Halloween is a chance to forget all your troubles and get spooked out. But some people don't need a holiday. They have creepy jobs year-round. We sent our correspondents out to find some of the spookiest jobs in the Northwest. Here are four professions that may send you howling, but not these people. We begin with hard rock miners in North Idaho.

I'm Doug Nadvornick at the Galena Mine in Wallace, Idaho. We're going where few people get to go deep underground with foreman John Weinkauf.

John Weinkauf: “That bucket right there's called a sinking bucket. We‚re going to ride down in one of those buckets.”

SOUND: clanking of a lift and going underground

The open-air bucket is tiny. Four-feet-by-four-feet. We can feel the chill as it drops us more than three thousand feet underground. We‚re wearing hard hats with bright little lamps to see in the dark passages.

Once we're underground, the closer we get to the earth‚s core, it warms up. In some places, it's downright hot; the miners who drill for silver sweat.

SOUND: miners running machinery

It's dark. It's loud. And Weinkauf says it's cramped.

John Weinkauf: “We have some areas that are very narrow, very small. I mean, head height and three feet wide. And a lot of people are claustrophobic about that.”

Weinkauf says they don't last long as miners.

John Weinkauf: “Most people, when they come underground, you know within the first week or so if they're going to make it underground or not. I mean, we've had people that don't. They just they come down and they're scared of it. They're scared of the environment.”

Perhaps some of the fear comes from stories about terrible mining accidents. Many in north Idaho still remember that 91 men died in a fire underground at the nearby Sunshine Mine in 1972.
But Weinkauf says spooky doesn't necessarily translate into danger, unlike back then.

John Weinkauf: “Everybody had one safety guy. You might see him. You might not. Now, I mean, our safety is underground every day.”

I'm Doug Nadvornick, three thousand feet under Wallace, Idaho.


And I'm Anna King at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Imagine this employment ad in your local newspaper.

Phil Sheely: “OK, you're going to be exposed to chemicals, you're going to be exposed to radiation, you're going to have to wear respiratory equipment.”

All for about 24-dollars an hour, according to Phil Sheely, the guy who runs the radioactive trash operation at Hanford's T-Plant.

This is where Hanford workers chemically extracted plutonium for the two bombs dropped on Japan during WWII. Getting into the radioactive zone of the facility requires three full weeks of training. So, Sheely and his crew nicely mocked up a non-radioactive workspace for me to check out. And that was spooky enough. Think the movie ET when the scientists take over the house.

Jake King: “Do we have someone suiting up?”

SOUND: Suit up, tape sounds

Now these guys suit up in huge white jumpsuits. They duct tape their plastic gloves on. They transfer trash, oh like broken glass and bottles of acid, from a deteriorating drum to a new fresh-factory issued drum that's sealed off.

Jake King, no relation, says sometimes he's not sure what he's sorting through.

Jake King: “The thing that bothers me the most, I think are some of the acids and the bases.”

Anna King: “What's wrong with the acids and the bases?”

Jake King: “It can burn a hole right through fairly quick, so that's my main concern when I got my hands in the bags.”

King says having a job sorting through radioactive trash can get kind of lonely. When he explains what he does, say at a backyard picnic, people slink away. But he doesn't find it spooky at all.

Jake King: “There's a lot of doctors, lawyers and stuff like that, but I play with rad trash – it's cool.”

SOUND: Alfa detector clicking

I'm Anna King inside Hanford's T Plant, where they'll be hiring soon.


And I'm Tom Banse on a farm outside of Olympia. The sun set about an hour ago.  The temperature is getting chilly.  Bat ecologist Greg Falxa (FALKS-ah) turns on two bat detectors... and soon they go off.

Sound: [silver haired bat flies over]

Greg Falxa: “That's our first bat.”

The detector takes the silver haired bat's high frequency echo-location call and makes it audible to human ears.

Sound: [ping, ping]

TB: “Sounds like Hunt for Red October.”

Greg Falxa: “Yeah.  What it sounded like in real-time, I can flip the switch here.  This is the actual cadence of it.  Now I've reduced the frequency, but that's the cadence...”

Falxa works for the non-profit Cascadia Research and also sometimes The Nature Conservancy. 

Greg Falxa: “I've been a nocturnal by nature.  I grew up as a ham operator.  I used to stay up late at night so I could talk to the other side of the earth on shortwave radio.  My internal clock is kind of set to the bat schedule.”

Sound: [bat detector picks up California Myotis bat hunting]

Falxa is unafraid even when bats fly right at him.

Greg Falxa: “That speeding up part was probably as they approached something, maybe the back our heads.”

Greg Falxa: “...You ducked!” [laughter]

TB: “Couldn't resist the instinct to duck when it comes right at my head.”

Greg Falxa: “We've all gotten to the point where we fight the instinct.

The precision acrobat flying loops over our heads is a tiny California myotis bat.

Greg Falxa: “Halloween is usually when they should be gone. And most of our bat species do disappear and go off and hibernate.”

Falxa documented that Silver haired and California bats forage year-round in the Northwest, when the weather's not too crummy. 

Greg Falxa: “In our culture it's associated with scary and vampires.  But in China historically bats were associated with good luck on its way.”

I'm Tom Banse near Olympia.



And I'm Jessica Robinson at the National Wildlife Forensics Lab in Ashland, Oregon. We're in an evidence room, where lab director Ken Goddard is sorting through a refrigerator full of oddly shaped plastic bags.

Ken Goddard: "Piece of meat and tissue. Blood sample from freezer. More fecal matter."

Think of the labs on CSI, only here, the victims are animals, and the bad guys poach, smuggle, and make high-end hand-bags out of endangered species. Itís the only crime lab in the world dedicated exclusively to handling evidence from national and international crimes against wildlife. It has bullet proof glass, door locks that read fingerprints, and an isolation ward that could contain Ebola.

It also has a room of flesh-eating beetles called Dermestids -- for those times when you need to clean the meat off a bone.

"So, we could sit there and scrape for hours, but you got Dermestids who will do it for free, happily. You wanna see what it smells like in there?"

And so into the bug room we go

Ken Goddard: "It's really not that bad. Looks like a tiger or a lion's skull.

(Reporter gags)

(Goddard laughs)

Ken Goddard: "And our reporter is turning a little bit red and sheís got her sweater over her nose, and sheís hanging on pretty tough here. Hahahaha!"

And, out of the bug room we go

For Goddard, dead things are just part of a dayís work.

Ken Goddard: "I guess we don't see those as being macabre so much as normal life. You get used to dead things in forensic science."

Goddard says it's the people who commit wildlife crimes that he finds creepiest.

I'm Jessica Robinson in Ashland, Oregon.

 
Copyright 2009 Northwest Public Radio, Spokane Public Radio, KUOW and Jefferson Public Radio

Photo Caption: Bat researcher Greg Falxa listens for his quarry at an Olympia-area farm.

Photo Caption: Josh Wilhelm, 23, is a nuclear chemical operator at Hanford's T Plant. He demonstrates how he sorts radioactive trash at the nuclear site in a large plastic glove bag.