Column: Ghost Walk Reveals the Other Side of The Dalles
Cody Yeager speaks to a tour group outside of the Baldwin Saloon during a recent Ghost Walk in downtown The Dalles on June 27.
Walk of the Town by Sarah Cook
The Dalles, July 8, 2023 - The sound of desk chairs sliding frantically across the wooden floor.
Filing cabinets being slammed shut.
Boilers exploding spontaneously.
I’m not sure what I expected to hear about when I signed up for “Ghost Walk through The Dalles," a free event offered through The Wasco County Library on June 27th and led by seasoned tour guide Cody Yeager.
But as a sensitive only child whose big imagination has followed her well into adulthood, I’ve always carried a deep curiosity toward all things spooky, underrepresented, and thinly veiled, so signing up was a no-brainer for me.
Cody’s been offering such tours since The Dalles Main Street held their first Ghost Walk fundraiser back in 2020 and has been a tour guide through the American Empress cruise line for about five years. Her style of teaching—which is what a good tour guide is really doing—is equal parts knowledge, enthusiasm for place, and dry humor, with an occasional burst of curmudgeonliness that belies a deep love for the more-than-human world.
All of this makes for a rich and memorable experience as an attendee. You find yourself gazing upward at the same buildings you’ve stared at for years, though something’s pleasantly different this time. Cody has a passion for history, particularly the history of this bustling and important city.
“The Dalles was once a wild and wooly town,” she notes, and I can’t help but picture the yellow street lights, which blink every Sunday and pretend this town’s past isn't complex and gritty.
By infusing the Ghost Walk with robust lessons in history, Cody manages to create a strangely grounded event—this despite the amount of time we spent talking about, say, the ghost cat who lives on the 3rd floor of the old Gates Hotel building. (On the corner of Union and 3rd, across from Clocktower.)
Norman Williams was publicly hanged 118 years ago in The Dalles after being convicted for the murders of Alma Nesbitt and her mother Louisa J. Nesbitt at the turn of the century.
Some of the stories were admittedly less cute: hauntings connected to grisly murders and the subsequent hangings that took place here in town—including the last public hanging in the state (and the first time a man was convicted of murder in the absence of a deceased body).
But much of the ghostly components of Cody’s tales weren’t about scary encounters or monstrous beings, just melancholy ghosts, sad cowboys who can’t bring themselves to leave, and spirits of all ages whose loyalty to place isn't affected by the boundary between life and death.
“I owned a bookstore for many years,” Cody shared while standing in front of Klindt’s, the oldest bookstore in Oregon. “I wouldn’t be surprised if I show up there after I die.”
Less threatening than what you might expect, then, it seems that a good number of spirits are simply misunderstood stewards, trying their best to maintain a relationship with or keep watch over something they once loved. It’s a different way of thinking about not just mortality, but place: that we can devote ourselves to the land, buildings, and other habitats that create our earthly lives, and continue tending to them no matter what side of the veil we find ourselves on.
The Waldron Brothers Drugstore near Lewis & Clark Festival Park on First Street. It’s the oldest commercial building in town, having withstood every single major fire and flood The Dalles has seen.
Backside of the Waldron Drugstore - it used to be used for a haunted house. Imagine that.
One of the highlights for me was hearing Cody talk about the old Waldron Brothers Drugstore building, east of Lewis & Clark Park and infamously landlocked by the railroad tracks. It’s a really special building, Cody explains, for numerous reasons: It’s the oldest commercial building in town, having withstood every single major fire and flood The Dalles has seen. It’s also the location of the first local newspaper, and a past home to the post office and a masonic lodge. From 1st Street, if you look closely at the western edge of the building you’ll see a black hand-drawn line marking what was once the highest point of the river.
I picture a time pre-Amazon Prime, where goods were carried into town along the Columbia and ushered directly from boat to the back of the building (and into one of the many “underground” tunnels that still exist in The Dalles, where the first floor of the road truly exists, from before the streets were raised to where they are now. Don’t know what I mean? Look west—and down—from the Waldron building, on the south side of the street, and you’ll see).
The top of that building also displays the same curve that we see on both the downtown banners and the Union Street underpass along the Riverfront trail, just west of the park. In past years, when the building was still easily accessible, the high school even used it as a haunted house.
Another highlight: The Baldwin Saloon. Cody brought us around to the original front of the building (on 1st Street, not Court) so she could point out the Caduceus motif, aka the imagery associated in the United States with medicine and healing…and, ironically, with gamblers, liars, and thieves.
The Medical Insignia can be seen on the Baldwin Saloon in the Caduceus motif, aka the imagery associated in the United States with medicine and healing…and, ironically, with gamblers, liars, and thieves.
A closer look of the motif shows the two serpents wrapped around the staff and surmounted by wings.
