Witch's Castle, Forest Park

The building most people call the Witch's Castle is officially the Stone House, also known as the Macleay Park shelter. It was constructed in the mid-1930s as a public shelter and restroom for people walking the trail through Balch Creek canyon, a rustic little structure meant to sit in keeping with the wooded ravine around it.

Its working life did not last long. The building lost its water line in the Columbus Day Storm of 1962, a powerful windstorm that struck the region, and the city chose not to fund repairs. Left without a purpose, the shelter was abandoned and slowly given over to the forest, its roof gone and its walls gradually cloaked in the moss and fern you see today.

The evocative name came much later. By local accounts, young people who rediscovered the mossy ruin in the 1980s took to calling it the Witch's Castle, and the name stuck, even though official trail maps still label it the Stone House. So the eerie name is a fairly recent nickname layered onto a humble piece of 1930s park architecture.

The name of Balch Creek, which runs past the ruin, carries a genuinely dark chapter of early Portland history. Danford Balch was an early settler who held a large land claim in this area in the mid-1800s. The conflict that made him notorious grew out of his family life: a young man named Mortimer Stump, who had worked for the Balches, married Balch's teenage daughter Anna against her father's wishes.

In 1858, Balch shot and killed Stump at the Stark Street Ferry crossing on the Willamette, in front of witnesses. He was tried, convicted, and in 1859 hanged before a crowd, an execution recorded as the first legal hanging carried out in Portland. The creek, and the wider area that became Macleay Park within Forest Park, still bear the Balch name.

It is worth being clear that this real and grim history is tied to the creek and the settler, not to the stone ruin itself, which was built decades later as an ordinary trail shelter. Over time the two stories have blurred together in local imagination, helping give the Witch's Castle its haunted reputation. The documented facts are dramatic enough on their own without the added ghost lore that has grown up around the site.

The ruin sits in one of the loveliest corners of Forest Park, the deep, shaded canyon of Balch Creek. Forest Park is one of the largest urban forest parks in the country, a long ribbon of woods stretching across the hills on the northwest edge of Portland, laced with many miles of trails, of which the walk to the Stone House is one of the most popular and accessible.

Balch Creek is a genuine cold-water stream, clean enough in its upper reaches to support cutthroat trout, a rarity for a creek running so close to a major city. The canyon is classic Pacific Northwest forest, with towering Douglas fir and bigleaf maple over an understory of sword fern, salmonberry, and thick moss, exactly the setting that makes the ruin feel so enchanted.

That damp, green richness is what gives the Witch's Castle its character. The same moisture that feeds the moss carpeting its walls also keeps the trail slick, so the atmosphere and the need for careful footing go hand in hand.

For a forest inside a city, Balch Creek canyon is surprisingly alive. Cutthroat trout hold in the cold pools of the creek, Pacific wrens and songbirds fill the understory, and pileated woodpeckers, the big crow-sized birds that chisel rectangular holes in dead trees, range through the older forest. In the damp along the water you may spot salamanders and the occasional newt.

Winter and early spring are when the ruin is at its mossiest and most atmospheric, the creek running full and the whole canyon glowing green, though the trail is at its muddiest and slickest then. Many people think this is when the place looks most magical.

Spring brings out the ferns and understory flowers and the sound of birdsong along the creek, a fresh and lively time for the easy walk in.

Summer is the driest and easiest hiking, cool and shaded under the tall trees even on hot city days, and the most popular season, so early mornings are best for a quiet visit. Fall adds the gold of turning bigleaf maples over the mossy stone before the winter rains return.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.