Tower Theatre

Edgar and Myrtle Thompson sold the corner so this 1940 Bend theater could be built. Seats 105 and 106 in Row M are unofficially theirs.

Seats 105 and 106 in Row M of the Tower Theatre belong to a married couple who have been dead since the 1940s. They're not roped off. Anyone who buys a ticket can sit in them. But the staff in Bend's restored 1940 movie palace know whose seats those really are, and so do the regulars, and during shows people sometimes turn around and look toward the back of the room because they think they've seen Edgar and Myrtle Thompson take their places.

Edgar and Myrtle came to Bend in 1910 and opened a music store on the corner where the theater now stands. The town wasn't big enough to support an instrument-and-sheet-music shop on its own, so they split the space in half and added a furniture business. They ran both for fourteen years. Edgar died in 1924. Myrtle stayed on alone for a while and eventually sold half the property to the Tower Theatre Company, who in 1940 put up the building she would, decades later, refuse to leave.

Local contractor Fred Van Matre put the Tower up in three months using two shifts of workers. Original capacity was 998 seats. The thirty-by-eighteen-foot stage hosted vaudeville, fashion shows, weekly amateur hours, and first-run movies, and for the better part of a century it has functioned as the cultural center of Central Oregon. The Tower Theatre Foundation has run it as a nonprofit since the 2004 restoration.

The first sighting that anyone wrote down happened during a performance. A man on stage glanced toward the back of the floor, near the lighting equipment, and registered an elderly couple in the last row watching him work. He delivered his next few lines, looked again, and the couple was gone. When he described them later, someone in the building recognized Myrtle Thompson immediately. Since then, performers and audience members have spotted the same two figures in roughly the same area, always together, always quiet, always watching the show with the contented expressions of season subscribers.

A medium who visited the theater later passed along a request from Myrtle: she wanted her own seat. The theater gave her two. Seats 105 and 106 in Row M are now informally Edgar and Myrtle's, located in the far back of the floor seating beside the sound booth. The seats are sold like any other seats. The Thompsons just have priority claim. Audience members in adjacent rows have, on multiple occasions, looked over mid-performance and watched the elderly couple materialize in those seats, sometimes for entire scenes.

The Tower keeps a ghost light burning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week on the empty stage, in keeping with old theater tradition: a single bare bulb left on for whatever spirits might want to perform after hours. Most American theaters that maintain the practice do it more or less symbolically. At the Tower, with at least two named ghosts in regular attendance, the gesture lands with more weight.

Most haunted-place stories are built on something terrible: a fire, a murder, a child gone missing, an asylum. The Tower Theatre's haunting is a couple who sold off the corner of their music store so a theater could be built, and then came back after death to enjoy the shows their property made possible. It's the most affectionate ghost story in Central Oregon.