One of Northwest Portland’s stranger real-life tales has not been incorporated into our tours.
The Curious Case of Mr. Hurshey’s Amputated Hand.
In 1890, a rail worker named Mr. Hurshey was working for the Union Pacific Railroad Company. While “making up a train”—coupling heavy railcars together by hand—his left wrist was completely crushed. He was rushed to the Old Portland Hospital on Third Street near union station, where the doctor had no choice but to amputate his left hand.
Pickled Hand
The amputated hand ends up eternal preservation in a fruit jar. During the late 19th century, a popular belief held that to enter eternity whole, a person’s physical remains needed to be completely intact. Driven by the belief in the sanctity of the body, the staff were not about to let the hospital throw his limb away. In 1890, his doctor gave him sage advice: preserve the hand in an alcohol bath inside a sealed glass fruit jar and bury it at home. He was perplexed but followed doctor’s orders and buried his hand in the yard of his Slabtown home. Mr. Hurshey did not intend to ever be reunited with his hand. He simply left his missing hand buried safely beneath the Portland soil while he later moved north to Tacoma for a job with Northern Pacific Railroad.
The Macabre Excavation and Investigation
Years later, construction crews working on an excavation project in Slabtown struck glass. Expecting old bottles, they instead uncovered a sealed jar containing a perfectly preserved human hand. Thinking they had stumbled upon evidence of a gruesome murder, the panicked crew called the authorities. Officer Gibson was dispatched to retrieve the jar and take it to the station, triggering a city-wide investigation. Detectives scoured local medical records, eventually tracking the surgical release back to the Old Portland Hospital. Realizing it wasn’t a crime scene but a preserved personal item, police located Mr. Hurshey living up in Tacoma and offered to return his missing hand back to him. The Oregonian ran the story “Can Have His Hand” in March 6, 1893.
Real-Life Metaphor: Gothic Horror in Real Time
Stories of severed hands returning to their owners are a staple of gothic literature. I thought that it might be worth researching the residential address of the burial for a tour but instead I’m working on a series of tales to read at Christmas at a local museum. Ghost stories were a Victorian England Tradition in the 19th century.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous 1899 story “The Brown Hand” tells the eerie tale of a dead man haunting a doctor for his preserved hand—a story often read as an allegory for imperialist guilt and colonial exploitation.
- Modern dark fantasy series, such as Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunter universe, continue to draw on this terrifying trope. Body parts being saved as trophies.
Yet nearly a decade before Conan Doyle ever published his ghost story, Slabtown had its very own real-life version unfolding right beneath the neighborhood’s soil.
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