Crater Lake Lodge

A man in old work clothes, a giggling child, a Chinese laborer near the elevator, and a Great Hall rocking chair that moves on its own.

Crater Lake Lodge sits on the rim of a volcanic caldera, almost a thousand feet above the deepest lake in the United States, in a place that gets 533 inches of snow a year and stays buried for eight months at a time. The Klamath people who knew this lake long before any lodge stood here regarded the water as sacred, contested ground between Llao of the underworld and Skell of the sky. Their tradition warned against looking at it. The lodge, when it finally opened on July 16, 1915, gave guests rooms specifically built so they could.

That tension may explain why this place has the haunting it has. The man in old work clothes who appears near the main staircase is the figure guests describe most often. Witnesses say he looks solid and real, a figure you'd nod hello to in a hallway. As soon as anyone speaks, the doorway is empty again. Many staff link him to the original construction crews, who were doing dangerous work in a brutal place. That construction was a disaster from the first season. Portland developer Alfred Parkhurst broke ground in 1909, with R.N. Hockenberry and Company designing, and materials had to be hauled over primitive roads in a working window of three summer months. By the time the lodge opened in 1915 it had tar paper for an exterior, beaver-board walls, no private bathrooms, a single small generator, a roof that leaked from day one, and a foundation set on uneven volcanic rock.

The structural problems followed it for decades. By the 1950s, supplemental columns were holding up sagging ceiling beams and steel cables were keeping the walls from spreading apart. In 1989 engineers condemned the building. A fifteen-million-dollar rehab from 1991 to 1995 dismantled the Great Hall, gutted the rest, and rebuilt the structure around a modern steel frame. Whatever was in the lodge before that work survived the renovation.

On the second and third floors, a child's footsteps and giggles echo through the corridors at night. Some guests have caught a glimpse of a small figure at the end of a hallway or in a doorway, gone before they can look again. A Chinese man has been reported on or near the elevator, fading from view as soon as he registers in someone's vision. Chinese laborers worked Oregon construction projects in the early 1900s, and a number of researchers have suggested he may also be connected to the lodge's brutal building phase.

Then there's the chair. A large rocking chair in the Great Hall has been the subject of staff reports for years. They describe walking past it and noticing the small forward-and-back motion of someone who has just sat down, in a chair no one has been near. The chair sits in the same Great Hall where the massive native-stone fireplace dominates the room, looking out through windows toward the lake.

Beyond the named ghosts, guests describe an oppressive presence in certain parts of the building at night, hard sleep, vivid nightmares. Park rangers have called the broader Crater Lake area a ghost-and-goblin park. They've reported campfires on Wizard Island, the volcanic cinder cone that rises from the lake's surface, that leave no trace of fire, no smoke, no ash when investigated the next day. The Klamath warnings about the water have been told down through generations.

The lodge is open seasonally, mid-May through early October, and shuts down for the winter months when the snow comes in. The seventy-one rooms book solid. People come for the views. They get the views, the impossibly blue water nine hundred feet below, and they get whatever else is sharing the building with them. The rocking chair in the Great Hall keeps doing its slow, small motion, in front of the stone fireplace, while the wind moves over a caldera that two Klamath spirits have been arguing over for a very long time.