Beyond Bizarre Walking Tour: Portland

Portland Walking Tour’s Beyond Bizarre tour started outside Old Town Pizza. I showed up with a camera and was given a sticker by the group’s guide, Melanie.

“If you forget my name, just think of how your hands get when you eat watermelon,” was the first thing she said to the group.

“Melanie,” she said after a confused silence and started handing out what I thought were garage door openers but turned out to be electromagnetic field detectors (EMFs).

The EMFs were light, plastic coffins, which fit in your hand. For anyone who has not seen a ghost hunter show, EMFs help detect spirits.

All nine of us equipped with our EMF’s barged through the Old Town Pizza dining room and down a stairwell to begin our tour. The basement had a low ceiling and was lined with even lower hanging pipes. There were stones chipped and rounded at the corners, stacked in wide pillars supporting the building. Melanie explained a tunnel that had been blocked off in the 1970s for two reasons: vagrants were making them their homes and the tunnels connected competing businesses.

Before then, the tunnels served as escape routes for gamblers and partiers in the Prohibition era. Some tunnels were used for water overflow, some as Shanghai tunnels; trap doors were set up all over town where either drunks or women were sent down to be sold into slavery.

The immediate room we were in, the one with the tunnel, looked a lot like the basement or storage facility for a pizza shop. I was beginning to become a little skeptical. The history of the tunnels and the architecture that Melanie was giving was great, but I was expecting a haunted tour.

Beyond was a room that required flashlights. I did not get a flashlight – there were not enough. The first thing I saw was an old easy chair. It was right in front of what looked like a giant brick oven. I am guessing now that it was the building’s furnace. Everything was covered in a layer of soot and the room was noticeably colder than the last.

I carefully bowed to avoid the ceiling pipes and followed the bobbing flashlights that soon sent shadows of chair legs dancing around a small brick lined room. The chairs were old, wiry wood with braided backings and arranged in a circle. We all sat down and Melanie began telling us about Nina.

Nina was sold into slavery back when there were 14 men to every one woman in Portland.

“She worked and died in this room,” said Melanie. I looked at the walls and the lights exploring the corners and ceilings and saw flashes of history. There was history trapped in this unused space. This room hadn’t been converted into a place to store empty kegs or an arcade – it’s still Nina’s room – and that’s when I started to feel vulnerable. I wasn’t scared yet, but there was no longer a cushion of protection. All of a sudden I no longer felt like I was in the basement of a pizza shop. I felt like something could happen.

Throughout the tour I had this feeling. Beyond the historical facts and opportunity to check out Portland’s historical architecture, there were parts of this tour where I was legitimately scared. Parts where I was short of breath and hesitant to look around corners. At one point a group member and I were trying to communicate with Nina. I didn’t feel silly or like I was pretending – I was hoping to talk to Nina – and I think that is the most important thing I have to say about this tour. The Portland Walking Tour’s Beyond Bizarre Tour will take you to incredibly, almost museum-like, well-preserved areas around Portland, accompanied by convincing stories that will set you up for having a good time if you are up for it. If you are a skeptic, this tour might not be for you. For me, I suspended my belief and experienced moments where I felt like I was in the past and because of that, I had a few genuine moments of cold, unexplainable fear.