In Brief
The bar at the Benson Hotel in downtown Portland keeps a ghost in a black evening suit who scowls at drinkers and knocks the cocktails out of their hands. Staff say he's Simon Benson, the teetotaling timber baron who built the place and funded Portland's drinking fountains to keep his men off beer.
The Full Story
The bar at the Benson Hotel in downtown Portland keeps a regular who has been dead since 1942. Staff and longtime guests describe a well-dressed older man in a black evening suit who turns up among the drinkers, scowls at them, and by repeated account knocks the cocktail clean out of someone's hand before walking off.
They know exactly who he is. Simon Benson built the place, and Simon Benson never drank.
He was a Norwegian-born logger who got rich on Oregon timber and sold his holdings around 1910 for nearly $4.5 million. He was also a lifelong teetotaler, and a determined one. In 1912 he paid for the bronze drinking fountains still bubbling on Portland's downtown sidewalks, the Benson Bubblers, for a single reason: he wanted his loggers and millworkers drinking clean water at lunch instead of slipping off to a saloon for beer. He opened the hotel's tower wing the next March, timed to Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, and ran it himself.
So the ghost is the man you'd predict. He is reported in that formal black suit on the 7th, 9th, and 12th floors, coming down the main staircase and walking the corridors with the bearing of an owner doing his rounds. The staircase drops into the lobby he built, a room of Italian marble and Austrian crystal paneled in walnut so rare the species is now extinct. But it's the bar where he does something about it. There is also a stranger version of the sighting: one employee said they watched Benson cross the dining room, not in evening dress but in a logger's rough clothes, walk straight into the wine storage area, and vanish into it. The man who built the fountains, patrolling the wine.
None of it is written down. There are no named witnesses, no dated sightings, no investigation on record, and the hotel itself doesn't advertise any of it; the stories live in back-of-house lore passed between staff. What holds them together is how little they change. The same well-groomed older man, scowling at the same drinks, told the same way for decades.
Simon Benson died in 1942, at the age of 90, and was buried across town at River View Cemetery. A former bell captain used to point out where the drink-knocking happens most often: the table nearest the staircase. That, he'd say, is the exact table Benson would have passed on his way out of the room.
