Oregon Institute of Technology

Paranormal sites blame OITs Klamath Falls campus on satanic rituals. The truth: a 1947 Marine barracks turned vocational school left empty in 1964.

The story you'll find on most paranormal websites about the Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls goes something like this: an abandoned campus with crumbling ruins, shadowy figures darting between buildings, satanic chanting on the hill above, animal bones arranged in the centers of strange rock formations, and nobody knows why the place was suddenly emptied out. The 2015 Herald and News editorial that took the story apart pointed out, fairly drily, that the chanting was probably just students during finals week.

Oregon Tech, as it goes by now, is a fully active polytechnic university with about 4,000 students and a Klamath Falls campus that is neither abandoned nor crumbling. The actual location of the haunting story is the original campus, three miles northeast of downtown on Old Fort Road, which the school occupied from 1947 until it moved to the current site in 1964.

That old campus is the interesting part.

It started life as a U.S. Marine Corps barracks during World War II, used to treat Marines coming back from the Pacific theater with malaria, filariasis, and other tropical diseases the rest of the country wasn't familiar with yet. When the war ended, the buildings were converted into a vocational school for returning veterans on July 15, 1947, originally called Oregon Vocational School. The institution went through a couple of name changes (Oregon Technical Institute, then Oregon Institute of Technology in 1973) and eventually outgrew the barracks. In the fall of 1964, classes moved to the current campus on the hill across town.

The old buildings sat empty. They were eventually demolished, but for years the half-collapsed structures, surrounded by sagebrush at the edge of a hot-springs valley, made an obvious draw for high school kids looking for somewhere to drink and tell each other stories. The satanic-cult-on-the-hill folklore probably grew out of those years. Visitors describe finding rock circles with bones arranged inside, hearing voices and chanting, seeing figures moving between the ruins, and feeling banged on or watched. Some of that may have been students. Some of it may have been people actually staging rituals at an empty site nobody was patrolling, which would be neither paranormal nor especially surprising.

The active campus across town is haunted in a different way: every October the school runs a Trick-or-Treat and Haunted House event for the community, now in its 25th year, where kids walk a costumed loop through the academic buildings and a student-built haunted maze. It's a sweet local tradition. It's also, intentionally or not, the school's way of holding onto the haunted reputation it never asked for in the first place.

So Oregon Tech has ended up with two haunted reputations running in parallel. The one on the paranormal sites is mostly nonsense recycled from a half-demolished old campus that was never actually abandoned mysteriously. The one the school cultivates is a haunted house in the gymnasium for trick-or-treaters. The kids walking the academic-building loop in October don't know any of this. They're there for the candy and the student-built maze, and they get their photo taken with a costumed engineering major before they go back to their parents.