Shanghai Tunnels Portland

Ask a Portland tour guide and you’ll hear the story in delicious detail: beneath Old Town’s streets runs a spiderweb of tunnels where victims — drugged in waterfront saloons, dropped through trapdoors — were dragged to the docks and sold to ship captains, waking up halfway to Shanghai. It’s one of the best dark legends any American city owns. And here’s the twist that makes it even better: the kidnapping happened, but the tunnels — historians are quite sure — did not.

The Legend, As Told

The story goes that Portland’s saloons, boarding houses, and brothels were linked by underground passages to the Willamette River docks. Deadfalls in barroom floors dropped the unwary into darkness below. Crimps hauled their unconscious cargo through the tunnels to waiting ships, out of sight of police and passersby. Tour operators have led visitors through Old Town basements since 1979 telling versions of this tale, and it has become as much a part of Portland’s identity as roses and rain.

Historians at the Oregon Encyclopedia, however, are blunt about it: they have found no evidence that any network of tunnels existed, and no evidence that basement passages were used for shanghaiing. What does exist under Old Town is more mundane — basements, sidewalk vaults, and some short passages that, per historian Richard Engeman, were built for purposes like moving merchandise between buildings and providing discreet exits from gambling dens and houses of prostitution. Discreet exits from a card game are not nothing — but they are not a kidnappers’ subway system.

The tunnel legend itself is surprisingly young. Its roots lie in journalist Stewart Holbrook’s romanticized 1933 newspaper series on Portland’s rough waterfront days, but the full “tunnel network” narrative took shape in the 1970s, and commercial tunnel tours began in 1979. In other words, the tunnels are a modern ghost story built on a real Victorian crime.

The Real Crime: Shanghaiing in Portland

Strip away the tunnels and you’re left with history that needs no embellishment. Shanghaiing — coercing or tricking men into service aboard sailing ships — genuinely happened in Portland, as it did in San Francisco, Astoria, and Port Townsend. Historians note it was primarily a problem on ships in the trans-Pacific trade, where voyages were long, conditions brutal, and volunteers scarce.

The machinery of the trade was the “crimp”: a sailors’ boardinghouse operator who supplied crews to captains for a fee. Crimps lodged sailors between voyages, advanced them money and drink, and collected the debt by delivering them — willing or otherwise — to outbound ships, pocketing the sailor’s advance wages (“blood money”). The line between employment agency and trafficking operation could be very thin. Trickery, liquor, and debt did most of the work; the drugged drink of legend was the exception that made the newspapers, not the nightly routine. And victims were delivered to ships the boring way — across the street and over the dock, often in plain view of authorities who had been paid not to care.

Crimping thrived because it was woven into the port economy: captains needed crews, boardinghouse masters controlled the labor supply, and municipal corruption kept the machine oiled. It declined in the early twentieth century as sail gave way to steam, and federal reforms — most notably the Seamen’s Act of 1915, which strengthened sailors’ legal protections — helped finish it off.

Bunko Kelly: The Man, The Myth

No figure looms larger in the legend than Joseph “Bunco” Kelly, and he’s a perfect case study in how Portland’s history got tall.

The documented Kelly was real enough: a crimp and boardinghouse operator on the 1880s–90s waterfront, his nickname reportedly cemented by an 1887 incident involving a British bark’s unimpressed captain. In 1894 he was convicted of murdering an elderly former saloonkeeper named George Sayres, served thirteen years, and was pardoned — after which he attempted, with characteristic brass, a book tour.

Then there are the stories. The most famous: that Kelly once wrapped a stolen cigar-store Indian in a blanket and sold it to a captain as an able-bodied (if sleepy) sailor. Or that he found two dozen men dead or dying in a funeral parlor’s cellar — they’d broken into what they thought was liquor and drunk embalming fluid — and sold the lot as a full crew to a ship called the Flying Prince. Researchers who have gone looking find no contemporary record of either event: no newspaper accounts, no ship, no mention even at Kelly’s own murder trial. Both tales trace to a former boardinghouse runner named Edward “Spider” Johnson, spinning yarns to writer Stewart Holbrook in the 1930s — and Johnson himself admitted he didn’t know if they were true. Kelly’s oft-quoted total of thousands of men shanghaied comes from the same braggadocio pipeline. Enjoy the stories; just file them under legend, where even their tellers left them.

Larry Sullivan, another boardinghouse boss of the era, was likewise a real and politically connected figure in Portland’s crimping trade — though here too, the colorful details in popular retellings outrun the documentation.

Why the Legend Stuck

The Shanghai Tunnels legend works because it’s built on truthful bones: Portland’s waterfront really was rough, men really were coerced onto ships, and Old Town’s buildings really do have atmospheric, brick-vaulted basements that feel like they’re hiding something. A story that physicalizes a real historical crime — gives it a place you can stand, a darkness you can walk through — will always beat a footnote about maritime labor law.

Today’s basement tours are best enjoyed for exactly what they are: theatrical storytelling in a genuinely historic setting. The chills are real. The tunnels-as-kidnapping-conveyor, historians agree, are not.

The History Worth Remembering

Behind the fun is a sobering truth: shanghaiing was labor trafficking, and its victims — sailors, loggers, drifters, the drunk and the unlucky — had almost no legal protection until reformers forced change. That story, fully documented and needing no trapdoors, is Portland’s real underground history: a reminder of what happens when an economy quietly depends on coerced labor and everyone with power finds it convenient not to look.

So take the tour, savor the legend of Bunko Kelly and his wooden sailor — and walk out knowing the truth is both smaller and darker than the myth.