👻 HAUNTED PLACE · EXP. Nº9474 ACTIVE

Donner Pass

Donner Pass is named after a disaster, not a family. In the winter of 1846-47 a wagon party of 89 people was stopped by snow a few miles short of the crest of the Sierra Nevada and wintered in two camps: cabins at the lake now called Donner, and tents at Alder Creek, six miles north.

Where is Donner Pass?

Location: California, United States
Type: Memorial / disaster site
Coordinates: 39.32, -120.242
Last updated: 2026-10-10

LOCATION

Why is Donner Pass said to be haunted?

Forty-one of them died. The survivors ate the dead, and one of them, Lewis Keseberg, spent the rest of his life accused of murder; he sued his accusers for slander and the jury awarded him a single dollar. Tamsen Donner, who paid five hundred dollars in coin to have her three small daughters carried out and stayed with her dying husband, never came down. Modern ghost lore adds a glowing woman among the trees on winter nights. Dated rather than repeated, that story leads to a 1997 novel and an unsigned entry on a ghost directory, not to the nineteenth century. What can still be visited is the real thing: a monument on a plinth built to the height of the snow, the boulder that formed a cabin wall, and a diary written inside the camp.

What is the history of Donner Pass?

This file is about a mountain pass, not a mountain range. The Sierra Nevada runs some 600 kilometres from north to south, and a single file cannot be about all of it. Everything told here happened in one small basin at its northern end: the lake, the meadow six miles north of it and the notch in the crest, all three of which carry the Donner name because of one winter. The emigrants who gave the pass that name were not a family and were never as few as the round figures suggest. Kristin Johnson, historian of the Donner Party Archaeology Project, counts 89 people: 87 emigrants plus Luis and Salvador, two California Indian vaqueros sent up from Sutter's Fort. In Utah the group left the established California trail for the Hastings Cutoff, a shortcut promoted by Lansford W. Hastings that none of them had crossed with wagons. Eliza P. Donner Houghton, who was three years old that winter and wrote the family's account in 1911, records that James Reed, William Pike and Charles Stanton rode ahead to fetch Hastings himself as a guide, and that Hastings "refused to leave his train" and would only ride to a ridge and point. They reached Truckee Lake — today Donner Lake — between 30 October and 4 November 1846, with the pass a few miles further on and already under snow. Patrick Breen's diary is the only document written inside the camps while people were still living in them. It opens on 20 November 1846, noting that they "came to this place on the 31st of last month", and on 29 November records: "still snowing now about 3 feet deep, wind W killed my last oxen today". On Christmas Eve: "rained all night & still continues to rain poor prospect for any kind of Comfort". The manuscript is in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. There were two camps, not one, and the distinction matters for anyone visiting. Most of the party wintered in cabins at the eastern end of the lake. The families of George and Jacob Donner, stopped a few miles short by a broken axle and the storm, wintered in tents and brush shelters at Alder Creek, about six miles to the north — a separate place, on land that today belongs to the Tahoe National Forest. On 16 December 1846 seventeen people set out on improvised snowshoes to walk over the crest for help. Two turned back the first day; the fifteen who continued are remembered as the Forlorn Hope. Seven of them reached Johnson's Ranch between 17 and 19 January 1847, after thirty-three days. Eight died on the way and seven of those eight were eaten. Two of the dead were Luis and Salvador, the men Sutter had sent with Charles Stanton and mule-loads of provisions in October. They left the group when they understood what was being discussed, were found collapsed further down the trail, and were shot by William Foster. It is the only killing for food known in the whole episode, and the two of them are also the two most reliably dropped from the count whenever the party is described as "87 pioneers". Four relief parties came up from California. The First Relief reached the lake on 18 February 1847, the Second on 1 March, the third on 13 March, and William Fallon's salvage party on 17 April, by which time Lewis Keseberg was the only person alive in either camp. Tamsen Donner is the reason this story is told at all, and what she actually did is better documented than the legend. Her husband George was dying of an infected hand at Alder Creek. When two men of the Second Relief, Cady and Stone, decided to turn back on their own, Tamsen paid them five hundred dollars in coin to carry her three small daughters out to Sutter's Fort. Eliza, one of those daughters, remembered her mother combing their hair, leading them to their father's bedside and saying, as if to herself, "I may never see you again, but God will take care of you." Tamsen stayed. She was still alive when the third relief came through and she did not leave with it. What happened next is Keseberg's word, and it should be labelled as such. He said Tamsen watched by her husband's bedside until he died, laid the body out, set off across the snow to reach her children, lost her way and arrived at his cabin soaked and grief-stricken, and died there in the night. Keseberg was accused of murdering her, sued his accusers for slander before Alcalde Sinclair, and won — the jury awarded him one dollar. There is one piece of evidence for his account that does not come from him: Edwin Bryant, passing the abandoned cabins with General Kearny on 22 June 1847, wrote that George Donner's body "had been carefully laid out by his wife, and a sheet was wrapped around the corpse". The arithmetic, from Johnson's own tally, subtracts cleanly. Of 89 people, five died before reaching the Sierra. That left 81 trapped. Of those, 14 died at the lake camp, 8 at Alder Creek and 14 while trying to get out: 36 deaths in the mountains, 41 in all. Forty-five of the trapped came out alive, and with three men who were outside the mountains when the snow closed, 48 survived. The site itself became a memorial early: a white wooden cross in 1887, the Pioneer Monument in 1918, a state park in 1928, and National Historic Landmark status for all three camp sites in 1961.

