In Brief
For decades, drivers on old Highway 101 near Cannon Beach, Oregon told of the Bandage Man, a logger wrapped head to foot in bloody gauze. He's smelled before he's seen, and he climbs into pickup beds, gone before the truck reaches town.
The Full Story
On the stretch of old Highway 101 north of Cannon Beach, Oregon, the story goes that you smell him before you see him. A spoiled-meat stench rolls in off the trees first. Then the figure: a man wrapped head to foot in bloody gauze, said to climb into the bed of a moving pickup and be gone before the truck reaches town.
It mostly happens, the way these stories go, to teenagers parked somewhere they shouldn't be. The encounter people keep retelling is from the 1950s. A couple parked a Chevy off 101, heard rustling in the woods, and caught the smell. The truck leaned, the way it leans when weight settles into the bed. When they turned, a bloodied, bandaged figure was at the rear window, pounding the glass and yelling. They drove off in a panic. Later, in the empty bed, they found a torn piece of bloody bandage. That is his calling card.
The legend can't agree on where he came from. The Cannon Beach History Center keeps two versions: a logger gashed open by a sawblade in the hills, or a construction worker hurt in a dynamite blast while crews bored the Arch Cape Tunnel through solid rock. Either way, the story has him bandaged and loaded into an ambulance on Highway 101. The ambulance crashed on a slick bend. Responders found the medics knocked out cold and the bandaged man gone. A three-day search turned up nothing but one more piece of bloodied bandage. In the years since, the telling has him surviving out there by feeding on animals, their half-eaten carcasses left along the shoulder.
For years, the old curving access road outside town was simply called Bandage Man Road, and driving it after dark was a teenage dare. The highway was realigned in the 1960s and the old bend disappeared, but the name stuck. These days the Cannon Beach surf shop even prints him on t-shirts, partly to scare tourists out of camping illegally along the highway overnight.
No newspaper ever recorded the crash, or a logger missing from one. A search of the archives, 1930s through the 1960s, found no disappearance, only deadly wreck after deadly wreck on Highway 101, a stretch a 1950s clipping had already nicknamed Death Row. A University of Oregon folklore student studied him in 1974 and found no origin either. The man may never have existed. The road that killed people was real.
