Lewis County Sirens.com

By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – Susan Patterson’s son called her the other day, laughing so hard he could hardly talk.

“He said, ‘It’s back’,” Patterson said.

“I said, ‘What? What’s back?” she said.

“The casket,’ he said.

And she laughed too. She’s still laughing.

“That thing is just going to haunt me forever,” Patterson said.

It’s a long story.

The Patterson family at one time owned a steel, never-before-used casket. The slightly damaged container meant for the dead had been languishing in the Fife warehouse of a shipping company where her son worked.

The Onalaska woman jumped at the chance to take possession of it.

It was the perfect enhancement to a spot on their property they called Pirate Cove. A place with a fire pit where her husband Pat and his SeaFair pirate friends would hang out and smoke cigars, she said.

The now-retired couple moved from West Seattle, home of the infamous group, to Onalaska years ago. Pat Patterson, now 72, has been a pirate for 38 years.

She replaced its lining with a skull and cross bones print fabric and they transformed the casket into a bar. It sat on a couple of logs. Beneath one end of the “split top” was storage for liquor bottles and the other half held a cooler, she said.

They only had it a year, maybe two, she said.

It disappeared during one of the floods, she couldn’t remember for sure which one, she said.

But it’s reappeared twice, and she feels almost certain the one that turned up over the weekend in a creek off the Newaukum River belongs to her family.

“That thing just keeps coming back, every time I think it’s gone, it comes back,” she said.

Patterson said she spoke to the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office and the coroner earlier this week.

Lewis County Coroner Warren McLeod learned of the find on Sunday. He and members of Lewis County Search and Rescue plan to attempt to recover it on Saturday morning. It’s on private property, a hike through fairly rough terrain, he said.

McLeod described the found coffin as steel gray, partially submerged, the foot end driven into the creek bottom, almost as if deposited there by raging floodwaters.

He said he couldn’t tell if it was occupied or not.

Patterson recalled theirs as maybe bluish-gray.

The first time the Patterson’s casket-turned bar disappeared might have been around 2006 during a flood. She recalled telling her husband over a cup of coffee that if anyone found it, it could be disturbing, so they placed a note on a community bulletin board in town: If anyone finds a casket, contact the Pattersons.”

“The boys searched and searched for months,” Patterson said. “Nick, my grandson found it out in the woods, standing straight up, but buried in the mud.”

They couldn’t dislodge it, so they left it where it stood.

The following year, they were flooded again and while they were cleaning up, they got a knock and their door. It was a sheriff’s deputy, she said. Asking about a casket.

“He said, ‘Yeah, I guess that last one knocked it loose, it’s now lodged downstream at the neighbor’s’,” she said.

Her recollection was it was stuck and never recovered.

Another flood hit in January 2009, and this time they lost everything. Their home was condemned. The couple moved to the other end of Onalaska.

“I never really thought about that casket after that,” she said.

She told her husband earlier this week the casket has risen again. She almost 100 percent sure it’s theirs, she said.

She told the coroner they don’t want it back.
•••

For background, read “Coffin discovered in Lewis County creek” from Tuesday February 17, 2015, here

Tags: By Sharyn L. Decker, news reporter

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