The not-so-mean streets of a renewing downtown core are haunted by the ghost of Medford past. It’s a raw, young Western kind of ghost — rowdy and naughty and sometimes downright dangerous. You can still glimpse it here and there.

A new walking tour aims to provide the glimpses. Amateur history sleuth Ben Truwe will lead the first of what’s billed as the Haunted Brothels and Opium Dens of Medford Walking Tour starting at noon Saturdays (beginning Dec. 3). The tours are free.

Truwe promises to show history buffs the sites of renowned brothels, the place where Pinto Colvig met the man who became Disney’s Goofy, the place where white slavers hooked victims on opium and more.

Dressed in coonskin coat and sporting a salt-and-pepper beard and mustache, Truwe starts out at the Southern Oregon Historical Society’s History Center at Sixth Street and Central Avenue (SOHS, where he volunteers, is not connected to the tour).

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Think those Dashiell Hammett tours in San Francisco without the hills. We’ll cover a half-dozen blocks in an hour or so. Got your walking shoes on?

Step this way to what’s now a Mellelo’s coffee bar at Sixth and Front streets. This was the home of Medford’s first fire wagon and horse team when the fire station was built in 1908. Truwe tells rip-roaring tales about the city’s early firefighting mishaps, but the real deal here is that it gets us to Front Street.

Front Street was wooden stores and tent saloons and brothels dating back to frontier days. On April 12, 1894, the Valley Record reported that, "The female fringes of society, who anchored in Medford after being driven out of other towns, are making themselves very conspicuous hereabouts, flaunting their vulgar presences ... making the night hideous with their orgies."

The Medford Mail editorialized in 1896 about Front Street’s "vice and dissipation" and its "half-drunken hoodlums, and their shouts of blasphemy and vulgarity." At 30 N. Front St., above the entrance to today’s U.S. Bank parking garage, stood the Imperial Rooms, a brothel operated for 20 years by one Stella the Redhead, according to a tape old-timer Ellis Beeson made in an SOHS oral history project.

"We don’t know much about Stella," Truwe says. "It tells me she was probably good at her business."

Half a century later, in 1949, the Mail Tribune was still railing against the area, calling it "a sickening sore on Medford’s otherwise fair face" with "derelicts, human dregs, winos, prostitutes." When "even ordinary drunks won’t go there," huffed the paper, "it’s getting out of line."

At Front and Main streets, Truwe stops to point out the site where he says Colvig, who would go to Hollywood and become famous as Bozo the Clown, met a crossing guard named Frank Willeke, who would provide the inspiration for Walt Disney’s Goofy.

Before that the spot was the site of Southern Pacific’s original Medford depot, where in the late 1800s buskers and magicians used to draw what the Southern Oregon Mail called "great crowds."

The decision by railroad stockholders in 1886 to connect Jacksonville to Medford instead of Central Point would seal the fates of all three, channeling development to Medford. A new depot in 1910 (now the home of Porter’s restaurant) marked the change.

Just around the corner, above today’s Hot Pots, was Ed Wilkinson’s butcher shop, 1896, designed by W.J. Bennet, Medford’s first architect. The abattoir was out back.

Not all the brothels were on Front Street. The Rex Rooms, at 319 East Main St., were known as the Medford Riding Academy. The Florida Rooming House was run by a woman named Edwards. Perhaps the best-known house of ill repute was the Royal Rooms above what’s now Beyond Comics at 322 E. Main St. When City Councilman George Millar was busted there in 1913, he claimed he was the victim of a "witch hunt."

In 1912 a prostitution "cleanup" closed the rooms for a time. But a few months later Julia Levenberry, aka Hazel McCoy, was running the Royal. Until she was arrested with opium paraphernalia at the Imperial, an Ashland bawdy house.

The saga of Wo Lee’s Laundry is a story worthy of a tabloid-style movie, with gold, Chinese opium dealers, a stabbing and a young woman bought in San Francisco by a man named Jim Ling, who brought her to Medford. The scandal led to police raids on other Chinese businesses, according to the June 17, 1912, Mail Tribune, and to a prostitution crackdown.

Truwe also promises dish on such oddities as Col. Ray’s cat ranch and why Medford had to lynch the knocker and burn the hammer.

There is a theme in all this — beyond the liveliness of the subject matter — and it’s about the ongoing disappearance of the living past in our midst.

"It’s not disappearing," Truwe says. "It’s being destroyed."

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com.