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Tombstones Under The Trees | Lone Fir Cemetery, Portland, Oregon · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:13
Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristen.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering Lone Fur Cemetery, located in Portland, Oregon.
0:24
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
0:27
Kristin: The gates stand open.
0:29
Kristin: Step carefully.
0:30
Kristin: It's time to descend into the hauntings of history.
0:34
Kristin: As an avid cemetery tourist, I often find myself wandering through endless lists of burial grounds said to be worth visiting.
0:41
Kristin: It feels both natural and inevitable when searching for cemeteries almost anywhere in the world.
0:47
Kristin: There are guides for every kind of traveler drawn to places of remembrance, from quiet churchyards hidden in remote villages, to sprawling Victorian necropolises that seem to resemble entire cities of the dead.
1:00
Kristin: Even National Geographic once published a list of the world's top cemeteries to visit, and among them stood Lone First Cemetery.
1:08
Kristin: For Oregon, the divining chapter of its early history wasn't gold or industry, but a long human migration westward into uncertainty.
1:16
Kristin: After Meriwether Lewis and William Clark explored the region in 1805, settlement remained sparse for decades.
1:24
Kristin: But as stories of the Western frontier spread through exploration journals and immigrant accounts, the Great Migration began in earnest during the 1840s.
1:34
Kristin: Thousands of settlers loaded their lives into wagons and pushed westward to the distant promise of Oregon.
1:40
Kristin: The journey was brutal.
1:42
Kristin: Disease spread quickly through wagon trains, rivers swallowed travelers whole.
1:47
Kristin: Hunger, exhaustion, accidents, and unforgiving weather claimed countless lives before many pioneers ever reached their destination.
1:55
Kristin: Yet those who survived arrived in Oregon determined to build something lasting at the far edge of the American frontier.
2:02
Kristin: They raised homes, cut roads through dense forests, opened businesses, and slowly shaped small communities from the wilderness around them.
2:11
Kristin: But every frontier, no matter how hopeful its beginnings, eventually confronts the same inevitability, death.
2:18
Kristin: Long before it became known as Longford, the land was simply part of a farm owned by pioneer settler James B.
2:24
Kristin: Stevens.
2:25
Kristin: His land claims stretched from the eastern bank of the Wilmette River to what is now Southeast 23rd Avenue and from Stark Street to Division Street.
2:33
Kristin: Shortly after the Stevens family arrived in Oregon in 1846, James's father, Eminer Stevens, died and was buried on the property.
2:42
Kristin: When Stevens later sold the land in 1854, one condition accompanied the transaction.
2:47
Kristin: Emmer's grave was never to be disturbed.
2:50
Kristin: The buyer was local businessman Colburn Barrell, a man whose own life would soon become permanently tied to tragedy.
2:57
Kristin: The same year, Beryl's business partner and close friend, Crawford Dobbins, was killed in the catastrophic explosion of the steamboat gazelle near Oregon City.
3:06
Kristin: The disaster killed numerous passengers and sent shockwaves through the young Oregon settlements.
3:12
Kristin: In response, Beryl set aside 10 acres surrounding the Stevens gravesite.
3:16
Kristin: To greet a cemetery where the victims of the explosion could be buried.
3:20
Kristin: He named it Mount Crawford Cemetery in honor of his fallen friend.
3:24
Kristin: Almost immediately, the cemetery became essential to Portland.
3:27
Kristin: Much of the young city's earlier burial grounds had been established on marshy or unstable land, and many were already deteriorating beyond use.
3:36
Kristin: Bodies from abandoned cemeteries were gradually reinterred at Mount Crawford, consolidating Portland's dead into a single growing necropolis on the east side of the river.
3:45
Kristin: By the 1860s, plots were being sold for$10 each, and the cemetery expanded with an additional 20 acres to meet the demands of the rapidly growing city.
3:55
Kristin: In 1866, Beryl offered to sell the cemetery to Portland for$4,000.
4:02
Kristin: The city refused.
4:03
Kristin: Instead, the property was purchased by a group of local families and plot holders who renamed it to Lone Fur Cemetery.
4:10
Kristin: The name reportedly came from Beryl's wife Aurelia, inspired by a single Douglas fir standing alone on the grounds.
