Operating Since 2006 · Oregon City Oregon Trail Terminus Heritage · McLoughlin Neighborhood and Promenade Tours · Local Historian-Led Programming
Northwest Ghost Tours is a walking-tour operation founded by Rocky Smith, an Oregon City native who has studied the area's history and paranormal lore for more than two decades and began running tours in 2006. Oregon City, established near the end of the Oregon Trail and the first incorporated city west of the Rocky Mountains, gives the tours a deep documentary base, and Smith presents the walks as a mix of history, folklore, and reported paranormal accounts grounded in research.
The company offers four distinct routes: the Downtown Oregon City tour, an Oregon Trail tour, the McLoughlin Promenade tour, and the McLoughlin Arc Light tour. Each runs roughly two hours over one to two miles, and the content is updated annually with new stories. Tours operate seasonally, concentrated from summer through December, with an intensive October schedule and special 'Spirits of Christmas' tours in December.
Stops draw on Oregon City's real history — the Ermatinger House (the third-oldest house in Oregon), former bank and police-station buildings, the site of the old Liberty Theater, and the McLoughlin neighborhood named for Hudson's Bay Company figure John McLoughlin. Smith has said his own first reported paranormal experience came while working at the Ermatinger House during college.
The tours begin at the Oregon City Municipal Elevator, the vertical 'street' that connects the city's lower and upper levels and is itself the subject of the tour's opening ghost story. Tickets are sold online through the operator's reservation system.
Sources
- https://traveloregon.com/things-to-do/culture-history/hauntingly-cool-ghost-tours-in-oregon/
- https://www.mthoodterritory.com/articles/fall-ghost-tours
- https://www.theclackamasprint.net/arts-culture/ghost-tour-the-town/
ApparitionsReported hauntings at multiple downtown sites
The defining tale of the tour is the one it opens with, at the Oregon City Municipal Elevator. According to the guides, a woman who lived in a mansion near the elevator strongly opposed its construction in her view; local lore, as recounted in the Clackamas Print's coverage, names her Sarah Chase and holds that she still appears at the top of the structure. The story is presented as folklore tied to the documented controversy over the elevator's placement rather than as a verified haunting.
From there the routes thread through documented Oregon City buildings. At the Ermatinger House, Oregon's third-oldest dwelling, guides recount the lore of a little girl and a steamboat captain; Travel Oregon's roundup of Oregon ghost tours notes the same figures. Other stops cited in local reporting include former bank and police-station buildings, the Pioneer Pub, a downtown coffee shop described as the most active location on the route, the site of the old Liberty Theater, and a pedestrian tunnel along Railroad Avenue.
The accounts are a blend of documented history and reported phenomena, and the operator frames them as research-based storytelling. None of the ghost stories is presented here as a confirmed paranormal event; they are the folklore that has accumulated around a city with one of the oldest continuous histories in the Pacific Northwest.
Notable Entities
Sarah Chase (Municipal Elevator, local lore)The Little Girl and Steamboat Captain (Ermatinger House lore)
