McMenamins Hotel Oregon

In the Cellar Bar at McMenamins Hotel Oregon in McMinnville, a ghost named John is painted right onto the elevator door. The bar is an earthy, dimly lit lair down in the basement, all brick walls and low ceiling, lit in part by pale purple light that filters down through amethyst glass set into the sidewalk overhead. John is the hotel's resident spirit, a well-dressed man, friendly and fond of small pranks, and the artist Myrna Yoder put his likeness on the basement face of the elevator he's said to haunt.

Two employees say they've seen him. Stories of his mischief started surfacing in the 1980s, and the front desk keeps a Ghost Logbook of the sightings, available on request. Longtime employees have said there were "unidentifiable forms of life in the basement," and some of them put it down to John. But for all that, no one knows who he was. The hotel's own history says it plainly: his identity has never been determined. The best guess is a long-term resident or a staffer who stayed.

The hauntings aren't only his. The manager, Em Thomas, has talked about the poltergeist side of the place, objects rearranged by unseen hands, and points out that ghosts come standard across the McMenamins properties.

Then there's the laughter.

Up on the Rooftop Bar, bartenders keep hearing children laughing and go looking for the source. They never find it. The hotel ties the sound to a specific set of kids: the ones who grew up here in the 1950s, when the building had been a hotel since 1905, and who had a reputation for running the halls, laughing and pulling pranks. One of them, Tom Nicolai, lived in a fourth-floor apartment here until he was twelve.

Other rooms keep their own stories. Guests in Room 305 have reported a hand tucking the blankets in around them. Staff note cold spots in the Cellar Bar and on the lower floors, and bathroom dispensers that switch on by themselves.

None of this is what the hotel is famous for. In 1950, a local farm couple named the Trents photographed a flying saucer over McMinnville, and Hotel Oregon has run with it ever since. A painting of a saucer beaming the building up hangs near one of the bars, and every May the place hosts the second-largest UFO festival in the country.

So the hotel spends all year watching the sky, selling the thing nobody can prove ever came down. And the ones who actually never left are the children, still laughing somewhere above the bar.