Phantom Pours

Writing about Oregon wine has led to also writing about birds, hiking, glass, cats (coming up)… and ghosts! Here is a piece I wrote for the October 2024 issue of Oregon Wine Press.

“I had no intention of alarming you unnecessarily — but you should use all proper caution. A draught of this Medoc will defend us from the damps.”

The wine sparkled in his eyes ... My own fancy grew warm with the Medoc. We had passed through walls of piled bones, with casks and puncheons intermingling, into the inmost recesses of the catacombs ...

Only too late does Fortunato, the ironically named victim in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” realize that an invitation to evaluate a fine sherry in a catacomb-turned-wine cellar is a ruse leading to his own entombment.

Sometimes, wine is spooky stuff. It ferments in haunted environs, swirling amid stories of sinister deaths and unexplained phenomena.

The ancient Greeks offered libations to appease gods, spirits and the dead. This often included pouring wine on the ground as part of religious rituals.

Eastern European folklore held that sprinkling wine on a vampire's grave would prevent it from rising again. Staking, burning, or burying the body with specific items were also thought to prevent the undead from returning to life.

In medieval Europe, wine’s sacred and symbolic associations led to the belief in its protective powers against malevolent forces, including witchcraft. In Poland, adding various herbs to the wine was thought to intensify the effect.

Modern wine brands have adopted various dark and eerie monikers, including Hollywood-based Vampire Wines. Their bottles, adorned with red satin-lined capes, come packaged in tiny coffins.

Oregon has its share of curious wine tales to discover this time of year. Its intriguing legends hearken back to the pioneering days of early statehood and confound modern sensibilities with accounts of the inexplicable.

THE MURDERED MINER

The phrase “Gold Rush” brings California to mind. But the 1850s frenzy for gold extended into southwest Oregon, enticing young prospectors from all over the world to stake claims on creeks near Jacksonville and on the Applegate, Illinois, and Rogue rivers. According to the Oregon History Project, the 1860 census counted several hundred miners in the area, at least half of them Chinese.

The most lucrative market for their gold lay over 200 miles away in Portland. One dark night, an unlucky prospector, making the long journey on horseback, encamped on a wooded hilltop. As he slept, the man was attacked and killed along with his horse. The killer made off with the gold.

It is said that the miner’s ghost still wanders the spot, endlessly searching for the lost treasure. A lone tree marks his hilltop resting place.

Today, the site is known as Ghost Hill, part of the Bayliss family farm and home to Ghost Hill Cellars in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA.

The family’s stewardship of this land extends back to 1906, when they cleared it of trees and brush to begin dairy farming. Since then, they have tended everything from cows and sheep to oats, barley, and clover. The wide variety of this effort is a testament to the “scary” economics of small-scale agriculture, a reality that led to the 1999 decision to plant wine grapes.

“You just kind of go with what you think will make some money or what you care about,” said Mike Bayliss, who has spent 78 years farming the property. “Something that you’re comfortable with, that you grow or raise.”

To the delight of wine lovers, the family is comfortable with producing Pinot Noir. The fourth and fifth generations of Baylisses now offer their estate-grown wines in a brand-new hospitality center, opening on Oct. 11. The building boasts a wine-tasting room and event space with wrap-around views of the surrounding valley… and a haunted hilltop.

THE GHOST OF HATTIE HAYMOND

When it opened in 1865, the Rock Point Stage Hotel served as a commercial hub for the settlement of Rock Point on the north bank of the Rogue River in southern Oregon. The station supplied travelers with a place to rest and eat along the newly completed stage roads linking Sacramento, Calif., and Portland. Two substantial bridges and the presence of a telegraph increased Rock Point’s commercial traffic.

The hotel not only offered a place to stay but also a general merchandise store, a social gathering place, and the local post office. Later, during the “pear boom” of the early 20th century, it sheltered orchard workers. Today, the building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, houses the tasting room for Del Rio Vineyard Estate.

Hattie Haymond’s ghost inhabits it, too.

