The Oregon Vortex - Gold Hill, OR
N 42° 29.572 W 123° 05.074
10T E 493050 N 4704504
The Oregon Vortex is also home to the famous House of Mystery and both phenomena are a popular roadside attraction for tourists year-round.
Waymark Code: WMWEG8
Location: Oregon, United States
Date Posted: 08/23/2017
Views: 1
There are many websites that highlight the famous Oregon Vortex as well as the House of Mystery. Our family visited this place to see for ourselves the natural phenomena this area has attracted curiosity seekers over the years. Although at first impression when the tour guide showed us examples of gravity-defying tricks, it was apparent after awhile that there is definitely something strange going on in terms of how one's eyes perceive objects in their surroundings. Are these tricks all optical illusions or is there something more legitimate going on in these hills? That's for you the visitor to determine.
The official Oregon Vortex website (link below) highlights its history and reads:
The House of Mystery itself was originally an assay office and later used for tool storage, built by the Old Grey Eagle Mining Company in 1904. But the history of the surrounding area, The Oregon Vortex, goes way back to the time of the Native Americans. Their horses would not come into the affected area, so they wouldn't. The Native Americans called the area the "Forbidden Ground", a place to be shunned. Many years before The House of Mystery was built it was noted that unusual conditions existed there. But it was not until well into the 20th century that any effort was made toward a scientific analysis of the disturbance.
John Litster was a geologist, mining engineer, and physicist. He developed the area in the early 1920's and opened it to the public in 1930. He conducted thousands of experiments within the Vortex until his death in 1959. He was born in Alva, Scotland on April 30, 1886, son of a British Foreign Diplomat.
Wikipedia highlights this place and reads:
The Oregon Vortex is a roadside attraction located in Gold Hill, Oregon, in the United States. It consists of a number of interesting effects, which are gravity hill optical illusions, but which the attraction's proprietors propose are the result of paranormal properties of the area.
Prior to any construction of the area, local legend had it that Native Americans in the area referred to the site as a "forbidden" land, and travelers passing through would often find their horses refusing to go through the area.
A gold assay office was built in the area in 1904, which slid from its foundation in the early teens, coming to rest at an odd angle. Odd angles seem to create an illusion of objects seemingly rolling uphill. The same effect can be seen in The Montana Vortex and house of mystery, Pennsylvania's Laurel Caverns, and at Santa Cruz, California's Mystery Spot. Oregon Vortex is also famous for "height change" as the apparent relative height of two people varies, depending on where each stands.Most people[who?] believe that this effect is due to a distorted background that induces a forced perspective, as with an Ames room, but this has been "ruled" out by taking readings with a stick. The Oregon site also appears to exhibit phenomena similar to those perceived by visitors at the mystery spot located outside St.Ignace in the upper peninsula of Michigan.
- The site was investigated on a second season episode of the SyFy reality show Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files, and although there seemed to be a small debate between the show's investigators over the "height change" phenomenon, they ultimately concluded that overall, all of the effects demonstrated were optical illusions.
- It was also mentioned on season 3, episode 11 ("Mystery Spot"), of The CW's Supernatural by Jared Padalecki's character, Sam Winchester.
- It is alluded to by one of the places that can be visited in the game Sam & Max Hit the Road. One of the locations that can be visited in the game is called Mystery Vortex and is located roughly at the position of the Oregon Vortex on the in-game map of the United States.
- In The X-Files an "Oregon Vortex" is mentioned during the season seven episode number five "Rush".
- The Mystery Shack in the Disney TV show Gravity Falls was modeled after the Oregon Vortex
There is also a newspaper article by the Oregonian which also highlights the Oregon Vortex and it reads:
'Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files' investigates Oregon Vortex: Optical illusions or unexplained mysteries?
Investigators from the SyFy reality show "Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files" normally check out reports of flying saucers and haunted houses. But on Tuesday's episode, they ventured to Gold Hill to study The Oregon Vortex, a popular roadside attraction where the laws of physics don't seem to apply.
The Vortex has been drawing tourists since the 1930s with reports of strange phenomenon, such as brooms appearing to stand on their own, and a spot where peoples' height seems to change based on where they're standing, which tour guides claim is caused by mysterious forces that change people's molecular structure while they're there.
The "Fact or Faked" team, lead by former FBI criminal investigator Ben Hansen, used scientific equipment to measure the odd angles and warped floor of the Vortex's famous Mystery House. They determined that certain brooms could easily stand on their own based on the type of bristles and the angle of the floor. They also debunked the appearance of a ball rolling uphill as an optical illusion -- it's actually rolling downhill, but the house's slanted walls play tricks on the eye. The dizziness that people sometimes experience in the house (which Hansen and stunt expert Austin Porter also noticed on the show) is based on the disorienting way people have to stand when they go through it.
But other investigations were less conclusive. Animals, it's said, are repelled by the magnetic forces at play in the Vortex, so the investigators tried riding horses through the site. Before getting to the Vortex, the horses completely stopped and reversed direction. The team got strange compass readings during their experiments, suggesting that massive magnets might be buried under ground, though they weren't allowed to do any excavation to determine if that was the case.
The height change anomaly also proved difficult to explain. Hansen determined that the spot where people stand on a level surface and appear to shrink or grow when they change positions actually has a two-degree incline. But that's not enough to explain the 16-degree difference they captured on camera when Porter and Jael De Pardo switched spots. And De Pardo said that when she participated in the experiment, she felt pressure on her shoulders and head that she couldn't explain, as if something unseen was pressing down on her.
So is it fact or faked?
"The height change? I don't know," Hansen said. "I see that there's an altitude change, and I think it's exaggerated when you put two people together. But when you watch the video, it's quite remarkable."
The "Fact or Faked" findings may have been inconclusive, but one thing's for certain: They had a blast shooting in Oregon. Porter commented that he was stunned by how beautiful the landscapes were around Gold Hill. And on Twitter, De Pardo said the episode "was darn right fun to film."