Wolf Creek Inn

Smith converted an earlier clapboard lodge — the old Six Bit House — into a first-class hotel: sixteen bedrooms, separate men's and women's parlors, a dining room, and, outside the back door, a deluxe outhouse. Working cowboys who could not afford a room slept on a shelf around the perimeter of the unfinished attic for a dime a night, spurs jammed between the boards to keep from crashing through onto the guests below. A Classic Revival south wing went on in 1925, the same year the sign went up: 'Wolf Creek Tavern: Tasty Cuisine.'

The inn sits just off Interstate 5 in the community that shares its name, the two parlors still furnished as authentically as the state can manage — original flooring and bricks, bullet holes included. The register is studded. Rutherford B. Hayes stayed. So did Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Orson Welles, Mary Pickford, John Wayne, and Sinclair Lewis — the inn was a retreat for Hollywood people ducking the studios. The State of Oregon acquired and restored it between 1975 and 1979; it operates today as a nine-room state heritage site, and the original bricks still carry their bullet holes.

The inn's own inventory is unusually mild-mannered. Manager Jeremy Davis, whose family took over the concession in 2021, tells reporters that people who come looking find things: footsteps, a sense of presence, the sound of children running and kicking a ball in the ballroom. The previous keepers, Andrew and Jessie Shroyer, catalogued toes being played with in the night, thirty-second patches of perfume near Clark Gable's room, and temperature drops the climate-control system cannot explain.

The named ghosts are hospitality workers and guests, which fits the building — an inn's ghosts being its guests is either the laziest premise in the archive or the most honest one. London's room — preserved, viewable, not rentable — is said to produce his voice and occasionally the man himself, standing in the room where he finished the novel. A female stagecoach driver turns up in the downstairs common areas, reportedly less frightening than supervisory. An older gentleman walks the halls. The file notes that a stagecoach inn's ghosts being its guests is either the laziest legend in the archive or the most honest.

Mysteries at the Hotel featured the inn in 2014; Ghost Adventures locked down in it during season fifteen. The state lists it on the National Register and keeps a ranger on duty to answer the questions the décor raises. October is the busiest month — which, for a business built in 1883 on people passing through, seems less like a haunting than a recurring reservation. The file's last note is the owners' own answer to whether guests report activity: not everyone, they said — just about everyone.