Oregon Institute of Technology

A polytechnic university in Klamath Falls. The campus and surrounding hills have a history of unusual discoveries and paranormal reports.

The old campus of the Oregon Institute of Technology sits off Old Fort Road, roughly three miles northeast of downtown Klamath Falls, a collection of buildings that began their existence during World War II as Marine Corps barracks. The military facility was used to treat Marines who had contracted tropical diseases, primarily malaria and filariasis, during service in the Pacific theater. Thousands of young men passed through the barracks during the war years, many of them gravely ill, and an unknown number died there while receiving treatment far from home.

When the war ended, the state of Oregon repurposed the military buildings as the Oregon Vocational School, which opened in 1947 to serve returning veterans seeking technical education under the GI Bill. The school grew and was eventually renamed the Oregon Institute of Technology. In August 1959, a new campus site was selected at 3201 Campus Drive, and by 1964 the institution had completed its relocation to the purpose-built facility. The old barracks campus on Old Fort Road was abandoned, and the buildings, already aging military structures from the early 1940s, began their slow deterioration. Some were demolished; the rest fell into disrepair, gradually reclaimed by weather and vegetation.

The abandoned campus became the subject of increasingly elaborate paranormal folklore. Online paranormal databases began listing the old Oregon Institute of Technology as one of the most haunted locations in Oregon, with descriptions claiming the campus had been suddenly abandoned with no explanation. In reality, as local historian and museum manager Todd Kepple pointed out, the relocation was entirely planned and well-documented. The school simply built a new campus and moved to it. The claim of mysterious abandonment was, as Kepple put it, bogus.

Nevertheless, the abandoned buildings attracted explorers and thrill-seekers who reported a range of unsettling experiences. Visitors described a heavy, ominous presence pervading the ruins, particularly in the areas that had served as medical treatment wards during the war. Shadowy apparitions were reported moving between the dilapidated walls, figures that appeared briefly before vanishing into doorways or around corners. The faint sound of chanting was heard by multiple visitors, accompanied by loud banging sounds that echoed through the empty structures. On the hill adjacent to the old campus, explorers found odd rock formations with animal bones arranged at their centers, and some reported finding blood, suggesting that the site had been used for ritualistic purposes by unknown groups.

The Herald and News, Klamath Falls' local newspaper, addressed the haunted reputation of the old campus in a 2014 editorial by editor Gerry O'Brien, who noted that the website articlecats.com had ranked it as the seventh scariest site in Oregon. O'Brien offered tongue-in-cheek alternative explanations for the reported phenomena: the shadowy presences were professors monitoring final exams, the sounds of praying were students hoping for passing grades, and the loud banging was classroom doors slamming as students departed for spring break. The editorial reflected a broader local skepticism about the more sensational claims surrounding the old campus.

Whether the paranormal reports are genuine encounters with the spirits of WWII Marines who died in the barracks, the residual energy of human suffering concentrated in a place of illness and recovery, or simply the product of overactive imaginations exploring abandoned buildings in the dark, the old Oregon Institute of Technology campus has earned its place in Oregon's paranormal folklore. The original buildings no longer exist, having been demolished or collapsed over the decades, but the stories persist among those who explored the ruins before they disappeared.