Shanghai Tunnels — The Old Portland Underground
Beneath Old Town Portland runs a claimed network of 'Shanghai tunnels' through which men were supposedly drugged and smuggled to ships — a legend born of 1930s newspaper romance, fixed by ghost tours since 1979, and now formally classified by the Oregon Encyclopedia as a myth, making it the library's best-documented case of a haunted place that never was.
Case File No. 479
FILE 01 The Legend
The story told on Portland's ghost tours is irresistible: from the 1860s to the 1910s, crimps dropped trapdoors in saloon floors, dosed sailors with knockout drops, held them in underground cells, and marched them through brick tunnels to the Willamette riverfront and onto ships short of crew — the city calling itself the 'Forbidden City of the West', unbeatable shanghaiing capital of the Pacific coast, with tour figures claiming 1,500 men and more vanished into the tunnels every year. The tour infrastructure is real and old: Michael P. Jones of the Cascade Geographic Society (founded 1978) explored Old Town's interconnected basements from the late 1960s, mapped what he called the Shanghai Tunnels, and ran tunnel tours from 1979 until his death in 2020; today Old Town Pizza & Brewing, in the 1880 Merchant Hotel, runs its own Haunted Shanghai Tunnel Tour through the basement passages, complete with the resident ghost Nina, said to be a young woman who died in the hotel's elevator shaft and who greets staff and guests alike. The legend's paper trail starts with Stewart Holbrook, the logger-historian whose romantic shanghaiing tales in the Sunday Oregonian from 1933 gave the trade its durable image; a 1980 construction find of a real underground passage fed the fire, and the tours did the rest. The true history underneath: shanghaiing was real — Portland crimps like Joseph 'Bunco' Kelly really did drug and deliver men to ships for blood money — but the scholarship says it happened in alleys and boarding houses, not via a tunnel network: no historian has ever documented one, the basements tourists walk were storefront basements and mostly blocked by the 1928 seawall, and the Oregon Encyclopedia's verdict is flat: historians have found no evidence to substantiate the existence of a tunnel network.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
The documented spine: real shanghaiing cases 1860s-1910s (crimp Bunco Kelly's career is a matter of court record); Holbrook's Sunday Oregonian romanticisation from 1933; Jones's explorations from the late 1960s and Cascade Geographic Society tours from 1979 to 2020; the 1980 tunnel-section find reported in the press; Old Town Pizza's current Haunted Shanghai Tunnel Tour and its ghost Nina; Oregonian investigations 2007 and 2017; the Oregon Encyclopedia entry of 2018.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
This is the library's textbook myth entry, and the skeptic layer is the mainstream here, not the dissent. The Oregon Encyclopedia (Oregon Historical Society, entry by public historian Richard Engeman, 2018) classifies the tunnel network as a myth outright; waterfront historian Barney Blalock ('Portland's Lost Waterfront' 2012, 'The Oregon Shanghaiers' 2014) flatly denies tunnels were ever used to move men; the Oregonian's 2007 and 2017 investigations found the stories 'highly dubious' and the tunnel-to-ship trade a near-impossibility given that the 1928 seawall works destroyed the near-river basements the legend needs. The 1,500-per-year figure is a tour number with no archival basis. What remains real: shanghaiing itself, the basements, and a very good ghost story whose ghost, Nina, has no documented death record either.
BEYOND THE CASE FILE / PLAN A VISIT