Timeline: the documented record of Donner Pass

31 October 1846 The emigrants reach Truckee Lake, a few miles short of the pass, and find it already blocked by snow. Patrick Breen dates the arrival himself in the first entry of his diary, written three weeks later.
16 December 1846 Seventeen people leave the lake camp on improvised snowshoes to cross the crest for help. Two turn back the first day; the fifteen who go on become known as the Forlorn Hope.
17-19 January 1847 Seven of the fifteen reach Johnson's Ranch after thirty-three days. Of the eight dead, seven were eaten; Luis and Salvador, the two California Indians sent up by Sutter with Charles Stanton, were shot by William Foster for food — the only killing of the whole episode.
18 February 1847 The First Relief reaches the lake camp, three and a half months after the party was trapped.
26 February 1847 Breen records inside the camp that Mrs Murphy "said here yesterday that [she] thought she would Commence on Milt. & eat him" — the moment cannibalism enters the contemporary written record.
Early March 1847 With her husband dying at Alder Creek, Tamsen Donner pays two men of the Second Relief, Cady and Stone, five hundred dollars in coin to carry her three small daughters to Sutter's Fort, and stays behind. Her daughter Eliza recalled her saying: "I may never see you again, but God will take care of you."
13 March 1847 The third relief party, led by William Eddy and William Foster, reaches the lake camp. Tamsen Donner is alive and does not leave with it.
17 April 1847 William Fallon's salvage party reaches the camps and finds Lewis Keseberg the only person alive. His account of Tamsen Donner's last night is the only one there is, and it is his.
22 June 1847 Edwin Bryant, passing the abandoned cabins with General Kearny, writes that George Donner's body "had been carefully laid out by his wife, and a sheet was wrapped around the corpse" — the only corroboration of Keseberg's story that does not come from Keseberg.
1847 Keseberg sues his accusers for slander before Alcalde Sinclair and wins. The jury awards him one dollar in damages, and the verdict is barely reported; the accusation outlives it.
23 October 1873 In the Tahoe basin to the south, the Pioche Daily Record reprints a Carson Appeal notice: "Cap'n Dick", the odd genius living at Emerald Bay as caretaker for Ben Holladay, has turned up missing, his empty boat found floating on the lake. The same notice describes him "scooping out a grave" on the little rocky island in the bay and lying down in it so that, if he died in his sleep, he would roll in and be self-buried.
15 July 1877 A Salt Lake Herald traveller's letter, reprinted in the Cheyenne Daily Leader, describes the islet where "an old salt called Sailor Dick built a home and a grave", says he "sunk, to rise no more, in the lake", and gives the title "hermit of Emerald bay" to his successor, Sailor Jack.
6 June 1918 The Pioneer Monument is dedicated, a bronze group by John McQuarrie raised by the Native Sons of the Golden West on a plinth 22 feet high — the height then attributed to the snow of 1846-47.
20 January 1961 The Donner Camp is designated a National Historic Landmark. The designation covers three separate sites: the Murphy cabin, the Graves cabin and the Alder Creek camp a few miles north, on Tahoe National Forest land.
1997 Doris Betts publishes the novel The Sharp Teeth of Love, in which a woman camping at Donner Lake is visited by the ghost of Tamsen Donner. It is the earliest text we could date in which Tamsen appears as an apparition at the lake — 150 years after her death, and in fiction.
2010 The analysis of the Alder Creek hearth is published: over 16,000 bone fragments, 86 per cent of them under a quarter of an inch, identified as cattle, horse or mule, deer, dog and rodent, with no human bone identified. It is reported as proof that there was no cannibalism, which is not what it says.
6 June 2015 The park's new Visitor Center opens and the Emigrant Trail Museum, which had operated since 1962, closes for good. Guidebooks and websites still send visitors to a museum that no longer exists.

