1896 Queen Anne, owned by drag queen Darcelle, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places
Tanya March PhD leads tours and researches old buildings. Tanya March is on the right in the front row. Three of the four authors of the national register nomination report met with Darcelle & Friends and Family to place a plaque on the wall outside of the home on September 30, 2020. Link to Oregonian coverage of the story.
Here’s What We Learned About Portland’s Gritty Past on Five Haunted Walking Tours
Slabtown Tours: A Night With Ghosts, slabtowntours.com
What’s the story? Dr. Tanya Lyn March, Ph.D., guides participants through Slabtown, Portland’s historic working-class neighborhood. March claims houses with truly bad hauntings tend to be torn down—we visited about as many construction sites as we did standing structures.
Where do you go? Many stops on the tour focused on Ernest Harp, a boy whose interactions with an alleged poltergeist were documented in historic Oregonian articles. The site of Harp’s most famous otherworldly disturbance is also the former site of the long-gone Slabtown music venue. New Seasons paved over the lot of a house where doctors with ties to Carl Jung and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle legally abducted and tortured Harp as “research.” The tour also stops by the house of late cartoonist John Callahan. The new owners haven’t seen Callahan yet, but they do see other spirits around the place.
Special features: Tours starting before 8 pm get free admission to the Freakybuttrue Peculiarium, a kitschy and immersive gallery that screams Old Portland.
Scariest moment: Through her storytelling, March makes real the horror of being a child in frontier Portland, where kids were treated horrifically if they survived childhood—back then, it was totally OK not to get vaccinated.
Lamest moment: The Ghost at ComedySportz is more contemporary than the rest of the tour material, but does inspire the existential horror of haunting a comedy bar.
Is it worth it? Yes, if you’re a history buff, but not if you’re a pagan or spiritualist. ANDREW JANKOWSKI.
Slabtown Tours offers virtual Portland experience | KATU
PORTLAND, Ore. – Well you don’t have to leave your house to learn about Portland’s history. Slabtown Tours is now offering virtual tours. You can see historic cemeteries, classic storefronts, vintage manhole coverings, and more.
Slabtown tour guide Tanya March says she took the tours to the web as something for her and her son to do together. “I had a bored child around the house”, March said, “Berkley is doing some of the research, I’m assigning him assignments”.
Berkley is in the 7th grade, but with schools closed he doesn’t have a lot to do. You can see him featured in the virtual tours as a cameraman, and a tour guide.
“So we’re trying to learn about different history themes here in Portland, Oregon, and encouraging people even in their own neighborhood to go out and look at the horse rings and curb guards”, March said. Berkley explained that curb guards were placed on curbs to protect them from the metal wheels of horse drawn carriages.
You can find the virtual tours on the Slabtown Website YouTube page, and of course, it’s all free.
Slabtown Tours Goes Virtual
