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On a recent tu
From under the ma
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 tu
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 tu
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 tu
According to Michael, the Broadway Theater, the Paramount, and the Orpheum all had co
Since he was seven, Michael Jones has been exploring and excavating his five-mile network of shanghai tu
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 ca
During volunteer work parties every Wednesday night, members of Northwest Paranormal Investigations help Michael restore the tu
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 shanghaitu
(a postcard from 2000)
Ten days before the end of the mille
That day, an ad in the newspaper says the Bagdad Theater is still available. The Bagdad is an Arabian-style movie palace leftover from the 1920s. The theater has a print of the movie Fight Club. This is too much to resist.
Our idea is to hire a staging company to build a dance floor below the movie screen. The Bagdad is huge inside, with balconies and red-velvet seats, spooky alcoves, and fountains in the lobby. It's been restored and converted into a theater-slash-restaurant. We can hire a lighting company. Turn the place into a night club. Make it a costume party with everyone coming as their favorite person from the past century. Serve di