Ghost hunter spots apparition

By AUTUMN FAHL

Staff Writer

Loren Benoit got his ghost.

At least, the Press staff photographer thinks he did.

For the second night in a row, Loren awoke at 12:01 a.m. to the voice of a dispatcher on his police scanner trying not to sound panicked. She alerted officers in the downtown Coeur d’Alene area that she’d received a call from an anonymous source saying a ghost had been spotted in Forest Cemetery.

And for the second night in a row, Loren bolted from bed, grabbed his gear and sped to the graveyard.

Only this time, he saw something.

More importantly, so did his camera.

“The conditions weren’t very good,” he admitted. “It was dark and the ghost — or whatever the heck it was — moved pretty quickly.”

Loren paused before adding: “And I guess maybe my hands were shaking just a tiny bit.”

The previous night at 12:01 a.m., similar scanner chatter had jerked Loren from a dreamless sleep. He had hurried to the graveyard, only to find no police and no ghost.

But last night was different. While Loren concluded police were busy elsewhere and that’s why he was the only one to show up at Forest Cemetery — the only breathing one, anyway — his ghoulish glimpse was fleeting. It left him wondering what he’d actually seen, never mind why his camera managed to register just one shot of the specter.

“From where I stood, it looked like a woman,” he said. “I had the sense that she was on a mission of some kind. Hard to explain, but I didn’t really feel threatened. Only that I had this one chance to see her, and then she was gone.”

Loren said he plans to stay awake tonight. His camera gear will already be locked up in his car, and he’ll keep the police scanner handy on the off chance that it will again broadcast a spectral sighting in the Lake City.

But for now, Loren Benoit has a lot more questions than he does answers.

TO BE CONTINUED