The Art House

A coffee shop and theater in a converted mission-style church that previously served as a mortuary, formerly the Bijou Cinema.

The building that houses the Art House in Eugene, Oregon has passed through four distinct incarnations, each leaving its own layer of history and, according to visitors, its own spiritual residue. The structure was originally built in 1925 as the First Congregational Church, a mission-style building designed for worship and community gathering. For three decades it served its congregation before changing hands in 1956, when it was converted into the McGaffey and Andreason Mortuary. For the next twenty-four years, the building that had once echoed with hymns and sermons became a place where the dead were prepared for burial, their bodies embalmed, dressed, and displayed for viewing in the same rooms where parishioners had once taken communion.

In 1980, the building was transformed again, reopening as the Bijou Art Cinemas, an independent movie theater specializing in foreign and art-house films. The conversion from mortuary to cinema gave the space a peculiar duality: a place built for spiritual contemplation, repurposed for the care of the dead, now filled with the flickering light and projected dreams of the living. The Bijou operated for decades as one of Eugene's most distinctive cultural venues before eventually becoming the Art House, a coffee shop and theater that continues the tradition of screening award-winning independent and foreign films.

The paranormal reports at the Art House are subtle rather than dramatic, befitting a building whose ghosts, if they exist, seem more curious than threatening. When the lights go down and the films begin, patrons report feeling a strange presence in the darkened theater, a sensation of being watched or of someone sitting nearby who was not there a moment before. The feeling is most commonly described as a gentle awareness rather than a frightening encounter, as though an unseen audience member has taken a seat to enjoy the show alongside the living.

Eugene Weekly recognized the Art House as the city's "Best Former funeral parlor and questionably haunted coffee shop," a title that captures both the building's unusual history and the lighthearted quality of its supernatural reputation. The ghosts here, whatever their origin, are described as friendly and interested more in enjoying the entertainment than in frightening guests. Some patrons have speculated that the spirits are those of people whose bodies passed through the building during its years as a mortuary, lingering in a space where they spent their final hours above ground. Others suggest the building's original purpose as a church may have created a spiritual atmosphere that attracts presences of all kinds.

The Art House occupies a unique position among Eugene's haunted locations. It lacks the dramatic apparitions and violent histories of other Oregon haunted sites, but its triple history as a place of worship, a house for the dead, and a house of cinema gives it an atmospheric depth that few buildings can match. The transition from church to mortuary to theater traces a strange arc through the human experience of the sacred, the final, and the imaginative, and visitors who sense something unusual in the darkened screening room may simply be responding to the weight of a century of profound human moments concentrated in a single building.