Gold Rush Bed and Breakfast Above a Collapsed Mine
6600 Orleans Street, Georgetown, CA 95634
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$
Room rates approximately $151+ per night per Kayak listings; full breakfast and afternoon wine and hors d'oeuvres included.
Access
Limited Access
Multi-story Victorian inn; rooms across two floors with shared and private baths.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1853 · Gold Rush Era Architecture · Woodside Mine Site · California Mother Lode
Georgetown sits at 2,600 feet in the Sierra Nevada foothills, founded in August 1849 when prospectors began pulling gold from the ravines and gulches that fed into the American River's middle fork. The Historic American River Inn was built in 1853 on the same parcel where the Round Tent gambling establishment had operated during the camp's earliest months. The construction directly overlay the Woodside Mine, a productive shaft that surfaced several large nuggets before its main tunnel collapsed.
The collapse of 1850 trapped 27 miners. Local accounts identify a single survivor named Oscar, who returned to surface work and later took up carpentry at the inn during its boarding-house years.
Like many Gold Rush structures in the foothills, the building's use changed with the town's fortunes. After Georgetown's mining declined, the property was, in turn, a private home, a hotel, a boarding house for miners working the surrounding diggings, and a tuberculosis sanitarium. The inn became Orleans House in 1862 and operated under various names until its 1984 conversion into the Country Victorian-style bed and breakfast that operates today.
The current inn occupies the original 1853 structure on Orleans Street and presents thirteen guest rooms decorated in period furnishings, with shared and private baths reflecting the building's nineteenth-century footprint. The property is recognized as one of the oldest continuously standing structures in Georgetown, a town now designated a California Historical Landmark for the role its main street played in the central Mother Lode.
Sources
The most frequently retold account at the American River Inn concerns a man called Oscar, identified in regional folklore as the only miner to survive the 1850 collapse of the Woodside Mine that runs beneath the building. The Inn's own promotional history describes Oscar continuing to work above ground as a carpenter at the property and entertaining guests in the parlor with the story of his survival.
Reports center on Room 5. Guests have described an older, shabbily dressed man who smiles and then is gone, the sensation of a hand passing across their hair, and their own name spoken quietly when no one else is in the room. The room is now the property's most-requested.
A 1996 segment for the syndicated television program Sightings filmed at the inn included a psychic who reported the names of additional spirits attached to the property, and the inn was previously listed in the regional travel guide Haunted America for its mine-collapse provenance. Among the property's other folklore is the so-called "Bordello Room," so named because a working girl named Catherine was reportedly hanged from its window by a jealous lover during the boarding-house years; that account has not been independently corroborated in newspapers of the period and is treated by the current owners as oral tradition.
The inn does not market itself primarily as a paranormal destination. The current innkeepers acknowledge the stories in their literature and answer guest questions, but the experience offered is a Victorian bed and breakfast rather than an investigation. Guests interested in the folklore are advised to request Room 5 at booking.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Book one of 13 Country Victorian rooms in an 1853 Gold Rush-era inn built directly above the Woodside Mine, where 27 miners died in an 1850 collapse. Room 5 is the most-requested for guests interested in the inn's documented folklore around a former miner-turned-carpenter named Oscar.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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