Astoria's dark material, in the open and labeled. The documented underworld stands in Crime and the Underworld, sourced and plain. This page gathers the told side, the mysteries the record itself leaves open, and the thin places, and it labels each for what it is: documented, told, or unknown. A ghost story here is a story the town tells, sourced to where the telling is recorded, never presented as fact.
Shanghai Stories
The town's favorite dark story stands in the legend ledger in its told form. Beside it, the trade as the record documents it, and the melodrama the town has staged from the story every summer since the 1980s.
Legend, told as legend
Shanghai Astoria
Astoria tells of its crimping years: men drugged, tricked, or dropped through waterfront trapdoors, carried through tunnels under the streets, and delivered to ships short of crews, waking at sea. The tunnels are the town's favorite story about itself, told as folklore and filed here as folklore. What is documented stands in the record above: a working port, a labor market that could be brutal, and a town that turned its darkest story into a summer melodrama. The Astor Street Opry Company has staged Shanghaied in Astoria every summer since 1984 or 1985; its record stands with the annuals.
Source: Astoria's told history; the Astor Street Opry Company's Shanghaied in Astoria, staged since the 1980s.
The shelf's best scary story is a sighting, filed as one: the night attack at Ape Canyon. The town also keeps its ghost stories the living way, out loud, at two gatherings in the annuals. And its carried newspapers print the word 'ghost' in their own columns; the Desk finds every one. The Archive holds no verified haunting and prints none as fact.
Folklore record, Pacific Northwest
Ape Canyon, Mount St. Helens, 1924
In the summer of 1924, five gold miners working a claim on Mount St. Helens said their cabin was attacked at night by ape men who threw rocks and pounded the walls. Fred Beck, one of the five, told the story for the rest of his life and published his account in 1967. The canyon kept the name the story gave it: Ape Canyon. This ledger files the account as what it is, a sighting told by the men who said they lived it, dated and placed, beloved and labeled. The mountain's own visitor centers tell the story to the public today, an easy drive from the river. The name the region learned to call him by stands in this ledger under its own entry, Sasquatch, just below.
Source: Beck, Fred. I Met the Apemen of Mount St. Helens. Published account, 1967.
Mount St. Helens visitor centers and the Johnston Ridge Observatory
The mountain's own visitor infrastructure, where the Ape Canyon story is told today. A sighting record's neighborhood: stand where the story is set, then hear it from the mountain's own desks.
The record's open questions, printed as open. The film chapter corrects the films Astoria has claimed and cannot confirm, beside the ones it can. A wreck on the bar left cannon in the sand for two centuries. A shelf of films nobody alive can watch survives as paper. And the papers of the day used the word 'mystery' themselves, on the pages the Archive carries.
This theme is thin in the record, and the shelf says so rather than padding it. What stands documented: prohibition closed the North Pacific Brewing Company in 1915, and its record stands in Crime and the Underworld. The county museum keeps the era's own exhibit, Vice and Virtue in Clatsop County, and the river's rum-running stories stand where all the river's told stories stand, in the legend ledger, labeled as told.
Clatsop County Historical Society: Research Center and Archives
The county's memory keeper, in Astoria: 35,000 historic photographs by the Society's own count, diaries from the 1840s, city directories, maps, and Finnish and Native American family history materials. Its scanning center has put more than 42 local collections on the Internet Archive, 4,357 items, free to read: the city directories and the school yearbooks among them, in full.
Access: Its digital archive is free on the Internet Archive. The photograph collection itself has no public database; photographs reach the public inside the Society's journal, its exhibits, and credited republications, and the rest is research in person: for photographs, ask the archivist. For a visit: one society pass covers the society's three town museums, the Heritage Museum, the Flavel House, and the Oregon Film Museum; ask at any of them. The Heritage Museum is entered by a few stairs, and an elevator inside serves its floors.
Citation (MLA) “Clatsop County Historical Society: Research Center and Archives.” The Astoria Archive. https://astoriamuseums.org
The Underground
Astoria's tunnels, both sides, labeled. The town tells them: men carried through tunnels under the streets, in the Shanghai story that stands above in its told form. The record fences them: the documented trade ran through boarding houses on the streets, not under them, and that documentation stands in Crime and the Underworld. And the famous tunnel record, the one with the tours and the books, belongs to Portland, up the river; this Archive does not move it downriver. Portland's own record of its tunnels stands at its holders, named on the underworld page.