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There are few places in Portland better suited to a ghost story than the Oregon Zoo.
Before the zoo took over its current location in Washington Park in 1959, the land was home to Hillside Farm, a Multnomah County poor farm that opened in 1868 and housed elderly and impoverished residents, orphans and people suffering from mental illness or infectious diseases. By the 1880s, more than 1,500 people had passed through the farm—and some of them never left.
In 2013, workers preparing the Oregon Zoo’s Elephant Lands project were surprised to discover human remains—first a skull, and later the bodies of nine individuals thought to belong to residents of Hillside Farm. This wasn’t the first time human remains had been discovered, either. Construction on the zoo’s Predators of the Serengeti exhibit had uncovered remains in 2008, as well.
Though zoo managers were reportedly aware of the property’s history, documentation regarding the exact location of the farm’s resident cemeteries was limited. Until a cache of century-old photographs were donated to the Multnomah County Archives in 2023, archivists knew very little about the farm.
If this were a horror movie, the next part would be obvious. Surely, the Oregon Zoo is haunted.
Earlier this year, paranormal podcast PNW Haunts & Homicides tackled this question in an episode titled “What Lies Beneath the Oregon Zoo.”
“This is a recipe for haunting,” the hosts proclaimed.
They found the history of Hillside Farm, but also the 1970 death of a 19-year-old who snuck into the zoo after hours and fell into the lion enclosure. The “youth first lowered himself over the side of the grizzly bear pit,” The New York Times reported that July, “clinging by his hands to the edge of the wall, then pulling himself up.” Then he tried the same trick over the lion pit.
Days later, someone broke in seeking vigilante justice. “Rifleman Slays 2 Lions That Killed Youth at Zoo” was the Times headline.
PNW Haunts & Homicides also examined the 2019 death of a concertgoer who stumbled into an unused rhino exhibit.
Still, no ghosts.
WW interviews with several employees at the zoo, including zookeepers in the Predators of the Serengeti and Elephant Lands exhibits, turned up exactly zero accounts of paranormal activity.
“I’m not sure how much I believe in that stuff anyways,” said one.
Zoo spokesperson Hova Najarian said simply, “No good ghost stories here!”
Even Reddit was useless. One user claimed their cousin worked the grounds for 20-plus years, but “most of his horror stories involved the bathrooms.”
Experts? “I have not personally heard of any ghost stories at the Oregon Zoo,” Oregon Paranormal Society founder Billy Walker II tells WW, “and, as far as I know, no one has ever done an investigation at the zoo.”
What’s clear is that the zoo is built on land with a history that Portland spent much of the 20th century forgetting. After Hillside Farm closed in 1911, moving over 200 residents to a newly built facility in Troutdale—which later became McMenamins’ Edgefield hotel—the buildings in Washington Park disappeared. Records about the people who lived and died there fell between the cracks, and the history of the state’s poor farms faded from memory.
It isn’t necessarily a proud history, either. Investigations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries revealed overcrowding, severe neglect and abusive superintendents.
“The beds are narrow wooden bunks with straw mattresses. The bedding was not clean, and the beds looked far from comfortable,” observed a 1892 Oregon state report evaluating the condition of the Jackson County Poor Farm, as cited in a recent OPB documentary.
After the Social Security Act of 1935 introduced federal safety nets, which replaced poor farms with welfare, pensions and institutional nursing homes, the previous era was paved over by modern development. Locally, it wasn’t until remains were discovered at the zoo that many Oregonians remembered that the state operated at least 17 county-funded poor farms at one point.
In lieu of specters, the only reminder of the bodies buried beneath zoo grounds is a plaque at the edge of its elephant enclosure:
This spot used to be part of a poor farm called Hillside Farm. It was located where Oregon Zoo, Hoyt Arboretum and World Forestry Center stand today. Between 1870 and 1910, it offered housing for the poor. Residents worked in the gardens, helping to make their own food.
Strangely, the Oregon Zoo’s most compelling ghost story may not feature any ghosts at all. It may be about the people who were forgotten years ago.
