McMenamins White Eagle Saloon

A server got pushed down the cellar stairs in the '90s. The bartenders blamed Sam, who tended bar at the White Eagle until he died upstairs.

In the 1990s, a server at the McMenamins White Eagle Saloon was carrying a tray down to the cellar when something half-pushed and half-carried her down the basement stairs. She wasn't hurt. She also wasn't alone, by any reading of what happened. The bartenders downstairs blamed Sam, the way bartenders at the White Eagle always blame Sam.

Sam, depending on which version you trust, was either Sam Warrick or Sam Riscoe. The lore has gotten reexamined a few times and currently leans toward Riscoe: a bartender and longtime boarding-house resident who lived above the saloon, traded labor for room and board, and eventually died in his upstairs room without ever leaving the building. He's been the resident ghost ever since, and the cellar is his territory.

The White Eagle opened in 1905 at North Russell and Mississippi in Albina, built by Polish immigrants William Hryszko and Bronisław Sobolewski to serve other Polish immigrants working the nearby Willamette docks. The original 20th-century clientele was rough: longshoremen, sailors, lumber mill workers, and the people who fed and serviced them. The saloon ran a brothel upstairs in its early decades, opium was sold out the back, and at least one shanghaiing operation supposedly used the basement to move drugged sailors down to the river through a long-rumored tunnel system. A 2018 reexamination of the lore walked back the most lurid versions of those stories, but the basics hold up: this was not a quiet bar.

McMenamins bought the building in 1997, kept the original mahogany back bar, and runs it today as a saloon and tiny six-room hotel. The cellar got the most renovation attention and is also where the most physical activity gets reported. Patrons describe being pinched, shoved, or touched while alone in the basement. Bartenders pulling stock have heard footsteps overhead in rooms that should be empty. The 1990s server-pushed-down-the-stairs incident is the encounter people repeat, but it's nowhere near the only one.

Upstairs has a different flavor. The hotel rooms have minor reports: a feeling of being watched, the bedside lamp turning on after the guest turned it off, a mirror briefly showing a face that isn't there. Nothing as physical as the cellar. Some staff theorize the women who worked the upstairs rooms in the early 1900s are still around in some quieter way, and that Sam was the bridge between the upstairs and downstairs worlds.

The White Eagle is a stop on the McMenamins ghost-tour circuit Willamette Week wrote up in October 2025 under the headline "The Witching Happy Hour." The tours sell out every fall. The history is good, the cocktails are good, and Sam, by most accounts, is still working his shift behind the cellar wall.