In Brief
Portland's Roseland Theater was renamed in 1991 to bury a nightclub murder. It didn't take. Staff and concertgoers still call the ghost Tim Moreau, the 21-year-old promoter strangled backstage in 1990 and buried where no one has ever found him.
The Full Story
At the Roseland Theater in Portland, Oregon, the man people say walks the empty halls was strangled inside the building and never buried. The staff and the crowd call him Tim Moreau.
The reports run the same way every time: footsteps in rooms with no one in them, a flicker of shadow up in the balcony, a cold burst where no draft should be. There's no Ghost Hunters episode here, no published EVP logs, no investigator's readings to point to. Just a name, and the people who keep reporting it. The story goes that Moreau never left.
The building went up in 1922 as an Apostolic Faith church — a brick meeting hall with a 1,150-seat sanctuary upstairs, designed partly with music in mind. By 1982 it was a nightclub called Starry Night, run by a man named Larry Hurwitz. Moreau was 21, a Reed College student from New Orleans, and the club's publicity director.
On January 23, 1990 — the day after The Oregonian exposed a counterfeit-ticket scheme tied to the club — Hurwitz called him into the office. A sound engineer named George Castagnola held him down while Hurwitz strangled him with a garrote made from a broom handle and speaker wire. They moved the body in garbage bags, in the trunk of a Cadillac, and buried it on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, near an abandoned logging road. It was never found. Years later, Hurwitz couldn't lead anyone back to the grave himself.
Hurwitz fled to Vietnam, where he organized a 1997 Sting concert, before a revoked passport got him deported that November. The case had finally broken through an IRS audit of his tax returns, chased for years by a Willamette Week reporter. He pleaded no contest to the murder in 2000.
In 1991, the new owners had renamed the place Roseland Theater, expressly to bury the Hurwitz association. The murder came with the building anyway. In 2008, Willamette Week named it the city's Best Haunted Venue.
The Roseland is a working music hall, 150 to 180 shows a year across its main floor and the room downstairs. The man they keep reporting is still out there somewhere above the Gorge, in ground no one has found. And Hurwitz, who walked free in 2008, was arrested again in January 2026 — at 71, on a fresh charge, more than three decades after the night Tim Moreau went into the office and didn't come back out.
