Fugatives & Refugees

The Shanghai Tunnels: Go Back in Time by Going Underground

You can't come to Portland and not hear stories about the downtown tunnel system.

Michael Culbertson, the concierge at the Benson Hotel, will tell you how kids used to get into the tunnels through an abandoned building a block off the waterfront in Old Town. Remembering his childhood in the 1940s, he says, "There used to be a whole culture down there. Our favorite place was an old, abandoned Chinese restaurant with beautiful ceramic murals. We fixed it up, and that became our clubhouse."

Adam Knobeloch, an engineer at the Freightliner Corporation on Swan Island, will tell you about a trapdoor in the basement of the old Broadway Theater, and how he'd wander lost underground.

Mark Roe, a local archaeologist, talks about the elaborate ivory opium pipes and tiny carved figures found in the tunnels during downtown urban renewal. The tunnels are littered with single shoes and broken glass, he says. Possibly because the local "crimps" shanghaied sailors and kept them prisoner underground by leaving them with only one shoe so they couldn't escape over the layer of broken bottles.

The term crimp was originally British slang for "agent." Men like Joseph "Bunco" Kelly, Billy Smith, and Larry Sullivan ran boardinghouses where sailors could eat and sleep between voyages. In return, the crimp had the right to book the sailors next job and get a fee from the new ship's captain. When the boardinghouse was empty, these crimps weren't above drugging loggers, cowboys, and miners with knockout drops and selling them as sailors. When no one was around to drug, legend has it, the crimps might sell dead men or even wooden cigar store Indians, wrapped in burlap, to desperate ship captains. To get these "sailors" to the waterfront, crimps dragged them through the tunnels.

Rumored to stretch from the West Hills to the river, the tunnels are also supposed to be the hiding place for hoards of Alaskan gold dust—and the tomb of an occasional treasure hunter who opened the wrong door, looking for that gold, and was instantly buried alive by the loose dirt behind that door.

Local historians even talk about a proposed law from the 1920s that would've required all deformed or sick people to travel about downtown using only the tunnels.

On a recent tunnel tour that started in the basement of the Matador, a bar at 1967 W Burnside Street, several men and women gripped a thick rope after signing a long legal liability waiver. Using the rope, a tour guide wearing a cowboy hat pulled them into the underground dark. Down one tunnel, around a corner, the tour found a nurse in a short-skirted white uniform. Kneeling on the stone floor, she shoved a vacuum cleaner hose between the legs of a mannequin. The vacuum roaring, the nurse screamed, "So, you slut, will you use some birth control the next time? You whore!"

From under the mannequins skirt, the nurse pulls a mass of pink gelatin smeared with tomato ketchup. She throws it at the tour and the dripping mess hits a screaming girl, sticking to her dress for a moment before it slides to the floor. The lights go out, and the rope pulls the tour group down another tunnel, around another corner.

There, a drunk woman in a housedress holds a glass of whiskey and yells, "But I'm a good mother! I love my baby! God, where is my baby?" Behind her a baby doll turns slowly inside a microwave oven.

Down tunnel after tunnel the rope pulls you past scenes of incest and torture until the last tunnel. There in the pitch dark, a crowd of strangers rush the tour group, groping their breasts and genitals.

The girl who got hit with the fake abortion, that was Ina from the previous chapter, and she's still bitter because the stain never came out. Me, I'm bitter because I didn't get groped.

Did I mention the big legal waiver everybody signed?

Miles more historically accurate—and scads less dramatic—the shanghai tunnel tour offered by Michael Jones won't leave you with so many stains and bruises. Currently operating through the basement of Hobo's bar and restaurant, 120 NW Third Avenue, Michael's tour has been more than forty years in the making. When he was seven years old, Michael used to visit a man called Dewey Kirkpatrick, the father of Michael's foster brother. Dewey lived in the Lenox Hotel on SW Third Avenue. There, Michael would hound the old men in the lobby for stories about the history of Portland.

One Sunday morning he was pestering the hotel residents with his relentless questions about Portland history. "I'd driven everyone out of the place with my questions except for one man who never, ever talked to me," Michael says. "I called him Captain Grump."

With his wrinkles and his scowl, Captain Grump looked at the little boy. Michael remembers, "He said, 'If you really want to know about the history of Portland, you have to go underground.'"

The old man led the boy down SW Third Avenue to the South Auditorium Urban Renewal District, where a building was being demolished with no barricades or chain-link fencing around it. Captain Grump led Michael down into the basement, to a trapdoor, then down a ladder to an old door. Michael remembers it as solid steel, heavy as the door to a bank vault. It's only now he realizes it was just an oak door covered in tin.

Behind the door was nothing but cold blackness. Michael says, "He said, 'You go through that door,' and he gave me a box of matches."

Captain Grump said, "You go straight and don't make any turns, and you'll get to the waterfront." Then he closed the door, saying, "See ya later, kid."

These were the first matches Michael had ever handled. One, then two, then three matches failed in the dark before he panicked and ran screaming out the door, crashing into Captain Grump.

Dewey Kirkpatrick was furious Michael had left the hotel with a stranger, and he agreed that if the boy would stay off the dangerous city streets, Dewey would help him explore the tunnel system. The tunnels were no longer contiguous, so to give Michael access to different sections, Dewey would move from hotel to hotel every week. "He'd sneak me past the desk clerk to get me into the underground," Michael says. But Dewey never explored the tunnels. "He had a bad leg and walked with a cane. He didn't go with me." Sometimes the hotel elevator went to the basement, sometimes they took the stairs, but they'd find some way into the tunnels that connected to each hotel. Michael went alone, and Dewey felt safe knowing the kid was off the streets.

According to Michael, the Broadway Theater, the Paramount, and the Orpheum all had connections to the tunnel system. "In the flood of 1996 and '97," he says, "a lot of places that thought they had no connections to the waterfront found out otherwise."

Since he was seven, Michael Jones has been exploring and excavating his five-mile network of shanghai tunnels. Now he leads tours to show them off. On a recent tour the Chinese Americans' Citizens Alliance sent eleven members through the tunnels and they told Jones, "Please don't change what you're doing—this is exactly the way it was."

Michael says other tourists did ask for a small modification. He says, "There were several of the old Chinese Americans who took the tour and said, 'I can feel the spirits. This place must be cleansed.'"

Michael has heard the voices of phantom men and women. He's seen only two spiders in the forty-plus years he's explored under Portland. And one cockroach, but it was a foot long, and he trapped it under a bucket because he knew no one would believe him. "It had to have come off a ship from overseas," he says. "No way was this thing locally grown."

He talks about shanghai prisoners who were locked in holding cells, left standing in water. The Ku Klux Klan met here. So did the immigrant Chinese they persecuted. Ask Michael about Nina, a prostitute who was killed for talking too much about the underground. Also ask him about cannibalism and the tunnel speakeasies of Prohibition.

During volunteer work parties every Wednesday night, members of Northwest Paranormal Investigations help Michael restore the tunnels, and they say the underground is the most haunted place in Oregon. Under the streets of Portland they say the spirit of a woman roams, searching for her kidnapped daughter. Other spirits still search for their beloved menfolk who were drugged and shanghaied onto sailing ships, never to be seen again. Still more wandering spirits died in the tunnel system and are still looking for their way out.

To see for yourself, put on some sturdy shoes and get ready to walk through the miles of low ceilings, broken furniture, and orphaned boots. You can contact Michael Jones at 503-622-4798, e-mail shanghaitunnels@onemain. com. Or write to the Cascade Geographic Society, P.O. Box 398, Rhododendron, OR 97049.