4:17
Kristin: The solitary tree became the cemetery's symbol, a lone sentinel watching over at the dead of a frontier city, still struggling to define itself.
4:26
Kristin: Remarkably, that Douglas fir still stands today, a plaque now marking its historical significance.
4:32
Kristin: Over time, lone fir evolved into something far larger than a simple burial ground.
4:37
Kristin: Families were encouraged to plant memorial trees beside graves, and across generations the cemetery transformed into a living arboretum.
4:45
Kristin: Today, more than 700 trees representing dozens of species canopy the grounds, making it Portland's second largest arboretum, a place where nature and death have grown together in quiet companionship.
4:57
Kristin: For more than 40 years, nearly all of Portland's burials took place at Lone Fur.
5:02
Kristin: More than 25,000 people now rest within its grounds, making it the oldest active cemetery in the Pacific Northwest.
5:10
Kristin: The cemetery became a reflection of the city itself, containing pioneers from every layer of society, politicians, prostitutes, merchants, soldiers, asylum patients, immigrants, laborers, and children whose names vanished from history almost as quickly as they appeared.
5:28
Kristin: Entire sections became devoted to Portland's Chinese community, though many of those graves would later suffer devastating neglect and removal during the 21st century.
5:38
Kristin: In 1903, a monument honoring veterans of the Indian Wars, the Mexican-American War, the American Civil War, and the Spanish American War was erected at the cemetery through donations from more than 500 citizens.
5:52
Kristin: The Towering Soldiers Monument still rises above the graves today, weathered by rain and shadows beneath the trees.
5:59
Kristin: For a time it seemed that that might be enough, that the weight of so much history would protect this place.
6:05
Kristin: But it didn't.
6:07
Kristin: Like many historic cemeteries, the Lone Ver eventually fell into decline.
6:11
Kristin: By the early 20th century, portions of the grounds had become neglected.
6:16
Kristin: In 1928, Multnomah County assumed control of the cemetery, though later developments brought further damage.
6:23
Kristin: In 1947, sections of the cemetery were paved over and construction projects disturbed areas that once held Chinese burials.
6:32
Kristin: Many of the graves were removed the following year.
6:34
Kristin: It remains one of the darker chapters in the cemetery's history.
6:38
Kristin: A reminder of how easily memory can be erased when the dead belong to communities pushed to society's margins, and yet lone fur endured.
6:47
Kristin: Today the cemetery stands not only as a burial ground, but as one of Portland's most beloved green spaces, memorial trees sway above winding paths, while a pioneer rose garden blooms from descendants of roses, once carried westward along the Oregon Trail, by immigrants searching for new lives.
7:05
Kristin: The cemetery has become both sanctuary and archive, preserving stories that might have otherwise disappeared beneath the relentless growth of a modern city.
7:13
Kristin: Although all plots have long since been sold, a small number of burials still occur at Lonefur today, linking the present to the earliest origins of Oregon's frontier history.
7:23
Kristin: In 2011, after decades of preservation work by the Friends of Lonefur Cemetery, the cemetery received national recognition when National Geographic named it on one of the top cemeteries in the world to visit.
7:36
Kristin: And perhaps that recognition feels fitting, because Lonefur is more than a cemetery.
7:41
Kristin: It's the story of Portland itself, born from migration, shaped by tragedy, shadowed by loss, and rooted deeply in memory because of the branches of a single enduring tree.
7:52
Kristin: Standing near the center of the cemetery is a mausoleum no visitor can miss among the graves.
7:58
Kristin: The McClay Mausoleum rises above its neighboring graves in a late Gothic Revival style in red sandstone within loafers setting it apart.
8:06
Kristin: Commissioned in 1877 by Donald McClay, McClay was a Scottish immigrant who had arrived in Oregon in 1866 and built a considerable fortune in wholesale trade, shipping, railroads, and banking.
8:21
Kristin: He's generally credited with founding what became a U.S.
8:23
Kristin: Bancorp, but the mausoleum wasn't built to honor his success.
8:27
Kristin: It was built for his late wife Martha, who had died on New Year's Day in 1876, the day after giving birth to their fourth child.
8:35
Kristin: The design is said to be a tribute to McLean's ancestral home in Rosshire, Scotland.
