Shanghai Tunnels

The tunnels themselves are real and mundane in purpose: built to move goods from the docks to basement storage without fighting streetcar and train traffic, and — in Chinatown's case — as escape architecture for tong gambling dens and opium operations. A 1919 Oregonian account of officials creeping through the "subterranean labyrinth" of Chinatown describes steel-barred doors, secret panels and carpeted stairways — passages to gambling dens, it says, that never once mention shanghaiing. When police raided those dens with sledgehammer squads, the secret stairways were the point. An eight-day 1933 Oregonian series on the actual shanghai trade likewise never mentioned tunnels.

Historian Barney Blalock, whose 2014 book The Oregon Shanghaiers remains the standard account, traces the tunnel story to Stewart Holbrook's apocryphal Oregonian pieces in 1962 and to Michael P. Jones, who collected old waterfront tales while managing a bank for hobos in the early 1970s, founded the Cascade Geographic Society, and launched the Shanghai Tunnels tours in 1979. The tours were popular. The myth has outrun correction ever since — even as historians note the shanghai practice itself faded by World War I, decades before the legend put it underground.

The paranormal layer arrived with the tour circuit: guides and guests file reports of footsteps, whispers, a sense of being watched, and figures in the dark stretches under Old Town — the named presence most repeated being a shanghaied man who never came back up.

The file notes the structure of the claim honestly: the fear the tunnels produce is real, the history that licensed it is contested, and the ghosts — like the trapdoors — are more attested by testimony than by record. The inventory of reported presences maps neatly onto the rooms a tour can reach, a correspondence the archive notes without verdict.

Portland's underground is closed, bricked over in places — building owners walled up basement portals in 2017 before a tech tenant moved in — and still toured in the stretches that remain, where the standard of proof has always been atmospheric. The archive files it under legend with a documented spine: real tunnels, real crimps, a real 1962 origin story for the connection — and a reminder that a city can be haunted by a version of its own past that never quite happened.