In Brief
The Wolf Creek Inn has stood on the old stagecoach road in Oregon since 1883, the oldest continuously running inn in the Pacific Northwest. The parlor piano plays itself, chairs drift around the dining room, and in one upstairs room guests keep meeting a long-dead author face to face.
The Full Story
Guests at the Wolf Creek Inn in Wolf Creek, Oregon keep turning around in one upstairs room to find Jack London standing in it.
London finished his novel *Valley of the Moon* in that room sometime in the early 1910s, and it has been kept the way it was during his stay. The story goes that guests who didn't know the room's history described the man they'd seen, then picked his face out of period photographs only afterward. His voice is said to carry through the room as well, with no one in it.
The inn is the oldest continuously operating hotel in the Pacific Northwest. It went up in 1883 as the Wolf Creek Tavern, a stagecoach stop on the Applegate Trail and one night's rest on the roughly 16-day haul between San Francisco and Portland. A bed cost 75 cents. President Rutherford B. Hayes slept here in 1880. So, decades later, did Clark Gable, who fished the Rogue River and has a suite named for him, and John Wayne, who took a room while filming *Rooster Cogburn*.
London's room isn't the only one with a story. "People come here and find stuff all the time," says Jeremy Davis, who runs the inn now with his wife Nancy. "If you're looking for it, you'll find it." Room 8 is the center of the activity, though he says the whole house has it. The parlor piano plays on its own. Chairs sit in different places between trips through the dining room. A baking pan once slid across the kitchen floor with no one near it. Doors slam shut. Things go missing from tabletops. Two mediums who visited left saying something "really heavy" was moving through the place. In an empty room, people hear a young woman's voice, said to belong to a female stagecoach driver whose name is lost, her words caught on EVP recordings. A favorite theory ties her to the stagecoach legend One-Eyed Charlie Parkhurst, except the dates refuse it: Parkhurst died in 1879, four years before the inn was built.
On a Friday-the-13th investigation in November 2020, a group worked through the rooms with an Ovilus, a device that voices words it assembles from the air around it. In the Clark Gable Suite, it spoke a single name. Carol.
Gable's wife was Carole Lombard. She had stayed at the inn herself, years earlier. A plane crash killed her in 1942.
