturday, through mid-November.
• Where: Tap Union Freehouse, 1300 Washington St.
• Featuring: Fanciful photographs of local ghosts by Chelsea Gaya, with research by Claire Shomphe. The artists will be on hand to share a beer and talk ghost stories.
It sure has gotten popular. The pair started out with a small handful of ghost stories they wanted to research and re-create for the lens; then word got around, and more downtown proprietors started volunteering their own eyewitness accounts, clammy feelings and weird rumors. Shomphe has been taking those anecdotes to the library, the historical museum and the Clark County Sheriff’s Office to hunt down newspaper accounts, police reports and other documents.
She hasn’t been able to substantiate everything — but she sure has learned a lot about police procedures and how they’ve improved over the years, she said. By the time you read this, the walls of the Tap Union Freehouse may be crowded with cautionary tales.
Like the smoky demise of poor Tilden Randall, portrayed in the pictures by Tap Union Freehouse owner Chris Daniels himself. He may not want anybody making fun of Tilden Randall, but Daniels was willing to don a vintage costume and assume the role of the tragedy upstairs. (Costumes have been supplied by Most Everything Vintage, another downtown shop.)
Desk tells story
Randall really is the reason for this project. When a new owner bought the Luepke Florist building and business in 2014, Spitfire was hired to help think through renovations. The partners were shown an odd upstairs room that hadn’t been unsealed in five decades. Inside, they discovered the spot where Tilden Randall had died: one of those massive “partners desks” from the early 1900s, a prestigious piece of furniture where two important men could collaborate even while each appeared to rule his own kingdom.
The desk hadn’t been touched since Randall’s death. Shomphe and Gaya found it full of documents and artifacts. From these, they put together a picture of a passionate man with an active heart — and a pleasure that probably stopped it in the end.
“We know he was a heavy smoker from all the pipes, cigarettes, cigars and boxes of tobacco we found in his desk,” Gaya wrote in an email. And, “We know he loved his wife based on the photos and letters we found in his desk in some secret compartments, along with dried flowers and some of the original Luepke Flowers paper that used to wrap the bouquets.”
The letters are too intimate to release, she said. And Randall’s daughter just died last year. So, the letters will linger in a box. Just like the ghost of their creator.
