Est. 1850 · Pacific Coast Maritime History · Old Town Chinatown Historic District · Nineteenth-Century Urban Infrastructure
Beneath the streets of Portland's Old Town Chinatown, a network of interconnected basements, brick archways, and short connecting tunnels stretches from the original waterfront to the city's main commercial blocks. The passages were constructed primarily during the late nineteenth century as a practical solution to a busy street grid: merchants needed to move goods from the Willamette River docks into hotel and tavern cellars without competing with horse traffic, streetcars, and pedestrians overhead.
The Willamette has since been pushed back from its original bank by harbor wall construction and the Tom McCall Waterfront Park reclamation. The tunnels themselves were never a continuous transit network so much as a chain of basements punched through with brick arches, with shorter passages running under streets to connect blocks. This arrangement, common to many port cities of the era, made the underground a useful storage and transfer zone for legitimate cargo, vice operations, and Prohibition-era smuggling alike.
The 'shanghaiing' narrative attached to the tunnels emerged considerably later than the tunnels themselves. Writer Stewart Holbrook began publishing colorful accounts of 1890s Portland in the Sunday Oregonian beginning in 1933, and his stories of kidnapped men sold to ship captains as forced crew became a fixture of regional folklore. Historians who have examined the period note that crimping, the practice of kidnapping sailors for maritime labor, was documented in many Pacific coast ports, including Portland, but there is no archival evidence that the tunnels themselves served as a holding network. The conflation of two real phenomena, the tunnels and crimping, into a single underground-kidnapping story is largely Holbrook's invention.
In the modern era, two organizations conduct tours: the Cascade Geographic Society's Shanghai Tunnels project at 120 NW 3rd Avenue, and the Portland Underground volunteer excavation group, which has been restoring sections for decades. Old Town Pizza & Brewing operates above one of the more frequently toured segments, and several of the building's basement features, including a former elevator shaft, anchor the building's paranormal lore.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_tunnels
- https://www.travelportland.com/culture/portland-shanghai-tunnels/
- https://shanghaitunnels.com/
- https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/shanghai-tunnels
ApparitionsShadow figuresCold spotsEVPPhantom footstepsTouching/pushingBattery drain
The most persistent figure in the Shanghai Tunnels' paranormal lore is Nina, pronounced with a long 'i.' According to oral tradition repeated by Old Town Pizza staff and tour operators, Nina was a young woman caught up in the late nineteenth-century vice economy of the waterfront district. The story holds that she cooperated with traveling missionaries to share information about the trafficking that surrounded her, and that she was found dead in the building that now houses Old Town Pizza. The specific mechanism of her death, often described as a fall down an elevator shaft, is not independently documented.
Visitors and staff report seeing a figure in dark period dress in the basement and dining room above. Her name, according to legend, is carved into the brick of one of the passages, and that carving has become a focal point of tours. Investigators have recorded EVP samples, photographed what they describe as shadow figures, and reported equipment battery drain in the lower passages.
Ghost Adventures filmed an episode at the Shanghai Tunnels that aired in October 2012, documenting what the crew described as multiple instances of unexplained activity. National outlets including Conde Nast Traveler, USA Today, Thrillist, and Cosmopolitan have ranked the tunnels among the most haunted sites in the United States.
Beyond Nina, tour guides describe encounters attributed to the men who reportedly worked, drank, or lost their lives in the basements above the waterfront. Reported phenomena include disembodied footsteps, cold spots in specific corners of the passages, and the sensation of being touched while standing alone. The combination of confined brick architecture, low light, and the heavy historical weight of the trafficking narrative produces a setting that investigators and casual visitors alike describe as among the more atmospheric urban underground spaces in the country.
Media Appearances
- Ghost Adventures (October 2012)