Is there a rational explanation for Donner Pass?

The version of this file published until now said that people around Donner Lake had "long claimed" to see a glowing, translucent woman among the trees on winter nights. We could not source that sentence, and this section explains what we found instead. There is no nineteenth-century ghost. We could find no report of an apparition at Donner Lake in the digitised American press of the period, and a negative is worth little on its own — so here is the control: a search of the Library of Congress's Chronicling America for "Donner Lake" between 1850 and 1930 returns some 2,690 pages, and the same archive gave us the 1873 notice about the drowned hermit of Emerald Bay quoted further down this file. The region was written about constantly, and the press of the day was perfectly happy to print ghost stories. It was not printing this one. Dating the story instead of the event moves it to the very end of the twentieth century. The earliest printed claim we could fix is a single line in Eric van Hoffmann's true-crime book A Venom in the Blood (1990): "Some Californians claim that Donner Lake is haunted by ghosts of the hard-luck pioneer Donner party." The earliest text in which Tamsen Donner herself appears as a ghost at the lake is not a folklore collection at all: it is Doris Betts's novel The Sharp Teeth of Love (1997), in which a woman camping at Donner Lake is visited by her. Ghost-guide treatments follow: Janice Oberding's Haunted Nevada (2001), Leslie Rule's When the Ghost Screams (2006), which sets the park's own visitor-centre telephone number alongside the heading "Donner Party Ghosts", and Matthew P. Mayo's Haunted Old West (2012), whose chapter on the park is called "Tragic Spirits of the Donner Party". A search inside digitised books for the exact phrase "ghost of Tamsen Donner" returns about ten results, and every one of them is Betts's novel or criticism of it; the same corpus returns some 735 for "Tamsen Donner" alone. The specific image in our own old text — a glowing woman — matches almost word for word an entry on a user-submitted American ghost directory that describes "a yellowish, glowing, female figure" whose ghost "hovers above the ground" at Donner Memorial State Park. That entry carries no date, no witness, no source and no investigator. It is the most likely origin of the sentence we have now removed. No institution asserts the haunting. California State Parks describes the site as a memorial and a museum and does not market ghosts. Mayo, who went there to write a ghost book, records that his own questions at the park about whether the ghost stories were true "were met only with smirks and head shakes". The cannibalism, by contrast, is not in doubt, and the archaeology is more interesting than the legend. Excavations at the Alder Creek hearth in 2003 and 2004 recovered more than 16,000 bone fragments, 86 per cent of them under a quarter of an inch. The identifiable ones were cattle, horse or mule, deer, dog and rodent. No human bone was identified. That result was widely reported in 2010 as evidence that the Donner Party had not resorted to cannibalism, which is not what it shows: it is a finding about one hearth, at the camp for which — unlike the lake camp — no written account of cannibalism exists. Kristin Johnson, the project's own historian, put the point flatly: "Based on the historical record, there can be little question members of the Donner Party practiced cannibalism." Survivors said so themselves, and Patrick Breen wrote it down inside the camp on 26 February 1847. Why a pass like this attracts ghosts is not mysterious. The bare facts are already unbearable, they are commemorated by a statue on a pedestal built deliberately to the height of the snow, and the road that carries most visitors there still closes in storms. A place does not need an apparition to feel haunted when the monument itself is a measurement of how deep the snow was.

