CATALDO — Brad Corkill and Terry Groth leaned against Corkill's pickup while they chatted for a little while at the end of a work day in September.

The mill was shut down, the workers had gone home and the two men specifically remember the vehicle being off.

"We would have felt it vibrating if it had been on," said Corkill, owner of Whiteman Lumber Company in Cataldo.

Groth, a foreman, stayed late to unload a log truck, but on his way back to the office, he noticed Corkill's truck was running and the headlights were on.

"I came back in and I said, ‘Did you know your pickup is running, or is it running for a reason?'" Groth said. "He said, 'No, I might have hit the button,’ but there’s no way he could have hit the button."

"I didn't think anything of it," Corkill said.

Groth turned off the truck and headed home but soon received a puzzling phone call from his boss.

"He called me up later that evening and asked me if I’d shut the truck off and I said, ‘Yeah,’" Groth said. "And he said, ‘Well, it was running again.’”

"About a half hour later, I went to leave and my pickup was running," Corkill said. "I can't explain that. Nobody was here, everybody was gone."

Corkill said it was especially odd because when he shuts off his truck, he pulls out the ignition key enough so he doesn't hear the "ding ding ding" to remind him to take it out. And while he does have a remote start on his keychain, he was nowhere near the button.

"The truck was running both times," he said. "The key was all the way in, of course, and it was on. The key had been turned. I can’t explain it."

Was it a technical malfunction, or was it something else?

Whiteman Lumber Company first opened in 1928 and has been in its present location since 1933. The mill burned down in 2009 and the new facility was built over the old one.

Groth is a fourth-generation worker, and he said the mill workers have a resident spirit of a previous employee who they like to credit when things get interesting.

"It’s always been kind of a standing deal. We’ll come back and something will be broken through the night or won’t start or something," he said with a chuckle. "It's definitely not a bad spirit."

Although some employees have experienced odd happenings, Groth said it's nowhere near as creepy as the original mill used to be.

"The old mill was an odd place to come to in the dark," he said. "There were sounds all the time. It was one of those deals that if I had to come down here by myself in the dark, I’d walk real fast back to my truck."