1 hour 30 minutes (approx.)
Daily Tour
14 people
English
From fiery deaths to watery graves: In this 1.5 mile cemetery walking tour, we weave what we know of the peoples who lived here for millennia with verifiable stories of recent centuries. We can only guess, based on our psychics’ readings and eerie coincidences we have observed, where people here before us feared to walk and canoe at night. As a wise person wrote, every story ends as a ghost story. Our ghosts are legion. We now call it Oregon; “ourigan” was ancestral home to hundreds of thousands. They have left a darkness here, expressed with stories from the earliest days of our written history to modern times. Starting with early disasters, we will tell ghost stories we have collected, from fiery deaths to those in the waters of nearby river; from self-inflicted to deaths brought by the state or a rich man’s guilt. Our route takes us through the inner eastside, where more of Portland’s disasters have happened than any other part of the city & where many early settlers are buried.
We will meet at Revolution Hall, a former high school who counted many now-famous people who would lead brilliant but tortured lives as alumni and suffered a tragic fire a century ago.
20 minutes • Admission Ticket Free
We will walk through the quiet streets of one of the oldest residential neighborhoods in what we now call Portland, telling stories of Portland’s first known witch and women who worked in the sex trade; and stories of seances that swept the city.
20 minutes • Admission Ticket Free
We will enter the Lone Fir cemetery near the section known only as “Block 14,” where mass graves of Chinese immigrants and those who died at the nearby asylum for the insane were buried. After telling some of the stories we know, we will walk through the cemetery, visiting the final resting places of residents that we have heard stories of already, as well as some of the most intense resident deaths; from dramatic drownings to axe murders to suicides.
45 minutes • Admission Ticket Not Included
At the end we will walk to one of Portland’s densest collections of restaurants, cocktail bars, wine shops and breweries in search of another kind of chill: ice cream. We’ll recommend our favorite soft serve or hard ice cream (we’re lucky to have both!), or another idea for something to sooth your spirit after this litany of ghostly tales.
5 minutes • Admission Ticket Free