HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
Boutique hotel in a late-1890s Pendleton boarding house and bordello, restored in 1991 and tied to the city's haunted underground tunnels.
17 SW Emigrant Ave, Pendleton, OR 97801
Research updated September 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$
Overnight rates for five rooms and a suite; reservations by phone only through the Pendleton Underground Tour office.
Access
Limited Access
Upper-floor Victorian boarding house; stairs to guest rooms, no elevator noted.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1898 · Pendleton red-light district · Former bordello · Pendleton Underground Tours · Eastern Oregon frontier town
Pendleton in the late nineteenth century was a wool-shipping and railroad town with an outsized vice economy. Accounts of the period describe more than 30 bars and roughly 18 brothels packed within a four-block radius, served by a network of underground tunnels that connected basements, card rooms, and businesses beneath the streets.
The building that now houses the Working Girls Hotel went up in the late 1890s as a boarding house, and for decades it operated as a bordello on the upper floors above ground-level commerce. Its interior still carries the marks of that era: 18-foot ceilings, exposed brick walls, and rooms laid out for short-term lodging.
The property was restored and reopened as the Working Girls Hotel in 1991. Pendleton Underground Tours, the nonprofit that interprets the city's tunnel and red-light history, acquired the hotel and runs it alongside its guided tours. Today the hotel offers five guest rooms and the Baker Suite, decorated with period antiques to evoke the building's turn-of-the-century use.
Reservations are deliberately low-tech: there is no online booking system and no walk-in desk. Guests call the Pendleton Underground Tour office to arrange a stay, a practice that keeps the small hotel tied to the tour operation that maintains it.
Sources
The Working Girls Hotel does not market itself first as a haunted attraction; its draw is the chance to sleep in a preserved bordello above Pendleton's old vice district. But the building sits inside one of eastern Oregon's better-known dark-tourism settings, the Pendleton Underground, and that association carries the ghost stories.
The underground tunnels and the lives lived in them — the women who worked the upstairs rooms, the laborers housed below the streets, the gambling and bootlegging that ran through the basements — supply the lore. Visitors on the underground tour hear those histories told as social history rather than as a haunted-house script, and the hotel's restored rooms let guests stay overnight inside that same fabric.
In November 2025, regional press covered a paranormal-television production turning to Pendleton's haunted underside, putting the city's tunnels and boarding-house era in front of a wider audience. Guest accounts of the hotel itself tend toward atmosphere rather than dramatic apparitions: the heavy quiet of an old upstairs hall, the sense of rooms that have held a great deal of human history. The hotel leaves the question open, and the building's documented past does most of the unsettling on its own.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Spend the night in one of five themed rooms or the Baker Suite, furnished with period antiques beneath 18-foot ceilings and exposed brick. Reservations are made by phone through the Pendleton Underground Tour office, which owns and operates the hotel.
The same operator runs guided tours of Pendleton's underground tunnels and former red-light district, the historical backdrop the hotel sits within.
See current room rates and availability at Working Girls Hotel.
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