Here’s one reason why I call it ironic: A bustling and successful saloon from the moment it opened, the Baldwin building was for a period of time owned and run by someone named Charlie Allen, more commonly known as “Doc.” He kept barrels of eyeglasses in the saloon, which he would sell to customers in need; he was not an optometrist, nor a doctor of any kind. The story goes that he’d cut a deal with the local undertakers in order to purchase and remain well stocked in his inventory of eyewear, which he obtained directly from the dead. Is this a ghost story? A story about fraud and betrayal? The invention of the side hustle? The veil here is so thin and bizarre that I can’t be sure.
The Granada Theatre was the first cinema west of the Mississippi to have the ability to show “talkies,” a new moviegoing experience back in 1929. Photo from Granada Theatre Facebook page
I love learning that the Granada Theatre was the first cinema west of the Mississippi to have the ability to show “talkies,” a new moviegoing experience back in 1929. I also love Cody’s language when imparting stories about the infamous red dots downtown: Stories about “negotiable affection,” and “erectile engineers” who worked on the upper stories of so many of the buildings, and the ghosts these “purveyors of pleasure” left behind.
Cody’s ability to keep folks engaged through a mix of humor, history, and animated storytelling—with a style at once magical and accessible—invites open-mindedness where skepticism may tend to arise. But if you’re like me, already eager to see things as they really are, so to say, then Cody offers an experience that will pleasantly befuddle any remaining boundaries between what’s real and what isn’t.
I had a hunch that speaking with her one-on-one would be an enlightening experience; I was right. The following interview was conducted by email, where Cody was gracious enough to share a little more about her own incredible life story, and why she was drawn to this kind of work:
Sarah Cook (SC): Do you live here in The Dalles?
Cody Yeager (CY): I do indeed live here in The Cherry City! I love it here. I do the tours for the library as a way of giving back to an organization I love supporting. I bought a house here in 2014, went away for a few years to finish up my career, and came back to The Dalles in 2018.
(SC): How long have you been providing guided Ghost Tours and similar walks?
(CY): The Dalles Main Street did Ghost Walks in 2020, as a fundraiser. They were looking for guides, and I volunteered for a few reasons. I love The Dalles; I love tour guiding, and I wanted to learn the spooky side of history. Johnna LaRoque (Owner of Route 30) ran The Gorge Paranormal Society (GPS), and she spoke about her experiences. So a year later, I asked the library what I could do to help them and suggested a Haunted The Dalles Walk. They liked the idea, and now I do it two or three times a year for them.
(SC): What drew you to this kind of work?
(CY): Nobody has ever asked me what drew me to this work. When I retired from the Oregon community college system—I was a dean at Southwestern Oregon Community College—I knew I wanted to come back to The Dalles. I knew I'd find something to do, but not full-time; I am done with that. (I did 20 years in the military too). So I began tour guiding for the beautiful American Empress, which is part of American Queen Voyages, and I do that two or three days a week, March through the first week in December. It is a way of promoting the community I love and that I consider my forever home.
(SC): As an attendee, such a huge part of the enjoyment I experienced was in the constant surprise of everything I was learning about all these places I was already so familiar with. I'm curious: As the person in charge and who already knows all these stories, what is one of your favorite things to experience on such walks?
(CY): The best thing about doing the walks for the library is that I always learn something new. You probably heard me ask how many people were Dallesians. They all know something I don't, and I am by no means an expert, but I prize learning above all else. We are blessed to live so near the oldest continuously inhabited area in the Pacific Northwest (Celilo), and The Dalles has always been a center of trade and commerce, since time immemorial. People on the tour will volunteer information that blows me away, and I file it away in my head.
(SC): How do you feel about ghosts? (Relatedly: what do you think people should know or consider about them?)
(CY): I don't think I'd use that noun. A lot of my civilian career was spent with the underserved and overlooked population of Indians, both in Oklahoma and here in Oregon. Sometimes I think that is where my real education began. I learned about the stick people who come at dusk, Skookumsasquatch, attended many dressings and burials, and learned that we don't know everything there is to know, we only pretend we do. When I tour guide in Skamania County, I always point out that Washington ranks number one in Bigfoot sightings because of their dense forests and rushing rivers. Every tribe along the Columbia River has stories about "the giants" and they are respected. So when people ask me if I believe in Sasquatch, I always say that just because I haven't been given the gift (yet) of seeing him, that doesn't mean he isn't there. I don't presume to know better than people who have lived here 15,000 years. When I worked in Warm Springs on the rez (8 years), my eyes were opened several times to how thin that veil is to the other side. I have stood out on the islands of the dead in the Columbia River and known I was not alone there. Visit some of the later Indian cemeteries where those remains were moved and you will see what I mean. Chief Seattle said "There is no death, only a change of worlds." I believe that.
(SC): Over the years, what's a highlight that you've experienced while either giving these kinds of tours or attending them?
(CY): A highlight of tour guiding for me is seeing people so surprised about all The Dalles has and has experienced. W.B. Yeats wrote that "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." If I can help that spark along, that is reward enough for me.
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