Wolf Creek Inn

Oregon's oldest inn, where Jack London finished a novel in 1911. Room 8, the parlor piano, and the kitchen baking pans are all active.

Jack London finished "The Valley of the Moon" in a second-floor room at the Wolf Creek Inn during the summer of 1911. It's the sort of biographical anchor a literary haunting would want. He wrote at the desk by the window. He died in 1916. Past guests and paranormal researchers staying in his old room have, on more than one occasion, reported turning around and seeing him there.

His face is recognizable enough from period photographs that visitors who don't know the room's history have correctly identified him afterward. People who do know the history mostly come specifically for the chance. Inn manager Jeremy Davis has logged the sightings carefully. Multiple guests have also reported hearing London's voice in that room, though no two accounts agree on what he says, which is either charming or deeply suspicious depending on your priors.

The Wolf Creek Inn is the oldest continuously operating inn in the Pacific Northwest. The original lodge went up in the 1850s as a clapboard stagecoach stop on the Applegate Trail. Entrepreneur Henry Smith expanded it in 1883 into a sixteen-room hotel that charged seventy-five cents a night. Across the next 140 years the guest book accumulated a roster of names that explains why Oregon designated it a state heritage site: Rutherford B. Hayes. John Wayne. Clark Gable. Carole Lombard. Orson Welles. Mary Pickford. Sinclair Lewis. London. Most of them passed through on the long stagecoach run between Sacramento and Portland in an era when there was nowhere else to spend the night for sixty miles in either direction.

Room Eight has produced the densest cluster of activity. Davis has said the whole house has it but Eight is the worst. Guests have heard a young woman's voice speaking in the room with no one else inside. Doors slam without anyone touching them. The piano in the parlor plays itself. Chairs reposition between trips through the dining room. Items lift off tables and turn up later in different rooms. In the kitchen, a baking pan has been seen sailing across the floor more than once, with witnesses present each time.

A separate identified spirit is a female stagecoach driver whose voice has been picked up on EVP recordings during paranormal investigations. Some researchers have tried to attach the voice to One-Eyed Charlie Parkhurst, a 19th-century stagecoach driver who lived as a man for her entire driving career and was only revealed to have been female at her death. The dates don't quite line up. Parkhurst's circuit was farther south, and she died in 1879, four years before Wolf Creek formally opened as a hotel. Whoever the driver actually is, she's been there longer than the inn has had its current name.

The Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures crew came through with Zak Bagans, who concluded that Wolf Creek harbors aggressive negative energy, several ghosts, and a vampire-like creature with fangs and visible blood around its mouth. One of his accounts has the entity biting a guest. Two visiting mediums from Nevada concurred that something heavy was happening throughout the building. Davis, who actually works there, takes a more relaxed view. "People come to the inn and find stuff all the time," he has said, in the tone of a man whose chairs do not stay where he leaves them.

The Bagans description is overheated by about an order of magnitude. The Davis description is closer to what guests actually walk into. The Wolf Creek Inn isn't a horror movie. It's a 140-year-old wooden building where Jack London wrote a novel, a stagecoach driver's voice still ends up on tape, and the chairs occasionally rearrange themselves while you're at dinner.