The Pantages Theater got a good going over Monday night by a team from Paranormal Washington but they report no apparitions, including the lady in the balcony.
That was word this morning from Kim Varian, a team member who spent the night in the performing arts center in downtown Tacoma.

”I would love to tell you that we saw an apparition ourselves but the truth is we did not,” she said in an e-mail. The spotting last week of an apparition of a lady in the balcony late at night by a theater staffer brought the team to the theater.

Though it was “mostly uneventful as for personal experience,” Varian said several investigators “felt as though someone was sitting next to them or following them.”
A full report or what they call a "reveal" won’t be available until the team reviews 40 hours of recorded video gathered by six cameras during the seven-hour investigation, she said.

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Abbi Wonacott used to ride the school bus past the Mashel River near Eatonville and as a young girl heard the story of a group of men from Oregon who came up and killed Indian women and children by the river in the Spring of 1856.

What was known as the Mashel Massacre was public knowledge but details were vague, she said.

“We didn’t know why it happened or who they were,” the 44-year-old Bethel Junior High teacher said.

Until the Spring of 2007.

Wonacott and her ninth grade class of highly capable students took on the Mashel Massacre as a history research project. They delved into histories, libraries and original documents. They consulted historians, including Cecelia Carpenter, author and Nisqually tribal historian. They visited the site of the massacre.

Little was know and what was printed wasn’t accurate, Wonacott said, but the class finally solved the mystery of that terrible day in local history.

The result is “Where the Mashel Meets the Nisqually: The Mashel Massacre of 1856,” a 40-page paperback complete with maps and photographs.

Wonacott will join other local authors Saturday at the Meeker Mansion in Puyallup for the Third Annual Author’s Expo. Some of her students who helped in the research and editing of the book will be there with her from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. to sign books and talk about their research. The book costs $10.

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