O'Kane Building

Tenants in this 1916 Bend building hear an old mans voice in the basement, lights cycle on the top floor, and locals just call him Hugh.

Bend Ghost Tours co-founder Meg Kehoe says there's something inside the O'Kane Building in downtown Bend that watches her from the upper windows when she walks her group past, and that she doesn't think it's human. She's not the only one with stories. Tenants and visitors have heard a ghost waitress shouting orders in what used to be a restaurant, an elderly man's voice in the basement, and footsteps on the second floor when nobody is up there.

Most accounts ascribe the basement footsteps to Hugh O'Kane himself.

O'Kane was an Irish immigrant who'd already lived through the California gold rush, the Yukon gold rush, and a hotel fire by the time he poured the foundation of this building in 1916. The two-story, reinforced-concrete structure on the corner of NW Oregon Avenue and NW Bond Street replaced his Bend Hotel, which had burned to the ground on August 30, 1915. He hired Beezer Brothers, a Seattle architectural firm, to design something that wouldn't go up the same way. The result was the first reinforced-concrete building in Bend: six retail storefronts, twenty offices, and a theater. It was important enough to the new town of Bend that when Deschutes County split off from Crook County, the county government rented two offices in the O'Kane to serve as its first courthouse.

Hugh O'Kane died at his hotel in 1935. The Bend Bulletin's headline on December 3 of that year was "Bend Pioneer Dies in Night."

The building outlived him by ninety years and counting. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986 and now houses Smith Rock Records, Red Chair Gallery, and a rotating cast of small businesses on the ground floor. The restaurant where the phantom waitress was heard shouting orders has changed hands several times. The basement is mostly storage. The top-floor windows look out over Mirror Pond.

The reports cluster in three places: the basement, the upper floors after closing, and the alley alongside the building. Visitors describe seeing strange lights on the top floor from outside, smelling smoke when nothing's burning, and hearing voices from rooms confirmed to be empty. The old-man-in-the-basement description repeats so often, across decades, that locals have stopped trying to explain it and just call him Hugh.

The O'Kane Building is a stop on the regular Bend Ghost Tour for a reason. The history is good, the architecture is striking, and the man who built it had a personality that arguably ought to leave a residue. Hugh O'Kane was the man who went broke twice in the Yukon and came back to build the most important commercial building in central Oregon out of fireproof concrete because he refused to lose another hotel. If anyone earned the right to keep patrolling the basement, it would be him.