Old Town Pizza & Brewing

A brick carved with NINA marks where a sex worker was thrown down the elevator shaft of the 1880 Merchant Hotel. The pizza joint kept the brick.

There's a brick at the back of Old Town Pizza & Brewing in Portland with the name NINA carved into it. The brick is part of a wall that used to be the shaft of an elevator, and the elevator is where, sometime in the late 1800s, a young woman named Nina is supposed to have been thrown to her death.

Nina was a sex worker at the Merchant Hotel, the building Old Town Pizza now occupies the lobby of. The hotel was built in 1880 by three Portland lumber barons in what's now the Old Town-Chinatown neighborhood, and like a lot of buildings on this stretch of Northwest Couch Street it had a basement that connected directly into the Shanghai Tunnels, the underground passages used to drug and kidnap men down to the Willamette docks. Nina worked the upper floors. Traveling Christian missionaries persuaded her to talk in exchange for help getting out. She talked. She turned up dead at the bottom of the elevator shaft a short while later, and whether the missionaries betrayed her or one of the hotel's regulars handled the problem himself has never been settled.

No historian has been able to verify a single piece of that legend. There's no death record for a Nina at the Merchant Hotel, no newspaper account of a woman thrown down a shaft, no missionary diary entry that lines up with the dates. The author of one of the more careful writeups on the case tried to dig up evidence and came back with nothing.

But the carved brick is there, and so are the sightings.

Employees and customers describe Nina as a woman in a long black dress, her face usually turned away, who appears on the staircase or near the rear booth where the elevator wall used to be. She's described as sad. People feel a tap on the shoulder when nobody is behind them. The smell of perfume drifts through the dining room with no source. One delivery driver, going down to the basement, said a column of smoke shaped roughly like a person rushed up the stairs at him and then was gone.

The basement is also where the Shanghai Tunnels start, and Old Town Pizza now leads tours down into them through a hatch in the floor. The tunnels themselves are a separate haunted-Portland industry, with their own roster of murdered ghosts and unaccounted-for footsteps, but Nina is exclusive to the building above. She doesn't seem to wander down.

What's strange about Nina, even by ghost-story standards, is how affectionate the staff sound when they describe her. She isn't hostile. She isn't a warning. She's the regular at the back booth who's been sitting there longer than any of the current employees have been alive, and the only thing she does that scares anyone is be visible at unexpected moments. The carved brick is treated like her gravestone. People leave it alone, except to point it out to first-time visitors over a beer.