The person who best knows the ghosts of Hot Lake Resort is Richard Owens, 27, a caretaker who lived more than a year on the second floor. He left six months ago and now resides in Hermiston.

Owens claims he often heard a piano in a third floor room play at night when the building was empty.

"Sometimes it would just play for five minutes. Sometime it would play for a while. After you lived out there as long as I did, you don't pay any attention to it. You don't want to pay any attention to it." he says.

` But the piano didn't bother Owens as much as the screams.

"My room was directly under the old surgery room, and you'd hear it real plain. There's a woman that screams up there. It sounds like somebody's got her tied up or something."

There were other things, too.

"I would put stuff in certain places and it would get moved," Owens says.

"When I'd go up to the third floor, I would always push the piano chair under the piano. But when I'd get back, the piano chair would be out in the middle of the room, and it's a big room. Inside the piano chair was some sheet music, and once in a while that music would be out on the piano.

"There's just no way that prowlers or anything are going to do that," Owens says. "Besides, they just couldn't get in. That third floor is locked up real tight.

"Things would get out of locked rooms. I had some wheelchairs get out of a locked room once, and the room was still locked," he adds.

Occasionally Owens would hear footfalls on a wheelchair ramp that links the first and second floors. "You can hear the footfalls coming right up the ramp. You can jerk the door open and there won't be a soul there," he says.

The third floor frightened Owens, particularly when he had to go up there on rainy nights to empty water buckets under a leak.

"It would be pitch dark, because the light bulbs burned out or the electricity was off. That was real scary. It took a lot to get me to go down them dark hallways. That's a long way and I didn't like doing it at all, but it had to be done.

"I wouldn't sleep a night on the third floor. I'm sure they wouldn't bother me, but there's just some things I don't want to know about," Owens says.

Donna Pattee doesn't believe in ghosts. But she admits that the old building disturbs her. For instance, there are three rocking chairs on the third floor, the seats of which never seem to get dusty. She says it's as if somebody or something sits in them...

Owens called Mrs. Pattee's attention to the absence of dust on the rockers. She was trying to verify it for herself by checking them regularly when she discovered the chairs also had a tendency to move about in the room when nobody was there.

"I placed them in a certain way out of curiosity, and I went back later and they were moved," she says.