Wolf Creek Inn

Oregon's oldest continuously operated hotel, completed in 1883. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, originally a stagecoach stop on the Applegate Trail. Author Jack London spent entire summers here.

The Wolf Creek Inn is the oldest continuously operating inn in the Pacific Northwest, a distinction it has held since 1883 when it opened its doors to travelers arriving by stagecoach on the Applegate Trail in southern Oregon. The original structure dates to the 1850s, when a clapboard lodge was built at the site. Entrepreneur Henry Smith transformed it into a proper hotel with sixteen bedrooms, charging guests seventy-five cents per night for a room. Over the following 140 years, the inn has hosted an extraordinary roster of famous guests, including President Rutherford B. Hayes, John Wayne, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Orson Welles, Mary Pickford, and Sinclair Lewis.

The inn's most celebrated guest was the writer Jack London, who spent an entire summer at Wolf Creek Inn and completed his novel The Valley of the Moon during his stay. London's room has been preserved, and it is in that room that his ghost is most frequently encountered. Past guests and paranormal researchers have reported seeing London's apparition in his former sleeping quarters, a figure unmistakable to those familiar with the author's photographs. His disembodied voice has also been heard at the inn, though what he says varies between accounts. London died in 1916, but his attachment to the place where he wrote appears to have survived him.

Room Eight has been identified as the epicenter of the inn's paranormal activity, the location where most of the ghostly encounters have been reported. Inn manager Jeremy Davis has noted that the whole house has activity, but Room Eight draws the most consistent reports. Guests have heard a young lady's voice speaking clearly when no one else was in the building. Doors slam without anyone touching them. Piano music plays from the inn's piano when no living person is seated at the instrument. Chairs move on their own, repositioning themselves as though occupied by invisible guests. Objects disappear from tabletops and are found later in different locations. In the kitchen, staff members have watched a baking pan fly across the floor on multiple occasions, propelled by no visible force.

A female stagecoach driver is among the identified spirits, her voice captured on EVP recordings during paranormal investigations. Some researchers have attempted to connect this spirit to One-Eyed Charlie Parkhurst, the famous female stagecoach driver who disguised herself as a man throughout her career, though timeline inconsistencies make this identification unlikely.

The Wolf Creek Inn was investigated by the Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures crew, led by Zak Bagans, who described the property as a historic building riddled with aggressive negative energy, apparitions, and a vampire-like creature. Two mediums from Nevada's Pioneer Saloon who participated in the investigation concluded that something really heavy was occurring throughout the building, an assessment that went beyond the typical characterization of the inn's activity. The vampire-like entity, described as having fangs and often observed with blood around its mouth, represents the most extreme end of the paranormal claims associated with the inn. At least one account describes this entity biting a guest.

Despite the more dramatic claims, the overall consensus among those who live and work at the Wolf Creek Inn is that most of the activity represents friendly acts of mischief rather than malevolent haunting. Davis has observed that people come to the inn and find stuff all the time, a casual assessment that reflects the normalcy of supernatural encounters at a location that has been hosting both the living and the dead for over fourteen decades. The inn offers guided paranormal tours for visitors interested in its supernatural reputation, and the Wolf Creek Inn remains one of the most actively haunted and thoroughly investigated locations in southern Oregon.