In Brief
The ghost most often seen in the basement of Kell's Irish Pub in Portland is a firefighter — fire chief David Campbell, who died in a 1911 blaze. The catch: the pub didn't open until 1990, decades after the man people keep meeting downstairs was gone.
The Full Story
Down in the basement of Kell's Irish Pub in Portland, Oregon, people keep meeting a firefighter who isn't there. He's tall, wears an old-fashioned fireman's uniform, and turns up near the bar downstairs. Of everything reported at Kell's, he's the figure people see most, and the staff and ghost-tour guides have described him the same way for years. They're fairly sure who he is.
They call him David Campbell. He was a real Portland fire chief, and on June 26, 1911, he was killed fighting the Union Oil Company fire. He was 47 years old. The city built a memorial to him in 1928, designed by the architect Paul Cret, and dedicated it in his honor.
The problem with the story is the calendar. Kell's didn't open until 1990, when the Irish immigrants Gerard and Lucille McAleese took over the ground floor of the Glisan Building. The man people see in the basement died 79 years before there was a pub for him to haunt. The lore ties him to the building, not the bar — the Glisan Building has stood at 112 SW 2nd Avenue since 1889, well inside his lifetime — but no record says Campbell ever set foot inside it.
The basement is the active part. It opens straight onto one of the entrances to the Shanghai Tunnels, the passages that once ran goods, and by local legend kidnapped men, between Portland's old saloons and the Willamette waterfront. The room that connects to the tunnel, the Cigar Room, is where the reports cluster: cold spots, footsteps, invisible hands brushing past backs and necks, heavy breathing close behind people in an empty room, a grand piano that has played by itself. The owner has said he once watched a face surface in one of the bar mirrors. Kell's is a regular stop on the city's haunted pub tours, and the basement is what they come down for.
Up on the roof, the Kell's sign carries a floodlight under the letter P, and the guides have an explanation for it. "Supposedly, the floodlight under the P in Kells Irish Pub turns on and off when Chief Campbell is trying to communicate with the living," one told Willamette Week. A man who died in an oil fire in 1911, and the one thing left of him, they say, is a light he switches on and off above a pub that didn't exist while he was alive.
