Deschutes Historical Museum

George the contractor died building the place in 1914. Staff blame him for moving things. Margie, a small ghost, runs the bathroom taps.

Staff at the Deschutes Historical Museum have a phrase for it: a George moment. The water tap turns itself on. A document you swore you put in the third drawer is sitting on the second drawer in plain sight. A piece of an exhibit shifts six inches between the time you locked up Friday and the time you came in Monday. The staff write it off, lock up, go home. George does what George does.

George is George Bernard Brosterhous, who fell from the third floor through an open stairway shaft during the building's construction in 1914 and died from his injuries. The Reid School went up that year as Bend's first modern school, a three-story brick building named for Ruth Reid, the city's pioneering first high school principal, with central heating and indoor plumbing in a lumber town that had almost neither. George never saw it finished. The Deschutes County Historical Society took over the building in 1979 after sixty-five years as an active school, The museum staff started clocking him almost immediately.

A century after his fall, he still does helpful work. Documents staff misplace turn up in convenient spots. Objects that were where they shouldn't be quietly migrate to where they should. A visitor once reported the full figure of a man watching her from across the room, and then watching nothing, because he was no longer there. Nobody on the payroll seems particularly bothered. If a contractor died building a place, the staff figure, he's earned the right to keep an eye on it.

Margie is the second ghost, and she's a younger story. She was named because a museum intern working late one night caught an EVP recording in which a small voice repeated the word, the way a child says her own name. She presents as a girl of about six or seven in clothes from the 1910s or 1920s. Some researchers think she may have been a Reid School student who died in the 1918 influenza epidemic that tore through Central Oregon, though her identity has never been confirmed. Margie giggles in empty hallways. She runs taps in the ladies' room. She flushes toilets repeatedly when nobody's in there with her. She seems to be having a much better time than most ghosts.

Otherworld Travels did a paranormal investigation at the museum and pulled multiple words off EVP recordings across different rooms: wife, finger, like, happy, discuss, two, Janell, Willie. Their team logged a video glitch in the toy and home exhibit room they couldn't account for, and perceived movement that prompted them to start filming. They wrote up the visit by saying, with appropriate hedging, that there appeared to be some unusual energy in the building.

Museum manager Vanessa Ivey runs an annual program called the Historical Haunts of Downtown Bend Walk that threads the museum's ghost stories through Bend's frontier history. Her own description of it is the best summary of what's going on here: ninety percent history, ten percent paranormal, one hundred percent fun. The Deschutes County Historical Society doesn't oversell George and Margie, and doesn't deny them either. The museum keeps doing its job preserving Central Oregon's past, and a long-dead contractor and a small girl in pre-flu clothing keep doing theirs, finding misplaced documents and giggling in the hallways and turning the bathroom taps on for the next person who walks in.