The Witch's Castle

A 1935 WPA picnic shelter in Forest Park draped with the legend of Danford Balch, Portland's first legal hanging in 1859.

There's no witch in the Witch's Castle. There's not really a castle, either. The moss-eaten stone shell at the bottom of Forest Park's Lower Macleay Trail is a 1935 WPA picnic shelter and public restroom, designed by Portland architect Ernest F. Tucker in 1929 and built on what was, at one point, the most remote public toilet in the city. Local lore credits Portland high schoolers in the 1980s with rebranding it. The name stuck so completely that most visitors hiking down from Northwest Thurman Street now believe they're looking at something actually medieval.

What's underneath the legend is more interesting than the legend itself. The land was part of the homestead of Danford Balch, an early Oregon settler who arrived in the 1840s. In late 1858, Balch's fifteen-year-old daughter Anna eloped with Mortimer Stump, a young man working at a nearby lumber camp. Balch took the marriage as a personal insult and the feud between the two men escalated through the fall. On November 18, 1858, as Mortimer and Anna prepared to board the Stark Street Ferry across the Willamette, Balch walked up and shot Stump dead with a shotgun. Anna was standing next to her husband.

Balch was tried, convicted, and on October 17, 1859, hanged in front of several hundred onlookers. It was the first legal execution ever carried out in Portland. His land moved through several owners before Donald Macleay donated most of it to the city in 1897. Balch Creek still runs through the canyon and still bears his name.

The stone shelter that locals now call the Witch's Castle has nothing to do with any of that. It was built almost eighty years after Balch was hanged, on land that had long since stopped being his. The original water line was destroyed in the Columbus Day Storm of 1962, the city decided repairs weren't worth it, and crews stripped out the doors, fixtures, and roof. The building has been an empty stone shell ever since, slowly being eaten by moss and ivy.

That's the building people now associate with Balch. The most popular ghost is Danford himself, sometimes accompanied by his murdered son-in-law Mortimer, occasionally joined by Balch's wife (cast as the witch). Visitors describe lights drifting through the trees around the structure, dim shapes near the walls at dusk, and silhouettes that look like women and children standing in the empty doorways. Hikers describe a heavy watched-feeling on the trail. A handful of people have described, with completely straight faces, the sound of phantom toilets flushing inside a building that hasn't had plumbing in six decades.

The Balch story is real history tied to the wrong building. The shelter, in fairness, does its part. The canyon is steep and damp, the trail loses light fast in late afternoon, and the shell sits in a clearing where the creek noise drops out for a few seconds as you pass. Hundreds of hikers a week walk through, most of them in daylight, and a real percentage of them feel something they can't explain. None of those people built the legend, and none of them are wrong about how the place feels. They're just standing about a mile downhill from where Portland's first murderer actually lived.