Shanghai Tunnels

From the 1870s until about 1915, Portland and Astoria were notorious for “shanghaiing” – supplying crews to ships by trickery and force. Sailors’ boardinghouse masters known as crimps lured seamen ashore, ran up their debts, plied them with liquor and signed them onto outbound vessels, often against their will; the law then enforced the contracts. This was real, and it was often done in plain sight, with the help of bribed officials.

The “Shanghai tunnels” are a later layer. Beneath Old Town Chinatown, many 19th-century buildings had basements connected to freight passages, sidewalk vault lights and loading spaces, and Chinatown gambling dens had genuine secret passages to evade raids and rivals. But the idea that a network of tunnels ran from saloon trapdoors to the river, carrying drugged men to waiting ships, does not appear in first-hand accounts of shanghaiing. Historian Barney Blalock, author of The Oregon Shanghaiers, traces the Portland version to the 1970s, when a drainage tunnel under the New Market Theater was turned into a bar feature and tour operators began telling the story; he notes that such tunnels would have flooded when the Willamette was high and that shanghaiers had no need to hide. The Oregon Encyclopedia likewise treats the tunnels as a myth built on a real crime.

The tours, run since the 1970s by local tour groups including the Cascade Geographic Society, mostly visit the basement of the 1880 Merchant Hotel building, now home to Old Town Pizza and neighbouring bars. That building also has Portland’s most famous ghost: Nina, said to have been a young woman working in the hotel’s brothel who informed on criminals – or was offered a way out by missionaries – and was pushed down the elevator shaft. Her name, legend says, is scratched into a brick in the shaft. Staff and customers report a woman in a long dress on the second floor and in the basement; the restaurant’s owner says he has never seen her.

The basements’ dark rooms and the crimping story have drawn ghost hunters, including Ghost Adventures’ Zak Bagans, whose 2012 visit a reporter described as a lot of shouting at dust. The tunnels also feature repeatedly in the TV series Grimm.

A young woman in a long dress (Nina) on the second floor and in the basement of the old Merchant Hotel, footsteps, voices and the feeling of being watched in the underground rooms – reported by restaurant staff, customers and tour guests.

The basement beneath Old Town Pizza and the former Merchant Hotel on NW Davis Street, its old elevator shaft and second floor, and other Old Town basements visited on tours.

Portland’s underground tours and ghost walks, including Portland Walking Tours’ “Beyond Bizarre,” are among the city’s most popular attractions, and the tunnels appear in Grimm, novels and ghost-hunting TV. The real history of crimping is told in Barney Blalock’s The Oregon Shanghaiers.