Can you visit Donner Pass?

The pin for this file (39.32, -120.2417) is inside Donner Memorial State Park, on the Splitrock campground near the east end of Donner Lake, about 1 km (0.6 miles) west-south-west of the Pioneer Monument. Donner Pass itself, the notch in the crest that gives the file its name, is about 6.9 km (4.3 miles) due west of the pin, over the county line in Placer County. California State Parks gives the park's hours as sunrise to sunset and its day-use fee as 10 dollars per vehicle; the visitor center opens daily from 10:00 to 17:00 and closes on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day, with the telephone number (530) 582-7892. The park is in Truckee, on the south side of Interstate 80, which the same page puts 100 miles (160 km) east of Sacramento. On 23 September 2026 that page listed the Ridge campground as closing on 30 September and the Splitrock and Creek campgrounds as closed. The visitor center opened on 6 June 2015 and took over from the Emigrant Trail Museum, which had operated since 1962; the State Parks press release for the opening said the old building would be kept for archival storage, training space, offices and meeting rooms. The exhibits, in the park's own description, deal with the emigrant experience, Washoe culture, the Chinese workers who built the railroad and early motoring over Donner Pass. The Pioneer Monument, a bronze family group by John McQuarrie erected by the Native Sons of the Golden West, was completed on 6 June 1918 and is California Historical Landmark No. 134. State Parks gives its pedestal as 22 feet (6.7 m), the depth traditionally assigned to the snow of 1846-47, and says it faces west toward the pass. The Native Sons placed tablets at the Murphy cabin site and the Graves cabin site in 1919. At the Graves-Reed site stands the Donner Cross, first put up by citizens of Truckee in 1887; its fifth version was placed there in 2024, according to the Truckee-Donner Historical Society's register of the party's landmarks, revised in November 2025. The Alder Creek camp, where the families of George and Jacob Donner wintered, is outside the state park. It is the Donner Camp Picnic Site of the Tahoe National Forest, at 12893 California 89, Truckee 96161 (39.37576, -120.18093), about 7.2 km (4.5 miles) north-east of the Pioneer Monument; the Forest Service directions place it roughly three miles north of Interstate 80 on Highway 89. Its interpretive trail of a third of a mile carries six signs quoting the party's letters and diaries, and the site has an accessible vault toilet and picnic tables. The Murphy and Graves cabin sites and the Alder Creek camp together make up the Donner Camp National Historic Landmark of 1961, National Register number 66000218, whose boundaries for all three sites were drawn in 1983. Interstate 80 crosses Donner Summit at more than 7,000 feet (2,130 m), and Caltrans closes it or imposes chain controls during winter storms; the older Donner Pass Road over the crest is the former US 40. The Donner Summit Historical Society's interpretive signs on that road, part of what it calls the 20-Mile Museum, are taken down for the winter months. The Emerald Bay story in this file belongs to another park, about 42 km (26 miles) south-south-east of the pin on the south-west shore of Lake Tahoe. For Emerald Bay State Park, State Parks gives hours from sunrise to sunset, 10 dollars per vehicle for day use or 3 dollars an hour for parking. Fannette Island is accessible only by watercraft, swimming to it is forbidden because of boat traffic, and it is closed in April and May as a wildlife breeding site. The stone building at its summit is the tea house built for Lora Josephine Knight, the owner of Vikingsholm on the shore of the bay; the grave Captain Dick Barter cut for himself on the island stayed empty, because he drowned in the lake in 1873 and his body was not recovered.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-13 · How we verify our content

Donner Pass

Where is Donner Pass?

Why is Donner Pass said to be haunted?

What is the history of Donner Pass?

Timeline: the documented record of Donner Pass

Is there a rational explanation for Donner Pass?

Can you visit Donner Pass?

Sources consulted

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Donner Pass

Where is Donner Pass?

Why is Donner Pass said to be haunted?

What is the history of Donner Pass?

Timeline: the documented record of Donner Pass

Is there a rational explanation for Donner Pass?

Can you visit Donner Pass?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

Add your testimony

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