The Art House

A 1925 Spanish Colonial that was a church, then a mortuary for 24 years, now an indie cinema. Patrons keep feeling someone settle into empty seats.

The Art House Theater in Eugene used to be a mortuary. Before that, it was a Spanish Colonial Congregational church. It's where bodies were embalmed for 24 years and where independent films now play with subtitles, and the building's own biography does most of the work in explaining why patrons keep mentioning the same thing: the strange feeling of not being alone in a not-quite-full theater.

The structure went up in 1925 as the First Congregational Church, designed in a heavy Spanish Colonial style with stained glass and thick wooden doors that don't really match anything else on West Broadway. The congregation moved out in 1956. The building was bought, gutted, and reopened as the McGaffey and Andreason Mortuary, which operated there from 1956 until 1980. Then Bijou Arts Cinemas took it over and ran it as a beloved repertory theater for forty years, until the Art House team picked up the lease in 2023 and kept the screens running.

So the building has been three things in a hundred years: a place where people prayed, a place where people were embalmed, and a place where people watched movies. All three uses involve sitting in dim rooms in rows. None of the architecture has fundamentally changed.

The ghost reports are all of a piece: a presence felt during screenings, particularly when the lights dim and the trailers start. Patrons describe the sensation of someone settling into a nearby seat that turns out to be empty. Staff have talked about footsteps in the upper sanctuary space when the projection booth is the only occupied spot in the building. Nobody has produced a name. Nobody has produced a backstory. The mortuary years are the leading explanation. Hundreds of people came through the building in caskets between 1956 and 1980, and some of them, the local lore goes, are still in their seats.

This is one of those places where the building is the ghost story. There's no Charley the projectionist with a dated death and a defining incident. There's a Spanish Colonial mortuary-turned-arthouse on a Eugene side street, and a presence that locals report often enough that the haunted reputation outlasted the Bijou rebrand. The aisle seats and the back rows are where the reports cluster, which lines up more or less with where the casket viewings would have happened in 1968.