Elm Creek Estates is experiencing its worst surge of unexplained disturbances on record, and the board’s solution is a single consolidated complaint form — which is also currently airborne.

PENDLETON, OR — The Elm Creek Estates Homeowners Association confirmed Tuesday that reported poltergeist activity within the development has increased by forty percent over the previous quarter, surpassing what the board’s own incident log describes, in underlined text, as "the threshold at which we probably have to say something." Forty-eight residents have come forward with accounts of objects moving without physical cause, doors cycling open and closed at three in the morning, and personal belongings relocated to positions that are technically still inside the home but are not where anyone put them. The HOA’s formal response, delivered via a laminated notice in the community mailroom, asks that residents refrain from filing individual complaints and instead submit all supernatural grievances through a consolidated reporting form available at the front office. The consolidated form is, according to three separate witnesses, also being thrown across the room.

I drove out to Elm Creek Estates on Wednesday morning after receiving a forwarded copy of the laminated notice from a contact who lives in the development and described the situation as "bureaucratically insane and also my kitchen chairs are stacked." The development is a planned community of approximately two hundred and forty units built in 2004 on the eastern slope of a drainage basin that, according to my county road atlas, had a different name before the development went in. The front gate was propped open with what appeared to be a ceramic rooster. I did not ask about the rooster. There are things you ask about and things you note and continue past, and the rooster was the second kind.

Community Notice

What The Residents Are Reporting

The forty percent increase tracks against a baseline established after a smaller disturbance cluster in 2021, which the HOA at that time attributed to "settling" and resolved with a memo. Current reports are more difficult to attribute to settling. Resident accounts include: a dining table found balanced on two legs with no support structure; a collection of framed family photographs reversed on their hooks overnight; a smoke detector removed from the ceiling, carried to the kitchen, and placed in the refrigerator’s crisper drawer; and, in one case that three separate residents mentioned to me independently, a television that has been turning itself on exclusively to display a channel that no one in the home subscribes to and that none of them can identify. The channel appears to show a meadow. Nothing happens in the meadow. It is on at 4 a.m.

I filled out their form. I filled it out very carefully. I put it in the folder they gave me. By the time I got to my car it was on the roof. My car. Not the folder — the form itself. Just the form.

— Denise Achterberg, Elm Creek Estates Resident, Unit 114

The HOA board did not respond to three requests for comment, which I left with an administrative assistant named Carl who answered the front office phone on the second ring each time and who sounded increasingly tired with each call. On my third attempt, Carl told me that the board had held an emergency session on Monday evening and that the session had been "complicated" by the fact that items kept moving off the conference table during the agenda portion. He then asked me not to quote him, which I am not doing. I am attributing the detail to a source familiar with the emergency session, which is technically different.

A poltergeist doesn’t care about your complaint process. That’s actually sort of definitional to what a poltergeist is. I don’t know how to explain that to an HOA board without it sounding like I’m being difficult.

— Dr. Fenwick Osei, Parapsychological Research Consultant, Pacific Northwest Anomaly Studies Group

Forty Percent Is Not a Small Number

To be precise about the forty percent figure: it is drawn from the HOA’s own incident log, which I obtained through a public records request filed last Thursday and received on Friday, which is either a sign of a well-functioning administrative process or an indication that someone in that office wanted the log to leave the building. The log covers eighteen months. The first nine months record twenty-two incidents classified under the header "Unexplained Property Disturbance (Non-Structural)." The second nine months record thirty-one. The notation system changes partway through — someone switched from checkmarks to a symbol I don’t recognize, which happens to be the same symbol that appears in the second notebook I carry for cross-reference material. I have not yet determined what this means. I have written it down in two places.

The consolidated form approach is not, on its face, the strangest part of this story. HOAs consolidate things. That is what HOAs do. What makes this particular administrative solution notable is that it was proposed and passed at the same emergency session during which, according to my source familiar with the proceedings, a pitcher of water traveled the full length of the conference table and stopped at the edge without falling. The board voted four to one in favor of the consolidation measure. The dissenting vote came from a board member named Patricia Wulff, who told me by phone that she voted no because she felt the form’s supernatural grievance section had insufficient space for the level of detail residents would need to provide, and also because she had watched the pitcher stop at the table’s edge and felt that a form was probably not going to address that. I found Patricia Wulff’s number in thirty seconds. She picked up immediately. She seemed glad someone had called.

I am filing this report from the parking lot of a diner on Route 395 that has been on my list for three years. The coffee is good. The eggs are better. Outside, through the window, the Land Cruiser is parked under a light, and I can see the collapsed tripod on the passenger seat and the corner of the county road atlas and the bag of trail mix from March that I keep meaning to throw away. I have the HOA incident log open on the table and the second notebook open next to it, and the symbol appears eleven times across both documents, and the Elm Creek Estates development sits on a drainage basin that had a different name before 2004, and Patricia Wulff has already sent me four additional photographs from her own unit that she had been holding onto since August because she wasn’t sure who to send them to. The consolidated form is not going to cover this. I don’t know what will. I’m ordering more coffee and I’m going to sit with the symbol for a while and see where it goes.