8:40
Kristin: It cost$13,500 and houses nine members of his family.
8:46
Kristin: The chapel on the second floor was open to the public for over a century, until Vandals forced it closed in the early 1980s, sadly destroying all but one of the original stained glass windows in the process.
8:58
Kristin: What remains still rises above the surrounding graves, though, worn by weather and attended by shadow, the mausoleum is now one of the most photographed areas of the grounds.
9:08
Kristin: But the true weight of Lone Fur doesn't rest in its tallest monuments.
9:12
Kristin: It rests beneath the trees, scattered across weathered stones, bearing the names of the people who built Portland, shaped it, argued over it, immortalized it, and finally disappeared into it.
9:23
Kristin: Some were founders, men like Aza Lovejoy, who helped establish Portland after arriving during the earliest years of American settlement.
9:31
Kristin: In 1845, Lovejoy famously lost a coin toss against Francis Pettigrove over what the new city would be named.
9:39
Kristin: Lovejoy wanted Boston.
9:40
Kristin: Pettigrove chose Portland.
9:42
Kristin: The penny that decided the city's future still survives today.
9:46
Kristin: Lovejoy obviously doesn't accept here, beneath the soil of Lone Fern.
9:51
Kristin: Other names scattered through the cemetery belonged to the men who governed Oregon during its fragile beginnings.
9:56
Kristin: Early mayorors like John A.
9:58
Kristin: Chapman, powerful landowners like Daniel H.
10:00
Kristin: Lawnsdale, territorial politicians like George Locke Curry, and restless frontier figures like William Williams Chapman, whose lives seemed to move more westward alongside the country itself.
10:12
Kristin: Their graves belonged to a generation that transformed Oregon from distant wilderness into settlement, often before roads, laws, or stability had fully arrived.
10:21
Kristin: Will Nova is not only filled with politicians and founders.
10:25
Kristin: Some of the people buried here gave Oregon something less tangible.
10:29
Kristin: Identity.
10:30
Kristin: Samuel L.
10:30
Kristin: Simpson, Oregon's first poet Lauterate, captured the Pacific Northwest in a language that still lingers more than a century later.
10:38
Kristin: His poem Beautiful Willamette transformed the river into something almost mythic.
10:43
Kristin: He tragically died after a drunken fall, his life ending suddenly and inelegantly.
10:48
Kristin: But the landscapes he wrote about outlived him.
10:51
Kristin: In many ways, Longfur feels like a natural resting place for a poet obsessed with memory, distance, and the haunting beauty of Oregon itself.
11:00
Kristin: Nearby arrests Eliza Barcus, whose paintings helped romanticize the wilderness of the American West, waterfalls swallowed by mist, forests darkened beneath storm clouds, and mountains rising like apparitions from the horizon.
11:14
Kristin: At a time when few women found recognition in the art world, Barcus became one of Oregon's most celebrated painters, preserving the Pacific Northwest in brushstrokes long before photography became commonplace.
11:26
Kristin: And then there's Julius Caesar, not the emperor, but a formerly enslaved man who became one of Portland's most recognizable local figures in the late 19th century.
11:35
Kristin: He worked odd jobs, haunted baseball games, and firehouses, wore a battered plug hat and a bright red vest, and delivered theatrical speeches to anyone willing to listen.
11:46
Kristin: Local folklore claims Julius Caesar may have helped popularize baseball's most enduring phrase, play ball.
11:52
Kristin: Whether true or not, the words survived him.
11:54
Kristin: They remain carved into his headstone at Lone Fur, two simple words, echoing long after the man himself disappeared into history.
12:02
Kristin: Beneath the same trees that shelter pioneers and politicians rests a different kind of figure entirely.
12:08
Kristin: Someone who spent her life fighting for a future most of her era could barely imagine.
12:12
Kristin: Esher Poe Lovejoy spent her life defying the limitations imposed upon women in her era.
12:18
Kristin: She was a physician, suffragist, reformer, and a humanitarian.
12:23
Kristin: She became one of Oregon's first female doctors and later gained international recognition for relief work during World War I.
12:31
Kristin: Attempting to drag her era into forward thinking, she did the impossible as a woman in her time.