Hattie was the stepdaughter of John B. White, the townsite’s founder, storekeeper, and first postmaster. She married Benjamin Haymond, White’s business partner and a prominent citizen who succeeded White as postmaster, served two terms as Jackson County commissioner, and brought various improvements to the gold rush-era waystation.

Hattie died in June 1891 in the Haymond home next door to the hotel. Her obituary in Ashland’s Valley Record curiously names no cause of death but notes that “She was an exemplary woman, of many excellent traits of character, and her death will be mourned by a large circle of friends.”

The following year, Benjamin Haymond remarried a woman named Rose Ann Morris.

According to Lena Freeman, Del Rio's marketing assistant, and Lindsey Zagar, the director of operations, Hattie makes her presence known to employees and tasting room guests through “disembodied voices, phantom smells, the moving of objects, and ghostly apparitions.”

The women’s interest in Hattie intensified after meeting a customer related to Ralph Haymond at a winery dinner. Ralph was born two weeks before Hattie’s death, but his birth certificate lists Benjamin’s second wife, Rose, as his mother. “So we have a couple of theories that either Rose was actually always the mother of Ralph, and then he was born out of wedlock, or Hattie was Ralph’s mother,” Freeman said.

This confusing chronology might explain why Hattie’s ghost has remained restless all these years.

All three Haymonds—Benjamin, Hattie, and Rose—are interred in the Rock Point Cemetery adjacent to Del Rio’s vineyard. The winery includes the family plot in its Haunted Flight Nights and Extra Haunted Dinner each October, where guests can learn more about the area’s history and hear stories of its haunted folklore.

DESPONDENT YOUNG LENA

Visitors to Argyle Winery’s modern tasting house in Dundee might miss the adjacent 1883 structure to the north along Highway 99W. Built as a home for the Imus family, it served as Dundee’s City Hall and, later, as Argyle’s first tasting room. Known as Spirithouse, it now hosts winery office space and special events.

It is also believed to be haunted by one of its original residents, Lena Elsie Imus.

Lena took her own life on Dec. 19, 1908, at age 25. According to her obituary in the Newberg Graphic, she seemed to have had much to live for, recently commencing a business course in Portland and having been “loved and respected by all.” But she poisoned herself in the family home nevertheless. Apparently, a romantic disappointment left her thinking she had nothing to live for.

“It was a love-gone-wrong kind of story,” said Cathy Martin, Argyle’s community development manager. “That’s kind of how she ended up in the situation she was in.”

Having spent more than 25 years on staff, Martin recalls many reports of encounters with Lena. These tales include hearing the crash of (invisible) wine glasses and smelling the waft of Lena’s floral perfume. The stories predate Argyle’s use of the property, going back to when the house was Dundee’s City Hall. “It’s not just Argyle ... it definitely is the house,” Martin observed.

Lena surprises some visitors, like the copier repairman whose toolbox inexplicably levitated and overturned. Others, including principals of the “Ghost Hunters” television series, come to Spirithouse seeking Lena.

“We get calls from all over the place,” Martin said. “It’s interesting to me to see the huge variety of reactions that come from that story.”

She remembers one visiting gentleman who walked around the house for three hours and then announced that Lena was sitting on a couch looking out a window toward the hill where the Imus family is buried in the Dundee Pioneer Cemetery.

Martin also recalls a tasting house worker who “swore that Lena went home with her in her car.”

Lena's lore inspired Argyle to name the old home Spirithouse. Each fall, they release their Spirithouse Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

Martin observes, “She’s still here, and in a number of different ways.”

A SIP OF MYSTERY

Wine encapsulates so much of human existence—including things we cannot explain. Cultures and practices near and far have long associated it with mystery. The surrealist painter Salvador Dalí said, “A real connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes of its secrets.”

Tales of the supernatural echo through the rows of Oregon’s vineyards. The restless spirits of scorned women hover, and a phantom miner’s footsteps beat through the countryside. These haunted tales recall the region’s history while offering not just a taste of fine wine but also a sip of the otherworldly.