Portland's Underground Tour

I'd been on Seattle excellent underground tour twice but didn't even know Portland had something similar. Host Michael Jones and his wife take you on an interesting and much more spooky tour in the Rose City.

First we must eat! The $13 tour could be supplemented by a $6 lunch. It was just a small sandwich, a bag of chips and a soda. I'd recommend skipping it and eating elsewhere.

Danny & I had a game of pool while waiting for the tour to start.


Our group was quite large. Michael is the fellow on the far right.

We walked out front and started walking down through a hole in the sidewalk.



The "underground" is really just a series of interconnected basements. What makes the tour so interesting are the stories that Michael tells - about men being "shanghaied"; drugged, held prisoner, and put onto waiting ships in need of a full crew.

This is apparently the "prison" cell for young women who were captured and then sent away to be prostitutes in far flung American cities.

Keep in mind that most photos taken here were with the camera's flash. In fact, it's dark all of the time, which greatly adds to the spookiness of the tour.

This was a demonstration of how drunken men at the bar were sent through trap doors and onto the floor below, albeit padded with mattresses.

These are the bars of one of the holding cells.

This was a poor man's warning system: metal cans on a string.

And finally we're back into the daylight. For more information and to book a tour, click here.