Hot Lake Springs

The hot springs at Hot Lake had been valued by Indigenous people, including the Nez Perce, for generations before Oregon Trail travellers began to rest there. In 1864 Samuel Newhart built a wooden structure beside the lake that served as a post office, blacksmith’s shop, dance hall and bathhouse. In 1904 the physician Dr. William Thomas Phy joined the project, the brick main wing was finished in 1906, and a sanatorium opened in 1907. It used the spring water to heat the building – reportedly one of the first commercial buildings in the country to rely mainly on geothermal heat – and had around a hundred guest rooms and a surgical ward. Phy bought the whole property in 1917, renamed it Hot Lake Sanitorium, and promoted its waters for heart, kidney and joint complaints. Advertisements and later writers called it the “Mayo Clinic of the West,” although a local historian, Dick Roth, considers the story that the Mayo brothers visited apocryphal.

Phy died at Hot Lake in March 1931, and in May 1934 a fire that began in a disused attic destroyed the wooden west end and the bathhouse. Eleven patients and two infants escaped unhurt, and the eastern brick section survived. The building was a flight school and a nurse-training centre during the Second World War, and then a resort under Dr. Adolph Roth until 1952, when it became a nursing home for elderly and disabled people. After that came a restaurant and dance hall, a series of failed ownership plans and, by 1991, abandonment. By 2003, when David Manuel bought it, all 368 windows were broken or missing and most of the roof was gone; the west wing collapsed in 2008. The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, and since 2020 it has been restored as a resort with mineral pools.

The ghost reputation formed during the long years of decay. In 2001 the ABC Family series The Scariest Places on Earth filmed in the derelict hotel, and since then visitors’ stories have circulated on ghost websites. They speak of screams from the old hospital wing, muttering voices, a rocking chair that rocks on a balcony without wind, a wheelchair that rolled across a level floor, phantom piano music, figures in the fog on the road, and a women’s restroom door that opened by itself. Some tell of a ‘gardener’ and of unnamed former patients. These are comments posted by visitors, relatives and former workers on listing sites, and they cannot be dated or checked.

Dark embroidery is common in such stories: websites speak of torture and an ‘experimental’ hospital. The documented record shows an ordinary private sanatorium and later nursing home, whose patients were people seeking treatment or care. The honest picture is of a landmark that became a ruin and acquired a reputation, and then came back to life.

Reports include screams and muttering from the former hospital wing, a rocking chair and a wheelchair moving, piano music, doors that open themselves, figures in fog on the road, tools that vanish and reappear, and apparitions. Most come from anonymous visitors and former workers.

The former hospital wing, the second-floor balcony, the restroom and the grounds near the hot springs and road.

Featured on The Scariest Places on Earth in 2001 and in a 2012 music video by Laura Gibson that NPR titled “Western Ghost Story.” It appears in lists of Oregon’s haunted hotels.