An 1878 Italianate house in Jacksonville where occupants report a child and her mother on the stairs
310 S Oregon St, Jacksonville, OR 97530
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Private residence; viewable from the public sidewalk and covered on Jacksonville's walking-tour materials. Free to view the exterior.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Sidewalk viewing on the corner of South Oregon and Pine streets in Jacksonville's historic district
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1878 · Oregon Gold Rush History · Jacksonville National Historic Landmark District · German Immigrant Heritage · Historic American Buildings Survey
Herman von Helms arrived in Jacksonville in 1856, during the southern Oregon gold-rush years, and built his life around the town's commercial center. He first bought into the Table Rock Bakery, then established the Table Rock Billiard Saloon, and in 1866 acquired the corner lot at South Oregon and Pine streets. In 1878 he built the Italianate-style house that still stands there, incorporating an earlier cabin as the kitchen and pantry. Local history notes that Helms probably added the von prefix to his name himself to suggest aristocratic European ancestry.
Helms married Augusta Englebrecht in 1862, an arranged match within the German immigrant communities of southern Oregon and northern California. Both were natives of Holstein, Germany, and by some accounts they met only the day before their wedding. The couple had nine children, but only five lived to adulthood. According to Historic Jacksonville, three of their daughters died in typhoid epidemics that swept the region, and a fourth daughter was killed by her sister's estranged husband.
The family held the property until 1926, when the youngest child, Harry, left Jacksonville and abandoned the house with its furnishings still inside. The building survives as one of Jacksonville's documented 19th-century residences and is recorded in the Historic American Buildings Survey, part of the dense concentration of preserved Gold Rush-era architecture that earned the town a National Historic Landmark designation.
Sources
The haunting accounts for the Herman Helms House are grounded in the family's documented losses rather than in invented atrocity. According to Historic Jacksonville, the organization that interprets the town's historic buildings, later occupants have described two recurring presences. The first is Minnie, the Helms's eldest daughter, who died before her second birthday in 1868 and was first buried on the front lawn before her remains were moved to the Jacksonville Cemetery during the house's construction. Occupants report hearing and seeing a small child running up and down the stairs.
The second presence is Augusta Helms herself, described as grieving the daughters she outlived. The accounts connect her sorrow to the typhoid deaths of three daughters and the murder of a fourth, the real tragedies recorded in the family's history.
The Helms House is included in Jacksonville's haunted-history walking-tour materials and local reporting on the town's most-haunted locations. Earlier aggregator write-ups described an elderly woman crying and framed the family's losses as a string of murders and suicides; those embellishments are not supported by Historic Jacksonville's account, which ties the reports specifically to Minnie and to Augusta's mourning. The house remains a private residence, best appreciated from the sidewalk as part of the historic district.
Notable Entities
View the Herman Helms House from the public sidewalk at the corner of South Oregon and Pine streets in Jacksonville's National Historic Landmark district. The house is a private property and is not open for interior visits; it appears in Historic Jacksonville's walking-tour and haunts materials. Pair it with the town's costumed Haunted History walking tours for the full story.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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