This is the original House of Mystery as you would see it today. It was built in 1904 by the Old Grey Eagle Mining Company as an assay office and tool-shed. This company stopped mining gold in 1911. A few years later this assay office slid off of its foundation on an angle and has been that way ever since. It was not until 1930 that it became known as The House of Mystery at The Oregon Vortex.
The Famous Circular Area with its Unique Phenomena
The Oregon Vortex is a glimpse of a strange world where the improbable is the commonplace and everyday physical facts are reversed. It is an area of naturally occurring visual and perceptual phenomena, which can be captured on film. No matter your education or profession you will find a challenge to all your accepted theories. Use the menu to the left to discover more.
History of the Vortex
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, a geologist, mining engineer, and physicist, 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 a son of a British Foreign Diplomat. He studied its effects first-hand for more than forty years. He even corresponded with Einstein on the subject. What he uncovered no one will ever know. Mr. Litser said, "The world is not ready for this," for he burned all his notes before his death.
Scientific Information
The Oregon Vortex is a spherical field of force, half above the ground and half below the ground. The word "vortex" simply means a whirpool of force, like a whirling mass of water, especially one in which a force of suction operates, such as a whirlpool or a whirling mass of air, especially one in the form of a visible column or spiral, such as a tornado.
A vortex, essentially a whirlpool of force, is the basic form of our universe. From our galaxy, whose vortex form we see as the countless suns of the Milky Way, throughout the gravitational vortex of our solar system, down to the vortex of an atom, the vortex form recurs throughout our world structure. The Phenomena that gives The Oregon Vortex its name are evident throughout the entire area. Nowhere in the circle do you normally stand erect. Inevitably the visitor assumes a posture that inclines toward magnetic north. The corona of The Vortex, as well as the minor vortices, discovered during the continuous study of The Vortex, are among the unique phenomena to be observed here.
As another person, on a level platform, recedes from you towards magnetic south, they appear taller. When they approach you, coming towards magnetic north, they become shorter. This is contrary to the laws of perspective, as we know it, and must be seen to be believed.
The Enigma: The Oregon Vortex is a spot about 165' in diameter in which gravity appears to play strange tricks. Roughly in its center is an old wooden shed, once an assay office for a gold mining company-now called the House of Mystery. People who enter the building find themselves leaning at an angle of about 10deg toward the center of the 165' circle. A 28-Ib. ball hangs at an angle from a chain hung on a beam in the shack.
Other weird things happen in the vortex. Cigarette smoke makes spirals. If an empty glass jar is placed on a board sloping uphill, toward the center of the circle, the jar will roll uphill. Compasses don't work in the vortex. A light meter will register different readings within and outside it. Birds won't go within its limits. Trees growing inside it have limbs that droop and lean toward magnetic north, and visitors entering the area assume a posture that inclines toward magnetic north. If 2 men of equal height stand a short distance apart, and are viewed by a 3rd observer, one will seem to be taller than the other. According to a guide: "As another person retreats from you toward the south, he becomes taller. This is contrary to the laws of perspective, and must be seen to be believed."
Some Explanations: Some scientists argue that the vortex does not defy the laws of nature. One skeptic, Herbert B. Nichols, former natural science editor of The Christian Science Monitor, took a carpenter's level, a light meter, and a plumb bob with him when he visited the site. Nichols claimed that there were no supernatural forces at work in the vortex and that visitors were mere victims of optical illusion.
However, promoters of the "House of Mystery" continue to dispute the optical-illusion theory. They claim that instruments placed outside the vortex have proved that. The steel ball does hang at an angle.
The scientific analysis of the disturbance constitutes an education in subjects of interest to all. The accumulated Notes and Data, written by John Litster, contains 35 pictures, diagrams, and illustrations along with other information specifically on The Oregon Vortex is available to all visitors.
Mystery
GOLD HILL, Ore. — Deep in the woods of this old gold mining town in southern Oregon, there is an unusual 22-acre lot for sale.
The asking price is $3.5 million, astoundingly high for a country-road plot with a three-bedroom house tucked away in an economically struggling corner of the country. But on one of these acres lies the Oregon Vortex, which is either a passport to the paranormal or one terrific tourist trap, depending on whom you believe.
