Francis Ermatinger House

The house went up in 1845, during the provisional-government era when Oregon City was the territory's seat and the end of the Oregon Trail. Ermatinger, a longtime HBC officer, kept it as the town grew past him. It entered the National Register in 1977 and spent years as a city-run museum — including a stretch of disrepair before the current programming took hold.

Its civic résumé is the strongest thing in the file: besides the Pettygrove–Lovejoy coin toss tradition, the house anchored Oregon City's historic-district identity while the town marked the end of the trail. The ghost lore arrived later, with the museum era.

Two presences carry the reports. Staff named the little girl 'April' — she is said to hide ribbons around the house, a claim repeated across the local tour literature. The dining room holds the other: a figure identified in the lore as a steamboat captain, reported seated at the head of the table, with chairs said to move.

The file has an unusual institutional consequence attached: a guide who worked at the house in the 1990s credits his unexplained encounters there with launching Oregon's paranormal-tour scene — the house's reputation drew investigators, the investigators drew a citywide ghost tour, and the circuit eventually produced the state's largest ghost conference. The Ermatinger reports, in other words, are documented to have generated an industry, if not an apparition.

Oregon City's standing gives the house its context: it was the territorial capital and the literal end of the Oregon Trail, the address where thousands of emigrants' paperwork ended. Ermatinger's 1845 house predates most of the town it now anchors; the county historical society runs the heritage programming, and the paranormal events — guided ghost tours, investigation nights, the podcast crews — now share the calendar with it. The little girl called April and the captain at the table are filed where the file files them: under the museum's own haunted-history banner, reported and unverified in the usual way.

The house runs haunted-history programming openly — Friday Night Frights, investigation nights with regional paranormal teams, basement access for ticketed guests — in partnership with the county historical society. The file keeps its scale honest: one contested coin flip, one ribbon-hiding girl, one captain at the table, and a 180-year-old ledger underneath it all that needs no ghost to justify the tour. Oregon City's oldest house thus earns its entry twice over — once for the coin toss it cannot quite prove, once for the ghost tours it plainly can. The reports remain reports — ribbons relocated, chairs moved, a presence at the head of the table — filed under the oldest standing roof in a town built on last entries in other people's journals.