Deep Secrets Of The City: The dark world below Portland's streets
harbors tales of shanghaied sailors and mysterious ghosts
By Mark Baker
The Register-Guard
Published: Sunday, May 28, 2006

PORTLAND - Ever been "shanghaied?"
Not likely. Not in the sense that Michael Jones is talking about,
anyway. And by the description coming out of Jones' mouth, you wouldn't
want to be.
But a long, long time ago, in the very place where 30 Wilson High School
students are standing, in the darkness below Hobo's Restaurant in
Portland's Chinatown district, it happened; a lot, if you believe the
history that Jones is giving you.

"If you really want to know about the history of Portland, you need to
go underground," says Jones, the curator of the Cascade Geographic
Society, a nonprofit educational and preservation agency located near
Mount Hood and founded by Jones in 1979.
"Shanghaiing," in the Portland underground sense, refers to the illegal
maritime practice that occurred between 1850 and 1941, until America's
entry into World War II. Sailors, loggers, cowboys, ranch hands,
construction workers and vagrants were kidnapped and sold to sea
captains who enslaved them for years at a time on board their Asia-bound
ships.
From Portland to Pendleton to New York City, from below campuses across
the nation, including the University of Oregon, lurks a world many do
not know about - a world filled with the "darkness and shadows of the
underground," as Jones puts it.

Asked why some are so fascinated with Portland's underground history,
Jones says: "It's a mystery that has been talked about from the very
beginning. When you were growing up in those times, your parents would
warn you: 'Don't go to Portland because of the shanghaiers.' "
Because of this reputation, Portland was known around the world as the
"unheavenly" or "forbidden" city, Jones explains. Also known as the
"Shanghai Tunnels," the underground is accessed by the basements of old
buildings that are connected to other buildings through brick and stone
archways.

'Don't turn around' 
Jones begins his tours - often given to groups from businesses such as
Nike and Intel, or student groups from across the state - in the
courtyard of Hobo's, a restaurant and bar in a 125-year-old brick
building on Northwest Third Avenue. Known as Lasso's Saloon in the days
when it had trapdoors in the floor that shanghaiers used to drop their
prey through, the courtyard is where Jones sets the stage for what's to
come.

"I do not believe in ghosts," says the 54-year-old, who bears a
resemblance to rock musician David Crosby with his short, stocky build,
his mustache and his long, brown hair that's slightly gray and balding
in the back. "But I can't explain why you might feel a hand on the back
of your neck. My advice? Don't turn around."
Some students guffaw. Some just look creeped out.

"You might smell someone smoking a cigarette or pipe or cigar," Jones
continues, "but you won't see anyone. Or you might smell the perfume of
an old prostitute."
Stories abound of ghost sightings in the tunnels. Northwest Paranormal
Investigations has helped Jones restore some of the tunnels over the
years, according to "Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland,
Oregon," the 2003 book by "Fight Club" author Chuck Palahniuk, a
Portland resident.

"They say the underground is the most haunted place in Oregon,"
Palahniuk writes. "Under the streets of Portland they say the spirit of
a woman roams, searching for her kidnapped daughter. Other spirits still
search for their beloved menfolk who were drugged or shanghaied onto
sailing ships, never to be seen again. Still more wandering spirits died
in the tunnel system and are still looking for their way out."
Jones has been fascinated with the Portland underground for most of his
life, since an old sea captain led him to the basement of an old
Portland hotel when he was just 7 years old, he says. It was 1959, and
Jones had gone to visit his foster brother's father, Dewey Kirkpatrick,
who lived from one hotel to another. The sea captain led him to the
hotel's basement and gave him a box of matches.

"To this very day," Jones tells the students, "I can hear that door
creaking open."
The man followed closely behind as Jones lit one match after another. "I
felt extremely grown up until he said, 'Well, kid, see ya 'round. I
gotta go." A frightened Jones, who says the experience "changed my life
forever," almost ran right through the man trying to get back to the
hotel, he says.
It's a story he has told many times, and whether you believe him or not,
it does set the stage for the descent into darkness.

Dust, dirt and musty smells 
With his introduction complete, and the heebie-jeebies firmly planted,
Jones leads the students through the restaurant and out onto the
sidewalk.
He unlocks the steel doors in the sidewalk. The students descend a
ladder leading underneath Hobo's. They pick out dimly-lighted
flashlights from a white bucket and stumble toward the dark.
They giggle. They shriek and scream as their feet hit the dirt and they
duck underneath the low ceiling of pipes and wooden beams.

The first stop on the 90-minute tour is a small room the size of a jail
cell. This was an "opium bunk," a place where drunk men and prostitutes
came to get high, Jones says. "Lots of people have commented about
seeing this woman standing in the window," he says. It's the ghost of
Nina, a prostitute who was thrown down an elevator shaft to her death
because she talked too much about the underground, Jones says. But if
you see Nina's apparition, it never says a word, "because the last time
she spoke, she lost her life," he says.

Next stop, after ducking under a brick archway, is a mess of dirty old
boots on the ground between two ropes. They were left long ago by men
who were shanghaied, Jones says. "This was not a romantic story," he
says. "This was human abuse at its worst."
Then comes a small holding cell with bars. Once you got dropped through
the trapdoor of a saloon, or were drugged and dragged here, this is
where you stayed until you were taken to
your ship.

Jones tells the "Slug Harbor Saloon" story, whereby two sailors found a
trapdoor one day and discovered what they thought were 10 barrels of
whiskey hidden below. They began to drink freely and invited another 30
or so men down to drink with them.
But "they weren't drinking whiskey," Jones says. "That was embalming
fluid!"

They were all literally "dead drunk," he says. And they were found by
Joseph "Bunko" Kelly, a notorious shanghaier, who sold their corpses to
an unsuspecting ship captain who thought the dead would soon awaken.
Around the corner and into another room with a chain hanging from the
ceiling, Jones explains that, "If you were standing at the wrong place
at the right time," you just might have found yourself in a "dead fall."

To demonstrate, he pulls the chain and ... whump! A dummy falls from the
trapdoor.
"I believe the underground is haunted," Jones says. "But not by ghosts.
I believe it's haunted by its past."