Shanghai Tunnels
It is almost Halloween -- and I live in a haunted city.
Yup, in Portland, OR, you can find ghost tours of one sort or another, easy peasey. I haven't been on any of them...yet. But there is one place with haunted history I would like to visit. I know others in Koscadia would, too, so maybe we can organize a meet up around it sometime soon.
Portland has had its share of Wild West history -- and some of it is linked with the Far East. It was a port (as you can tell by its name) and that meant ships, a lot of them headed to the Orient. There was a grim practice, ("Shanghaiing") of manning some of these ships by kidnapping men and enslaving them, basically. Some of the bars near the Portland waterfront had trap doors that the barkeep could use to drop a drunken man into a tunnel system. The drunken man's shoes would be taken so he would be unlikely to escape from the glass littered tunnels where he would be held in a cell. Then off to China by ship! This illegal practice went on from 1850 to 1941 -- almost a hundred years.
Talk about labor abuses.
Women were not immune from kidnap, either, for "white slavery" (the practice of nabbing women and pressing them into prostitution), also went on in the tunnels.
Since the waterfront area abutted Chinatown, the underground held opium dens, too, or so I have heard.
Spooky or what? Bound to be some ghosts down there...
Here is the website for the Shanghai Tunnels tour.
Have you been to the Shanghai Tunnels? Does your town have an underground with a shady past? Come into the kitchen, settle down with a cuppa, and share your day, your weekend and Halloween plans, and anything else that is on your mind. Welcome.
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