12:37
Kristin: But perhaps no figure at Lonefur embodies the uneasy boundary between compassion and darkness more than James C.
12:43
Kristin: Hawthorne.
12:44
Kristin: Hawthorne founded the Oregon Hospital for the Insane, during an era when mental illness remained deeply feared and poorly understood.
12:52
Kristin: Yet he made a promise that every patient who died under his care would receive a proper burial, even when abandoned by family or society.
13:01
Kristin: He kept that promise.
13:03
Kristin: More than a hundred former patients were eventually interred at Lone Fur, many in the cemetery's southwest corner.
13:09
Kristin: Their graves remain one of the cemetery's quietest and most unsettling chapters.
13:14
Kristin: Before we reach the hauntings, there's one final piece of Lone Fur that this episode can't walk past quietly.
13:20
Kristin: From the 1860s through the 1920s, more than 3,000 Chinese immigrants were buried in the southwest corner of the cemetery, in a section that became known as Block 14.
13:30
Kristin: These were men and some women and children who had come to Oregon and built much of what Portland still stands on.
13:36
Kristin: They constructed the seawall along the Willamette.
13:39
Kristin: They laid railroad lines through country that had no roads.
13:42
Kristin: They dug the original sewer system beneath the city streets.
13:46
Kristin: They did the work that the frontier Portland needed done and couldn't or wouldn't do itself.
13:51
Kristin: And they did it during a period of open legal codified racism.
13:56
Kristin: Laws that barred further Chinese immigration denied Chinese Americans the right to citizenship, and made ownership of land and property nearly impossible.
14:04
Kristin: Block 14, though, was never meant to be a permanent resting place.
14:08
Kristin: In traditional Chinese practice, the dead were buried for a time and then later exhumed, their bodies carefully cleaned by specialists, placed in small metal boxes inscribed with the person's name, home, village, and family, then sent back to China to be buried with their ancestors.
14:23
Kristin: To rest in foreign soil indefinitely wasn't the plan.
14:27
Kristin: For many of those buried in Block 14, arrangements had already been made.
14:31
Kristin: Around 700 of them did make it home.
14:34
Kristin: Their bones repatriated across the Pacific in the years after burial.
14:38
Kristin: The rest didn't.
14:40
Kristin: In 1947, Moldnomah County decided it needed the land.
14:44
Kristin: 265 graves were exhumed and the remains removed.
14:48
Kristin: And then in the early 1950s, the rest of Block 14 was bulldozed and paved over to build a county office building and parking lot.
14:56
Kristin: The headstones that had once stood there, bearing Chinese names and names of home provenances, of families waiting on the other side of the world, were gone.
15:05
Kristin: For decades, people drove past the corner of Lone Fur without knowing what was underneath.
15:09
Kristin: It wasn't until 2004 when the county building was being demolished that ground penetrating radar found human remains beneath the parking lot.
15:17
Kristin: The building came down in 2007.
15:20
Kristin: The land then was returned to the cemetery, and the silence that had been kept for 50 years began slowly to break.
15:26
Kristin: In April of 2026, just weeks ago, as this episode goes to air, Mongoma County representatives stood at Block 14 and read a formal apology at the gravesite for the first time.
15:37
Kristin: A memorial is now under construction.
15:40
Kristin: It has taken the better part, though, of a century.
15:43
Kristin: Those buried in Block 14 haven't been simply forgotten by time.
15:47
Kristin: They were raised by intention, and some of them, it seems, have refused to accept the forgetting.
15:52
Kristin: And they are not the only ones.
15:54
Kristin: The most famous spirit in Lone First Cemetery is Aine Tingry LeCause, better known by the name she used in life, Emma Merloan.
16:02
Kristin: She was born in France on November 8, 1850, and her family immigrated to the United States when she was around five or six years old.
16:10
Kristin: In adulthood, she lived in a properous neighborhood with her husband for many years, before he abandoned her for another woman in New York.
16:18
Kristin: Rather than waiting around for a life that had already moved on without her, she built one of her own, establishing herself as a high-class courtesan in Portland's Tenderloin district.
16:28
Kristin: Just before Christmas on December 22nd, in 1885, Roland was brutally murdered in her cottage home at 3rd and Yamill Streets.