"World famous-renowned business," reads the real estate advertisement for the property, 4303 Sardine Creek Road in Gold Hill, which was opened to the public in 1930.
The Cooper family has run a business at the Oregon Vortex for more than 40 years, and every year it draws thousands of tourists, mystics, psychics, scientists and those obsessed with the unexplainable.
The vortex is billed as a mysterious point where some laws of physics are temporarily suspended as the result of a confluence of magnetic fields.
The owner, Maria D. Cooper, and the other tour guides say the vortex makes objects defy gravity and other laws of nature. Balls roll uphill, brooms stand on end and people appear dramatically taller or shorter as they switch places.
Some people even visit the vortex because they find relief there for their back pain, Ms. Cooper said.
"It's a unique piece of land and we don't really know what makes it all happen," she said. "It is strongest when the moon is full."
Admission costs $6 to $8.
There are dozens of such mysterious places and legends around the country and the world. A partial list includes the Bermuda Triangle and sites called Gravity Hill, Anti-Gravity Hill, Spook Hill and Confusion Hill. Many of the mysteries at such sites have been debunked as the result of fraud or optical illusion, although the debunking apparently does little to deter tourism, lively debates and a deep fascination with such "X-Files" -style attractions.
The Oregon Vortex was featured on an episode of "The X-Files" in 1999, and is among the most alluring of these mystery spots, according to a review of travel guides and the many Web sites that mention it.
"After subjecting many spots to rigorous, very scientific tests, our Mystery Spot Test Kit indicates that the Oregon Vortex is the most disturbed," according to Roadside America, an on-line guide to "off-beat" tourist attractions.
So what exactly happens at the Oregon Vortex?
The woodsy hilly property, with steep slopes and skewed angles, also includes the "House of Mystery," a slanted wooden shack built in 1890 as an assay office for a gold mining company here, before it slid off its foundation. The house then became the perfect laboratory for demonstrating the "unusual conditions that exist here," according to the brochure for the Oregon Vortex and the House of Mystery.
As this reporter, who is admittedly prone to motion sickness, stood within the confines of the Oregon Vortex, it felt like being on a small boat in choppy waters with a hangover.
Nevertheless, scientists and other skeptics do not buy it. Places like the vortex, with their hills and weird angles, can leave people feeling disoriented and susceptible to tricks of the mind and eye.
"It's an optical illusion," said Russell J. Donnelly, a professor of physics at the University of Oregon. "It's kind of cute. I'm a professional scientist, and I don't like to debunk everything — it's a harmless fantasy."
James Randi, a former magician who is now the nation's most prominent skeptic on all matters illusory, paranormal and occult, said that the mind often played tricks on visitors to places like the Oregon Vortex and that too many operators of such attractions cashed in on those deceptions.
"People believe, falsely, that what they see with their senses must be real," Mr. Randi said. "Your senses deceive you all the time, otherwise David Copperfield would be out of business."
But others resist these conclusions. "You can find scientific survey maps of the United States and the planet that show both magnetic and gravitational anomalies," said Michael A. Grizzel, a chemical engineering and biotechnology researcher at the University of Maryland, who started the Enigma Project in 1978 to investigate claims of paranormal and unexplained phenomena. "That's not to say they represent anything of real high strangeness, but that possibly leaves the door open for some type of bona fide mystery."
Mr. Grizzel insisted that until a full and independent scientific investigation was conducted on the Oregon Vortex, it still qualified as a mystery.
Ms. Cooper, 60, who was a psychiatric social worker before she took over at the House of Mystery for her ailing father in the late 1970's, said she was ready to retire from the vortex tourism business.
"It's time for me to move on," she said, after an hourlong tour on a recent Sunday to 32 baffled and dizzy vortex visitors, a tour she gives several times a week. "It's time for me to turn it over to another."
She said that a few people had bid on the land but that nothing was official yet.
Meanwhile, the vortex is as popular as ever. Carla Bryant was on her second visit recently, 54 years after she first saw it as a 10-year-old with her parents. After the tour, she said she was as convinced as ever that something strange was going on in Gold Hill.
"I had to come back," she said. "I married a man from Maine who never, never sees anything like this."
The final Curious © phrase:
“Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.”
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
