1888 Community Newspaper in a Reportedly Haunted Building
500 E Hancock St, Newberg, OR 97132
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Working newspaper office; not a public attraction. Exterior view from Hancock Street.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved sidewalk
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1888 · Oregon Newspaper History · Yamhill County History · Newberg Community Heritage
The Newberg Graphic was founded on December 1, 1888, making it among the oldest continuously operating community newspapers in Oregon. The paper was established by Hiatt & Hobson as an independent four-page weekly published on Saturdays at a subscription price of $2 per year — a not-insignificant sum for the time. Newberg itself was not formally incorporated until 1889, meaning the Graphic predates the town's official municipal existence by a matter of months and operated as the town's first newspaper from its earliest organized days.
Frank P. Baum took over as publisher in 1890, beginning a long chain of editorial leadership transitions across the 20th century. Rob and Donna McCain owned the paper for twenty-five years before selling it to Eagle Newspapers in January 1985. Eagle ran the Graphic until selling its newspaper holdings to Pamplin Media Group in January 2013. Robert B. Pamplin Jr. then sold his entire newspaper company to Carpenter Media Group in June 2024 — the paper's most recent ownership transition.
The Graphic today covers Newberg, Dundee, St. Paul, and eastern Yamhill County, with the editorial office at 500 East Hancock Street in downtown Newberg. Historic editions from 1888 through 1993 are accessible through the Oregon Historical Newspaper Project (Historic Oregon Newspapers) at the University of Oregon — providing a continuous documentary record of the paper's first 105 years of publication, scanned and searchable through the Library of Congress's Chronicling America database under LCCN sn96088233.
Newberg is situated in the Willamette Valley wine country southwest of Portland. The city's history includes its founding by Quaker settlers in the 1880s — making it the first Quaker community west of the Rocky Mountains — and its connection to Herbert Hoover, who lived in Newberg from 1885 to 1888 as a boy in the home of his uncle, John H. Minthorn. The Hoover-Minthorn House is preserved as a museum in the city. The Newberg Graphic's first decades of reporting covered the same town in which the future 31st President of the United States was attending Pacific Academy.
Sources
The paranormal accounts associated with the Newberg Graphic office are notable for including time lapses — a relatively uncommon class of report that distinguishes this location from the standard apparition-and-sound pattern of most haunted-building accounts. Staff over the years have described experiencing periods of missing or lost time while working in the building, finding themselves unable to account for stretches of minutes or hours that should have been part of their workday. Time-lapse and 'missing time' phenomena are documented in the parapsychological literature as a distinct category, sometimes associated with electromagnetic anomalies in older buildings with original wiring, sometimes attributed to focused attention states, and sometimes — by witnesses — to something less mundane.
Apparition sightings have also been reported over the years by employees inside the building. The number and identity of these figures have not been formally documented in the web-accessible sources, but the consistency of the reports — multiple employees, multiple years, multiple shifts — has been enough to give the building a regional 'extremely haunted' reputation among Yamhill County paranormal enthusiasts.
The accounts at the Graphic exist primarily as employee oral tradition, transmitted from one generation of newsroom staff to the next across the paper's 135+ year operating history. Local tradition holds that the upper-floor offices and the back production areas are where the time-lapse experiences cluster, though the geographic specificity of the reports is not well-documented in published sources. The building has been owned and operated by the newspaper through multiple corporate transitions (Eagle, Pamplin, Carpenter), and the staff turnover associated with these transitions has produced waves of new employees who arrived at the building without preconception and reportedly began experiencing the phenomena over time.
No historical event — fire, death, violent crime — has been identified in connection with the building's construction or the newspaper's operational history that might explain the accounts. The 1888 building would predate modern construction standards and has likely housed multiple occupants or uses in its long lifetime; any of those layers could be the origin of the reported phenomena. The Shadowlands description characterizes the location as 'extremely haunted' without providing specifics, indicating that the source's information was already at one remove from primary witness accounts when it entered the paranormal-directory tradition.
The building is not open for paranormal tourism — it is an active newspaper editorial office — and the only available experience is to view the exterior from East Hancock Street.
The Newberg Graphic is an active community newspaper at 500 East Hancock Street in downtown Newberg, Oregon. The paper was founded in 1888 and is one of Oregon's oldest continuously operating local papers. The building is not open for paranormal tourism; view from the street.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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