public

Heavily Investigated

There's a ghost log at Edgefield — a running record of things guests can't explain. Girlish laughter in empty hallways. The click of a dog's nails crossing a room where no dog sleeps. A nurse in white drifting past a doorway, there and then not. Staff in the brewery before dawn have heard something rolling through the rafters with nobody above them. The building held the desperate and the dying for seven decades, and people who stay the night swear something here never checked out — it just stopped being visible.

Opened in 1911 as the Multnomah County Poor Farm, Edgefield once spread across 345 acres where the Sandy and Columbia Rivers converge — a self-sufficient community for the poor, the disabled, and the mentally ill. It later admitted TB patients, troubled children, and the aging infirm before closing in 1982. The McMenamin brothers purchased and restored it, reopening as a winery and hotel in 1990. Many who died here are believed buried in unmarked graves on the property — a detail the brochure mentions, tastefully, near the spa information.