In the mid -1920s, the Medford High School Tigers football and basketball teams coached by Prink Callison routinely won state championships in football and basketball.

When major U.S. cities were connected to telephone service in the late 1800s, small towns like those in Southern Oregon were left on the sidelines. Most of them did not have power plants or sewer lines, let alone the money to build a phone network and pay royalties to Alexander Graham Bell.

As a survivor of a Rogue Indian Wars attack in 1855 that killed her husband, wounded a daughter and left a son missing, Mary Ann Harris became a caretaker for an elderly woman in Jacksonville, Ore.

Poltergeists are said to be mischievous ghosts with a variety of tricks, ranging from making loud noises, moving furniture, and knocking on doors to pinching, biting, hitting and tripping people.

The approach of Halloween is often accompanied by stories of ghosts and otherworldly spirits.

It’s Halloween and ghost-story time. Here’s one from the Sept. 2, 1911, edition of the Medford (Ore.) Sun newspaper. It starts like this:

Here’s a close-at-hand Halloween ghost story: Some say the Plunkett Center at the entrance to Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Ore., is haunted.

Brothers Col. Frank and Dr. C.J. Ray were very successful and wealthy entrepreneurs in the Rogue Valley in the early 1900s. In addition to running businesses in real estate, gold mining and orchards, they electrified the area with power from their Gold Ray Dam.

A contract mail carrier for 39 years beginning in 1898, Hathaway Jones, dreamed up some really tall tales as he traveled alone through Southern Oregon’s rugged Rogue River Canyon.

The Shasta Daylight was Southern Pacific's streamlined train that ran between San Francisco and Portland in the 1950s. It had top priority on the tracks and promised maximum speed and comfort for the passengers.