Lone Fir Cemetery

Portland buried 3,000 Chinese workers at Lone Fir, exhumed most in 1948, paved Block 14. Children's voices, a lantern caretaker remain.

In July 1948, Multnomah County workers exhumed 265 bodies from Block 14 of Lone Fir Cemetery, the corner of the property the city had set aside for the burial of Chinese immigrants. The bones were supposed to go home to China. Some did. The rest got reburied around the cemetery in unmarked graves, and in the 1950s the county paved Block 14 over and built an office on top of it.

A lot of the ghost-tour pages skip past that part of Lone Fir's history. They go straight to the lantern-carrying caretaker and the children's voices on the gravel paths, which are real enough as recurring accounts. But the haunting at Lone Fir doesn't make sense without the underlying fact that this is a cemetery where Portland buried more than 3,000 Chinese workers between the 1860s and 1920s, then dug most of them up, then built parking on the rest.

Block 14 was purchased in 1891 by the City and Suburban Railway as a burial ground for its deceased Chinese workers, the men who built Portland's seawall and a lot of the city's early infrastructure. In Chinese tradition, the graves were temporary. Bones were meant to be exhumed after a fixed period and shipped back to home provinces in small metal boxes. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the broader anti-Chinese violence of the era made that complicated. A lot of those boxes are still in the ground.

The hauntings at Lone Fir cluster around what you'd expect. Visitors hear children playing in sections where many young people are buried: laughter, footsteps on gravel, the distinct sound of running, then nothing when you look. People describe whispers near the Chinese workers' memorial that went up in 2004 after community advocacy finally got Block 14 acknowledged. The lantern-carrying caretaker is a recurring figure on the older paths, an older man who patrols and disappears.

The cemetery dates to 1846, making it Portland's oldest. It holds about 25,000 burials across 30 acres in Buckman, with a wrought-iron fence, a single fir tree (the original "lone fir" was felled long ago, but a successor stands), and a patchwork of styles ranging from pioneer markers to Victorian monuments to recent flat granite. From roughly the 1960s through the 1990s the cemetery was effectively abandoned, vandalized, overgrown. Lone Fir's reputation as a haunted location took hold during that stretch.

Friends of Lone Fir Cemetery formed in 1999 to restore it, and the place is now actively maintained, hosts tours, and was named among Oregon's scariest by the Portland Tribune in 2025. Metro is also working on a long-overdue Block 14 memorial project, planned with input from Portland's Chinese American community.

Skeptics will say children's voices in a cemetery is psychological projection. Maybe. The lantern is harder to dismiss because too many independent visitors describe the same figure on the same paths. The whispers near the memorial are the part that lands hardest, because if you read the history first they stop sounding like a ghost story and start sounding like a list of names nobody bothered to record.

Lone Fir doesn't need supernatural framing to be heavy. The supernatural part is just the city's bad conscience showing up on schedule.