Kell's Irish Pub

Above a Shanghai Tunnel entrance, this Portland pub has three named ghosts including 1911 fire chief David Campbell.

Kell's Irish Restaurant and Pub sits on the second floor of an 1889 building in Portland's Old Town-Chinatown, directly above one of the entrances to the Shanghai Tunnels. Those tunnels are the basement passages that once connected the saloons of downtown Portland to the Willamette River waterfront. Goods moved through them. According to persistent legend, men did too, kidnapped out of saloons and dropped onto ships bound for the Pacific. Whatever you make of the kidnapping stories, the basement of Kell's opens into that same underground network that has spooked Portlanders for over a century, and the pub has the ghosts to prove the connection.

Three named figures turn up regularly. The one staff and tour guides describe most often is the Firefighter, often identified as David Campbell, the Portland fire chief who died in the line of duty in 1911. Campbell appears as a tall figure in an old-fashioned fireman's uniform, most often in or near the basement bar. Houston Oldland, a Portland ghost tour guide quoted in Willamette Week, has said that the floodlight under the letter P in the Kell's Irish Pub sign turns on and off when Chief Campbell is trying to communicate. He's been spotted at other businesses near Ankeny Alley as well, but Kell's is his main haunt. Staff describe him as protective rather than menacing, which fits a fire chief.

Gerard and Lucille McAleese opened the pub in 1990, Irish immigrants taking over a building with more than a hundred years of accumulated history beneath its floorboards. The Glisan Building, at 112 SW 2nd Avenue, had been a networking spot for Portland businessmen and managers at the turn of the 20th century, and the surrounding blocks were a hub for saloons and boarding houses in the city's roughest era. The McAleeses inherited the ghosts that came with all of it.

The second ghost is a young red-haired girl who plays small tricks on adults and is gentle and playful with children who come into the pub during daytime hours. Her identity has never been pinned down, though some accounts speculate she may have been a victim of the 1918 influenza pandemic that devastated Portland. She moves small objects. She seems to be having fun.

The third is an older man in a derby hat who appears in the mirrors. He likes the live music. Musicians performing on stage have caught glimpses of him watching from reflective surfaces, as though he's still enjoying the entertainment a hundred years after he was alive to pay for a ticket.

The basement Cigar Room is where the activity gets dense. It connects directly to one of the Shanghai Tunnel entrances, and visitors there report invisible hands brushing their backs and necks, and a temperature that drops sharply enough to fog breath even in summer. A grand piano in the basement has played by itself on multiple occasions. Upstairs, chairs rearrange themselves overnight, televisions switch on without explanation, the sound of heavy breathing drifts out of empty rooms, and a black mist has been seen traveling through the pub. The owner once watched a face appear in one of the mirrors. Staff have occasionally turned to holy water for the more aggressive episodes.

Kell's is a regular stop on Portland's haunted pub crawls now, including the BeerQuest Haunted Pub Tour and Portland Ghosts walking tours. The pub leans into the reputation without overdoing it. The floodlight under the P in the sign flickers off the second you stop watching it, and on again before you reach the door.