In Brief
George Brosterhous fell to his death building the Reid School in 1914, before the roof was even on. A century later, staff at the Deschutes Historical Museum in Bend, Oregon credit him with small favors and call him the helpful ghost.
The Full Story
The man who haunts the Deschutes Historical Museum in Bend, Oregon never got to see the building finished. George Brosterhous fell to his death while he was building it, and for a century the staff have credited him with small favors.
They call him the helpful ghost, and they have a name for the favors: George moments. A book you've already hunted for turns up on a table you already checked. A document slides one drawer over. "The elevator door will open and close all of a sudden, things will disappear and reappear," says museum volunteer Vanessa Tupper. Visitors report footsteps and shutting doors, and once in a while a man in a hat and old-fashioned clothes walking the halls.
George and his brother Ed were Bend's premier contractors, in Central Oregon from Minnesota since 1903. They built much of the early lumber town, starting with its two-cell jail, raised for $292.32 in 1905. In 1914 the brothers were hired for something bigger: the Reid School, Bend's first modern schoolhouse, three stories of brick with central heat and indoor plumbing. Before the roof was on, George fell through the open stairwell shaft from the third story and died.
The school stood for 65 years before it became the museum it is now. George stayed the whole time.
Years later, a pianist practicing inside noticed an older gentleman watching her play. She found him again afterward, on the wall. It was Brosterhous, in a photograph the museum keeps on display, the contractor looking out at the building he never finished.
He isn't the only one people describe. Staff also tell of a little girl in 1910s clothes who giggles and runs the halls and pulls documents from the files before slipping them back; some think she was a Reid School pupil lost to the 1918 influenza. A team that once recorded through the rooms came away with eight stray words on the tape, among them happy, discuss, and two names, Janell and Willie.
None of it scares the people who work here. Every fall they lead a walking tour through downtown Bend's ghost stories, now in its fourteenth year and one of the museum's biggest fundraisers. "It is 90% history, it's 10% paranormal and it's 100% fun," says manager Vanessa Ivey.
The way they tell it, a man who died building the place has earned the right to keep an eye on it.
