McMenamins Edgefield

Animal bones in a pentagram on Room 215's floor. A nurse in white. A baby crying. Edgefield was a poor farm before McMenamins ever touched it.

During a paranormal cleansing of Room 215 at McMenamins Edgefield, investigators found animal bones arranged on the floor in the shape of a pentagram. Nobody knew who put them there. Room 215 is the room people specifically book on this property because they want a shot at experiencing some of what guests before them have written up.

Edgefield wasn't built as a hotel. It opened in 1911 as the Multnomah County Poor Farm, a 345-acre experiment in early-20th-century social welfare where families, the disabled, the mentally ill, the elderly, and the destitute were sent to work the land in exchange for a roof. Residents farmed, did laundry for downtown Portland, ran a dairy, and were treated in an on-site hospital wing. There was also a jail. By the 1960s the farm had become a nursing home. By 1982 the last patients were transferred elsewhere, and the property sat abandoned and vandalized for over twenty years.

It was nearly demolished. The Troutdale Historical Society fought to save the buildings, and the McMenamin brothers stepped in with capital and a vision in 1990. Today the 74-acre property in Troutdale, Oregon is the flagship of the McMenamins empire: a hotel, a winery, a brewery, a distillery, a movie theater, two restaurants, a glassblowing studio, a par-3 golf course, and an outdoor concert lawn that has hosted Bob Dylan, Norah Jones, and the Decemberists.

The activity reported on this property is dense and patterned. A nurse in white seen in the upstairs hallways near the old hospital wing. A former janitor who appears in the basement and lower corridors. A ghost dog spotted around the lawn at dusk. Concentrated activity on the entire second and third floors.

The unmarked-graves history is what locals reach for to explain it. The poor farm buried indigent residents on site, and not all the burial locations were properly recorded. One account in the McMenamins guest-log archive involves a young mother whose infant died of chickenpox during the farm's early years. Both were buried somewhere on the property. Both still turn up in the ghost logs, by McMenamins' own records: a woman in early-1900s clothing seen near where the rose garden is now, and the sound of a baby crying in rooms that have no babies in them.

Room 215 sits on the second floor near where the women's ward used to be. The pentagram bones were the most dramatic find, but the room has a longer record: heavy footsteps when nobody's upstairs, the door opening on its own, lights flicking on after staff has confirmed they were off. The third floor has its own pattern, mostly involving the east wing where male patients were housed.

Skeptics will say a 74-acre former poor farm with thousands of residents over six decades is going to accumulate ghost stories whether or not anything actually happens, and that McMenamins has a clear financial interest in playing them up. Both are true. Both also leave out the volume. Edgefield gets more independent witness reports than any other McMenamins property by a wide margin, including from staff who don't want to be on the haunted-bar circuit and have nothing to gain by talking. The ghost dog on the soaking pool path doesn't show up on schedule. The reports just keep arriving at the front desk.