Lone Fir Cemetery

Portland's oldest cemetery, established in 1846 with 25,000 graves across 30 acres. Contains 10,000 unidentifiable graves due to years of poor maintenance, and 16 Portland mayors rest here.

Lone Fir Cemetery is Portland's oldest burial ground, established in 1855 on land where pioneer J.B. Stephens buried his father Emmor upon arriving in Oregon in 1846. In 1854, Stephens sold the property to steamboat captain Colburn Barrell, who was soon forced to use the land for mass burial after his ship the Gazelle exploded on the Willamette River, killing twenty-four of sixty people aboard. The scattered remains were so difficult to identify that early settlers stored body parts in their homes until burial could be arranged. Barrell's wife Aurelia suggested the name Lone Fir for the single fir tree standing on the property. For more than forty years, every burial in Portland occurred at Lone Fir, and today the thirty-acre grounds hold over 25,000 interments, including nearly 10,000 in unmarked graves.

The cemetery's most famous ghost is Emma Merlotin, born Ane Tingry-LeCoz in France on November 8, 1850. After immigrating to the United States as a young child, she became a well-known Portland courtesan, described as a beauty with a generous heart who fed her neighbors during Christmas and helped anyone in need. On December 22, 1885, Merlotin was found brutally murdered with a hatchet in her cottage at 3rd and Yamhill Streets. In a desperate attempt to identify her killer, investigators removed one of her eyes, believing that a person's last image was preserved in the retina at death. The experiment failed, and her murder remains unsolved. Visitors to Lone Fir report seeing a shadowy figure of a woman dressed in French fashion roaming the grounds, sometimes throwing up her hands and screaming. Others describe a happier apparition of a young woman in a red dress, calmly strolling through the cemetery as if taking an evening walk.

The cemetery's most thoroughly documented spirit belongs to James McKenzie, who served as groundskeeper from 1889 to 1923, working seven days a week for most of his thirty-four-year tenure and rarely taking a vacation. Witnesses describe a tall, thin man in work clothes carrying groundskeeping tools during early morning hours. Cemetery staff have reported finding sections that appeared recently tended overnight, with leaves raked and weeds pulled, though no one had been assigned the work. On at least one occasion, tools were found arranged neatly near a grave that needed repair. According to Ghost City Tours, security camera footage from 2018 captured a shadowy figure moving among the graves between 2:00 and 5:00 a.m., appearing only in pre-1923 sections of the cemetery where McKenzie would have worked.

Among the most disturbing discoveries at Lone Fir is Block 14, the southwest corner where patients from Dr. James C. Hawthorne's Oregon Insane Asylum were buried between 1864 and 1879. The state paid a standard five-dollar grave-digging fee for mass burials, and wooden markers rotted or burned away over the decades. In 2004, ground-penetrating sonar revealed anomalies beneath a Multnomah County office building that stood on the site, and subsequent excavation turned up coffins and human remains. Up to 132 asylum patients are believed to be buried in this section, and visitors to the Hawthorne graves report hearing screaming sounds and seeing confused, distressed figures. Children visiting the area have described perceiving sad people who seemed lonely and scared.

Other paranormal phenomena at Lone Fir include dark shadow figures in the pioneer section that vanish when directly observed, the sound of children laughing and crying near sections containing children's graves, and a Victorian-era woman in mourning dress who appears near the same monument in the founding families section, placing flowers that later vanish. Near the Chinese Laborers' Memorial, where approximately 1,100 unidentified railroad workers were buried in Block 14 with only 265 bodies exhumed and relocated in 1948, visitors have reported hearing Cantonese voices and smelling incense. Investigators note that paranormal activity concentrates during early morning and late afternoon hours, with overcast and foggy days showing increased phenomena. The Friends of Lone Fir Cemetery, established in 2004, restored the long-neglected grounds, and the cemetery now hosts the annual Tour of Untimely Departures each Halloween, drawing nearly a thousand visitors to hear the stories of Portland's most troubled dead.