16:36
Kristin: A nearby police officer heard screams and found her partially beneath her bed, hacked to death with a hatchet.
16:43
Kristin: Blood covered the walls, the floor, everything.
16:46
Kristin: The cottage had become a slaughterhouse.
16:48
Kristin: Her murder remains unsolved to this day.
16:50
Kristin: In a last effort to identify her killer, investigators removed one of her eyes to be examined by a photographer.
16:57
Kristin: It wasn't merely desperation, but science of a kind.
17:00
Kristin: In the late 19th century, a number of researchers genuinely believed that the human eye functioned like a camera, capable of preserving the final image seen before death.
17:09
Kristin: The technique was known as optography.
17:11
Kristin: Whatever was found or not found on Emmer Merlowin's retina, it brought no one to justice.
17:17
Kristin: In life she had been known for more than her profession.
17:20
Kristin: Neighbors recalled her charity, particularly around Christmas, when she fed those who had nothing.
17:25
Kristin: She was, as old accounts have it, a woman with a heart that her circumstances didn't diminish.
17:30
Kristin: Whatever happened to Emma Merlowin that night, some believe never truly ended.
17:35
Kristin: Many visitors report seeing a shadowy figure of a woman dressed in French fashion, moving between the trees.
17:41
Kristin: When approached, she throws up her hands, screams, and vanishes.
17:44
Kristin: Those who have seen her believe she's caught in a loop she can't escape.
17:48
Kristin: Contendra live the last moments of that night that should have never come for her.
17:52
Kristin: Marlowe, though, doesn't haunt Lone Fur alone.
17:55
Kristin: The cemetery dance with old growth and shadow, even in daylight, seems to hold other presence that can't easily be explained.
18:02
Kristin: One night, two friends were waiting near Lone Fur for a third companion who was running late.
18:07
Kristin: It was nearly half past eleven, and the cemetery beyond the fence had begun to feel like company of its own.
18:13
Kristin: Restless and bored, they climbed over and wandered among the graves.
18:17
Kristin: After a time they noticed a figure standing at a distance, motionless in a way that felt wrong.
18:23
Kristin: Not the stillness of someone pausing, but the stillness of something waiting.
18:27
Kristin: They called out, no response, so they moved closer.
18:31
Kristin: The figure was an old man with a long white beard, standing with his back to nothing, and his face turned slightly toward the ground.
18:38
Kristin: Then, as though snapped from a trance by their approach, he retched his neck upward and stared directly at the sky.
18:44
Kristin: The two friends stopped walking.
18:46
Kristin: Then the man turned and fixed his gaze upon them.
18:49
Kristin: What came out of him wasn't a shout or a threat.
18:51
Kristin: It was a sound that the two friends couldn't easily describe afterward, something between a roar and a wail, loud enough to shake birds from branches above, both ran.
19:01
Kristin: When they returned to the spot long after, the man was gone with no trace of him, no footsteps, just the dark between the trees, the graves, and the silence that had been there all along.
19:11
Kristin: Among all the memorials at Lonefer, a favorite for many belongs to James and Elizabeth Stevens, descendants of the very family whose land became the cemetery.
19:20
Kristin: Her headstone is carved with a relief portrait of the couple, and the epithet they chose is unlike anything else on the grounds.
19:28
Kristin: Here we lie by consent, after fifty-seven years, two months, and two days, so journey through life awaiting nature's immutable laws to return us back to the elements of the universe, of which we were first composed.
19:40
Kristin: These seven years together a counterfer to the day.
19:44
Kristin: There's no sorrow in it, no appeal to heaven, no plea for remembrance.
19:48
Kristin: Just two people at rest by consent, returning to what they always were.
19:53
Kristin: Maybe that's why the first family's memorial remains so beloved.
19:57
Kristin: Their story became the beginning of countless others that eventually found their way into these grounds.
20:02
Kristin: For all its name suggests, Lone Fur was never meant for one soul.
20:06
Kristin: It became the resting place for an entire city.
20:09
Kristin: For now, the stories of Lone Fur slip back into stone, and the dead return into their uneasy rest.
20:16
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil into Lone Fur Cemetery, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
20:23
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn, yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.