Oregon Vortex

A roadside attraction opened in 1930 on Sardine Creek, featuring a tilted 1904 gold assay office. Native Americans reportedly called the site "forbidden ground."

The Oregon Vortex sits on Sardine Creek in Gold Hill, a pocket of land in southern Oregon's Rogue Valley where the normal rules of the physical world appear to bend, warp, or break entirely. Long before any European settlement, Native American tribes in the region considered the area forbidden ground. According to local legend, they avoided the site and observed that horses refused to enter the area, turning away at its borders as though repelled by an invisible force. The land carried a reputation as a place where the natural order did not apply.

The Old Grey Eagle Mining Company acquired the property and built a wooden assay structure on the site for separating and valuing metals. Around 1910, the building slid off its foundation during a landslide, coming to rest at a dramatic tilt that gave it the appearance of defying gravity. The tilted structure sat abandoned until 1914, when prospector William McCollugh rediscovered it and persuaded his friend John Litster, a Scottish physicist and geologist, to travel to the United States to investigate.

Litster was captivated by what he found. He spent decades conducting experiments within the area he identified as the vortex, a spherical field of force roughly 165 feet in diameter that he believed produced measurable anomalies. He documented objects rolling uphill that continued to travel until they leveled off rather than losing momentum as expected. Compass readings gave incorrect results within the field. Most famously, two people standing at opposite positions within the vortex would appear to change height relative to each other, a phenomenon that could be observed and photographed but not easily explained. Litster opened the site to tourists in 1930, naming it the House of Mystery, and compiled his findings in a manuscript titled Notes and Data before his death in 1949.

Litster's widow sold the Oregon Vortex to Ernie and Irene Cooper, and the attraction has remained in the Cooper family since, operated by their daughter Maria and grandson Mark. Over the decades, visitors have reported a range of unsettling experiences within the vortex: disorientation, nausea, a sense that their bodies are being pulled in unexpected directions, and the persistent feeling that something is fundamentally wrong with the space they are occupying. Inside the tilted House of Mystery itself, brooms stand on end, balls roll in directions they should not, and visitors struggle to stand upright in ways that seem to exceed the effects of a merely slanted floor.

The Oregon Vortex has attracted both believers and skeptics. Two University of California, Berkeley researchers investigated a similar location called the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot and concluded that both sites could be explained by orientation framing, a phenomenon in which the brain's visual processing uses spatial frames of reference that can be deceived by tilted environments. James Randi, the famous skeptic and illusionist, deconstructed the Oregon Vortex's claims in 1998, using photography and mathematics to describe the phenomena as optical illusions. The site was also featured in an episode of The X-Files, cementing its place in popular culture.

Despite the scientific explanations, the Oregon Vortex retains its aura of the uncanny. The consistent refusal of horses to enter the area, documented as recently as a 2012 investigation by The Oregonian newspaper, suggests that whatever is happening on the site affects animals as well as human perception. Whether the phenomena are genuinely paranormal, the result of unusual geological forces, or elaborate optical illusions exploiting the tilted landscape, the Oregon Vortex remains the oldest documented mystery spot in the United States and one of southern Oregon's most visited and debated attractions.