Ghost Stories Linger at Mt. Hood Oregon Resort

By Justin Andress, Mountain Times

Paranormal activity is part and parcel of life on the mountain. Several spots on the mountain have a reputation for otherworldly happenings. Some have even earned an international reputation for their spooky vibes.

However, few people think about the Mt. Hood Oregon Resort when they conjure up the area’s most active haunted spots. For most, the resort is the place where you stop to grab a drink or celebrate an occasion with a good meal. Locals know it for the luxurious spa or the well-maintained golf course.

According to some resort employees, however, spirits seem to love the place, too. From unseen partiers to phantom phone calls to a few sightings, Mt. Hood Oregon Resort has plenty of ghost stories for those willing to look.

“When I was doing security,” one former security guard explained, “I’d walk through and hear audible footsteps upstairs, but there wasn’t anybody up there. Mallard’s was pretty notorious for that. A bunch of bartenders refuse to close by themselves or say they won’t work past a certain time frame because, in one of the times that they did close … they would hear things or see certain lighting that kind of freaked them out.”

In fact, one reliable source says that the entire east side of the resort sees occasional unexplained events. Last year, a guest was moved after complaining about noisy upstairs neighbors. She was the sole person booked in her building. A few years before that, a news crew left the hotel in the middle of the night after members of the four-person team spotted a mysterious figure walking around their room. According to staff, sightings and interactions tend to occur most frequently when occupancy is at its lowest.

On one occasion, an evening in the fall of 2019, a staffer recalls, “One room kept calling the front desk. I would pick up the phone and it kind of sounded like you were listening to an empty room. It’s a weird noise. It’s not a dead line, and it’s not static. It just sounds like someone picked up the hook and left it on the counter, and you can kind of hear the room.”

As the calls poured in, the staff began to worry that a guest had injured themselves or had a medical emergency and couldn’t call out for help. An employee rushed to the room, only to find it empty. After confirming the disturbance wasn’t being caused by a prankster employee, anxiety set in.

“So, then, I think, okay, someone broke into the room and this could be a bad guy or a burglar or whatever. I don’t know. So I swing the door open ... there’s no lights on, there’s nothing. So I turn on my flashlight, flip over my radio, hold it by the antenna so I can hit someone if I need to. I check the bathroom; there’s no one in there. I check the closet, I look at the back door, and the back door is dead-bolted from the inside. … so there’s probably nobody in the room.

“So, then I think, okay, there could be someone under the bed, so I get down on my hands and knees and I flip up the bed skirt and shine my light, and there’s no one there,” he laughs as he recalls his own nerves. “Thankfully. The worst part was lifting up the bed skirt.”

A quick check of the phones confirmed everything worked, but the disturbances weren’t finished for the evening. “I go back up to the front desk,” he says. “And then the housekeeper [working the building I just came back from] was at the front desk with the new front desk lady, and I go up and they look kind of ashen, and I’m like, hey, yeah, the room’s fine. There’s no one in there. I don’t know what’s going on.

“They asked, ‘You checked the room?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ They’re like, ‘The entire time that you were gone, up until you walked in, that room was still calling the front desk.’”

Those are just a sample of the ghost stories on offer at the Mt. Hood Oregon Resort. While they’re not quick to advertise their haunted happenings, most of the staff will readily confirm that the resort seems to coexist with some kind of paranormal presence.

The next time you’re having a late-night drink at Mallards or you’re staying in one of the resort’s east-side rooms, keep your eyes (and ears) open for an encounter from the beyond.