McMenamins Bagdad Theater

A young stagehand hanged himself backstage in this 1927 Hawthorne cinema pub. He's been crossing the screen ever since. Plus a powder-room woman.

The Bagdad Theater's headline ghost wanted to be on the stage, not behind it. According to the lore that's circulated through this Hawthorne Boulevard cinema pub since at least the 1970s, a young stagehand hanged himself in the backstage area, and people have been seeing him drift across the screen ever since. Whispers behind the screen. A figure caught in your peripheral vision while the trailers roll.

Picture Jack Nicholson sitting in this auditorium on December 18, 1975, watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest open in Oregon for the first time. Louise Fletcher and Michael Douglas are with him; the world premiere had played New York and L.A. a month earlier, but the Bagdad got the Oregon premiere and the cast came up for it. The Mediterranean-fantasy interior they sat under, arched proscenium, faux balconies, Moorish flourishes, was forty-eight years old by then; Universal Studios had built the place as a vaudeville-and-pictures palace, opening it on January 14, 1927 with Laura La Plante in Her Big Night. The stagehand, by the version Portlanders pass around, was already walking the catwalks above them.

The stagehand isn't the only resident. Staff and regulars describe a woman in the women's powder room, sometimes seen in the mirror behind them, sometimes only a cold draft that crosses the row of sinks. People in the auditorium describe a young female figure who appears in different seats, never moves much, fades after a few seconds. Children's voices in the aisles between showings. Shadowy shapes in the balcony when nobody else is upstairs. Footsteps pacing the empty halls during closing shifts.

Mike and Brian McMenamin bought the place in 1991 and turned it into a brewpub-cinema, the version most Portlanders know. The original incident is impossible to date. There's no surviving police record naming the stagehand's suicide, and McMenamins' own files treat the account as oral history rather than verified fact. What keeps the story alive is repetition: the same encounters keep getting described across decades, across staff turnover, across every owner the building has had. Compared to Edgefield, the Bagdad is a quieter haunt. Fewer named ghosts, less Ouija-board mythology, more "I've worked here for ten years and I've stopped being surprised when the projection booth door opens on its own."