Haunted History walking tours highlight Jacksonville’s paranormal past
Published 4:00 am Friday, October 6, 2023
- Haunted History tour guide Ellen Martin stands next to a fireplace at the Historic County Courthouse in Jacksonville Tuesday.
A vivid pageant of past hauntings will play out in Jacksonville in October during a series of Haunted History walking tours.
Since 2016, Historic Jacksonville Inc. has hosted the tours — during the summer and in October — to bring attention to the rich legacy of what was once the second largest city in Oregon, and to support continued preservation of the National Historic Landmark.
“These tours are not your typical ghost tours with special effects,” said Carolyn Kingsnorth, president of Historic Jacksonville Inc. “They are history tours about real hauntings resulting from past events.”
Costumed guides lead the tours, sharing the history and tales of pioneers “whose spirits still dwell in many of our historic buildings,” the Historic Jacksonville Inc. website states.
Ellen Martin, a tour guide since 2016, said, “I am one of the original people who, along with Carolyn, determined the first route since we knew all these fabulous tales of spirits who once lived here.
“We started with two tours per night, then went to four tours, and eventually added an extra night in October. The tours continue to grow in popularity, and I hope that people will keep coming. They are not meant to be scary, or spooky, or gory. It is fun to see peoples’ reactions to the stories,” Martin said.
The Courthouse Tour highlights tales of brothels, epidemics and hangings, while The Britt Hill Tour features stories of murder, arson, saloons and Oregon’s first Chinatown. Tours Friday and Saturday, Oct. 13-14, begin at 6, 6:15, 6:30 and 6:45 p.m. Reservations are required; the cost is $10 per tour. “Walk-ups” will be accommodated on a space-available basis because tour size is limited.
Each one-hour tour begins at the Jacksonville Visitors Center at the corner of North Oregon and C streets.
Jacksonville was the hub of Southern Oregon from the time gold was discovered until the railroad bypassed the city to take advantage of the level valley floor. The population of the mining town subsequently declined and, although Jacksonville tried to maintain its prominence by creating a “spur” railroad, Medford soon became the new center of commerce. When Medford was designated the county seat in 1927, Jacksonville became a ghost town.
After being designated an historic landmark in the 1960s, Jacksonville maintained its old-world character, and preservation efforts continue to this day.
While the Haunted History tours are not exclusively centered around paranormal experiences or macabre tales, there have been some strange encounters reported at sites throughout Jacksonville, Kingsnorth said.
She said the former proprietors of the McCully House Inn, Mary Ann and Dennis Ramsden, had a guest who spoke at length with a “presence” who was later identified from photographs as the late John McCully.
A rather dramatic, otherworldly phenomenon was related by a former Jacksonville mayor’s wife, Kingsnorth said, who as a teenage docent at the Children’s Museum (on the site of the former county jail) had a full Poltergeist moment, with her chair moving three feet across the room as she sat quietly reading. At the time, she thought she might have been experiencing the ghost of a Chinese immigrant reported by Louis O’Neil — the last man hanged in Jacksonville — as he awaited his execution in the late 1800s.
Other reports of spirits appearing in Lederhosen and speaking German may relate to the original population of Jacksonville comprising as many as one-quarter to one-third Germanic peoples, Kingsnorth said.
“The spirits that still linger are the results of things that happened in the past,” Kingsnorth said. “If you know your science, matter can become energy, and energy becomes matter. One of the theories is that the strong emotions attached to these events could manifest in physical form.”
“It is my mantra,” she said, “that history is not the names, places and events we memorize for an exam. History is people and their stories — it is who we are.”
For more information and to purchase tickets, visit historicjacksonville.org/haunted-history-tours/