The White Eagle Café & Saloon – Oregon

Across the river from Portland’s Shanghai tunnels, the White Eagle Saloon welcomed the seedier side of frontier life in the early 20th century.

The Legend

“A prostitute killed upstairs by a jealous lover, drunken patrons shanghaied through a basement tunnel, and a waitress half-pushed, half-carried down the basement steps by an invisible, but persistent force.

Such sordid lore envelopes the White Eagle Cafe & Saloon and the details become more graphic and gruesome with each telling. At the White Eagle, the line between this world and the other—and between fact and fiction—seems to have been thoroughly and wonderfully blurred.

There is more than just good story telling going on here, though. Psychics who have examined the place report a sensation of violence and death in the basement and a deep well of sadness dwelling on the second floor.

The White Eagle first nested in the rough, working class waterfront neighborhood of Albina in 1905. At the time, the area was crowded with hundreds of recent arrivals from Great Britain, Scandinavia, the Balkans, Russia, the Mediterranean and the Far East.

They worked on the docks, in the Union Pacific railroad shops, or at the neighbouring factories and mills built along the Willamette’s east bank north of the Broadway Bridge.”

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The White Eagle Café & Saloon – Oregon