Oregon Shakespeare Festival · Ashland Railroad District · Southern Oregon University
Peter Finkle relocated to Ashland in 1991 for work and stayed. In 2018 he turned to researching and writing about the town full-time, publishing photo-essays and neighborhood histories that became the Walk Ashland site, and later leading walking tours drawn from that research. The City of Ashland's Historic Preservation committee gave him an individual award in 2019 for his work documenting the Railroad District.
The haunted tours were not the original plan. Finkle has said the stories arrived on their own: as he talked with residents about the town's history, people began volunteering accounts of what they had encountered in Ashland's older hotels, houses, businesses and theaters. Once he had collected enough of them, he built the Haunted Ashland tour around the buildings where they happened. A second route covering Southern Oregon University followed.
That sourcing is what separates these walks from a typical ghost tour. Rather than retelling urban legends or passages out of earlier books and newspaper morgues, Finkle presents accounts he heard from the people who reported them, or from a close acquaintance of theirs. He does not claim to explain any of it.
The main tour ends at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Elizabethan Theatre, which anchors the town's identity and turns up repeatedly in the accounts. Regional coverage of Ashland's haunted reputation has pointed to a 1930s actor said to linger at the festival grounds and to reports of footfalls in the halls of a downtown hotel.
Sources
- https://walkashland.com/walk-ashland-walking-tours/
- https://walkashland.com/about/
- https://theashlandchronicle.com/haunted-ashland-walking-tours-are-back-thanks-to-peter-finkle-oct-2-6/
- https://1859oregonmagazine.com/explore-oregon/fall-for-ashland/
- https://www.ashlandchamber.com/ChamberDirectoryDetail.asp?MemberID=3292&CID=97
ApparitionsUnexplained SoundsCold SpotsObjects MovingFeelings of Being Watched
The material on both walks is testimony. Finkle collected it from people who told him what they experienced in a specific building, and he presents it as their account rather than as an established fact about the property.
He sorts what he has been told into four rough categories. The first is a brief visual impression, a figure caught in a mirror or at the edge of vision and gone when looked at directly. The second is sound with no apparent source, footsteps or fragments of conversation in an empty room; in one case a woman and her dog reacted to the same noise at the same moment. The third is atmospheric, a feeling of being watched or unwelcome, sometimes attached to a spot that stays a few degrees colder than the air around it, and sometimes noticed by animals first.
The fourth kind is the one Finkle finds hardest to set aside, and the one he leads with when asked: reports in which a physical object, or occasionally a person, seems to occupy the ordinary world and something else at once. He offers no mechanism for it. His stated position is that independent people keep describing the same thing, which is the reason he keeps repeating their accounts.
Regional coverage of the tours has singled out the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where a 1930s actor is said to remain, and a downtown hotel where guests have reported hearing someone move through the halls. The Peerless Hotel, where the main walk begins, sits in the Railroad District Finkle spent years documenting.