The Gallery Ghost by Sarah Delanty

In the mid-1990s, I worked in Old Town in Portland, Oregon as the Manager for an art gallery specializing in fine art photography. It was a small space where we sold original posters, fine art photographs, and a limited selection of art books. Once a print was purchased, we also had a frame shop in case there was a need for that. The owner, the framer, and I were the only employees. The gallery was part of a larger single building converted into several charming shops with big floor-to-ceiling storefront windows and original brick walls. The gallery had a main floor with very high ceilings, a smaller loft upstairs with two computers, and a basement. The first floor is where sales transactions, workshops, and framing occur. In addition, the basement was where we kept inventory, files, and the active part of the frame shop was down there, the electric saws where frames were cut to size. Part of my job was to keep an inventory of the posters and to file were downstairs in the basement.

One day when I was down there - and it was creepy, all brick and part of the basement were always damp with rainwater trickling down one corner wall. There were old computers that no longer worked. The owner was an eccentric hoarder who disliked throwing away anything. The basement was packed with odds and ends, and junk was strewn about, waiting for someone to deal with them someday. The saws for the framer were located at the opposite end of the basement, from where the posters and filing cabinets were.

While doing my business, I heard music coming from the direction of a dusty table behind me. I stopped what I was doing to listen more closely to identify where the music was coming from on the table. As I lean into one of the dusty old computers, the music gets louder, and suddenly, I hear the piano chords of Chopin’s Funeral Music. Then, I hear chains rattle, and hearty blowing wind sounds begin to accompany the stark chords. I am freaking out with chills, and as I write this, I am fully back at that time, reminding me of the full-body chills and sweaty hands I experienced. Shackles fully up, I ran up the stairs, shocked and breathless, to where my boss, the owner, was sitting. I must have looked like someone who put their finger into an electric socket. Before I could explain, he eyed me up and down and very calmly said, “Sarah, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Trying to understand it, I asked if a radio was in the basement. Nope, no radio. Later that same week, our framer ran up the stairs with a similar look. She described a ghost that looked like a genie 🧞. Half was a whisp of smoke, and a half was a shirtless black man wearing chains around his neck.

I found out later that Portland had a slave trade, and humans were smuggled in from the Willamette River along the corridors where our gallery was built. My boss told me that he often conversed with the spirits in the gallery. However, I decided that it could have been better to refrain from indulging too often. Whenever I returned to inventory work in the basement after my musical encounter, I always said aloud to whoever was listening, I’m super busy and don’t have the time to play today. Later, we were visited but more subtly. Letting us know they were still hanging around by making our working computer screens flicker into white noise and then sometimes flicking off. The framer never saw her genie phantom again.

Chopin - Marche Funèbre (Funeral March)