Roseland Theater

21-year-old Tim Moreau was strangled here in 1990; his body's still in the Columbia River Gorge, and the lights still cycle on their own.

The Roseland Theater wasn't called the Roseland yet on January 23, 1990, when 21-year-old Tim Moreau walked into his boss's office at the Starry Night nightclub and didn't walk out. He was the venue's publicity agent. The day before, The Oregonian had run a story exposing 180 counterfeit tickets to a John Lee Hooker show, and his boss, Larry Hurwitz, had reasons to want him quiet. Hurwitz strangled him in a backstage hallway while another employee, George Castagnola, held him down. The body went into the Columbia River Gorge. It's still there.

Castagnola pleaded guilty in 1998. Hurwitz pleaded no contest to murder in 2000 and got eleven years. Both served their time. Tim Moreau is the reason this venue is on this list, and the building has carried his name in some form ever since, even after the new owners renamed the place the Roseland Theater later in 1991 specifically to bury the Hurwitz association.

Staff and touring crews have been describing the same kind of activity for thirty-plus years. Stage lights cycle on and off mid-show with the board powered down. Mic stands tip over in empty rooms. Equipment rolls off road cases between sets. Willamette Week named the Roseland the city's "Best Haunted Venue" in 2008, which is a strange award to give a real working music hall, but that's the reputation.

The building itself wasn't built for ghosts. The Apostolic Faith Church put it up in 1922 as a two-story brick meeting hall on Northwest Sixth Avenue, with a 1,150-seat sanctuary upstairs that's now the main floor of the venue. It was a church for sixty years before Hurwitz turned it into Starry Night in 1982. Most accounts of unexplained activity place the events in the back hallways, near the office area, in roughly the part of the building where Moreau was killed. That's not subtle, and the people who've worked there don't pretend it is.

Sound engineers have logged it the most. One described unplugged monitors picking up faint signal during soundcheck. Another talked about the headliner's tech laughing off a flickering spot until the same fixture started cycling during the encore with the dimmer pack visibly dark. There are no Ghost Hunters episodes, no published EVPs, no wikipedia paragraph cataloguing it. Just thirty years of crews trading the same set of small inexplicable things and a murdered kid whose family never got a body.

The Hurwitz connection is the part of this story that doesn't get hedged. He confessed. He served time. He was released in 2008. Tim Moreau is buried somewhere in the gorge, and the venue where he was killed now hosts about 200 shows a year. If you've been to a concert at the Roseland, you've stood roughly where it happened. Most people don't know.

The crew knows.