In Brief
During a 2007 play at the Tower Theatre in Bend, Oregon, an actor saw an elderly couple in the back row, then watched them vanish. He later found the woman's face in a museum photo: Myrtle Thompson, who once owned the land the theater stands on.
The Full Story
During a 2007 run of "Mornings at Seven" at the Tower Theatre in Bend, Oregon, an actor looked out from the stage and saw an elderly couple seated in the back row, near the lighting controls. When he looked again, they were gone. The lighting technician posted right there said no one had been sitting in those seats at all.
The actor later found the woman's face in a photograph at the Deschutes Historical Museum, and he recognized her. Her name was Myrtle Thompson, and she had been dead for more than sixty years.
The Thompsons came to Bend around 1910, when the town held about 536 people. Edgar and Myrtle opened a music store, then added furniture, because a town that small could not keep a music shop alive on its own. Edgar died in 1924. Myrtle kept the business going, and somewhere along the way she sold half of her property to the company that built the Tower, which opened its doors in 1940. She ran the store until her own death later that decade.
So the story Bend tells is a gentle one, and it is the version recounted on the Deschutes Historical Society's walking tours of the building. The couple whose land made the theater possible came back to enjoy the shows, turning up quietly in the back of the house, an old man and his wife watching whatever is on stage.
That same 2007 production left a second account. An actress alone in her dressing room between shows said she heard the voice of an old woman in the empty room with her. What it said was, "Okay, the coast is clear."
Sometime after that, a paranormal investigator passed along a request. "Myrtle wants her own seat at the Tower." The theater listened. Seats 105 and 106 in Row M, at the far back of the floor beside the sound and lighting controls, are now informally the Thompsons'. They sell like any other seats in the house. The couple simply has the older claim.
Which is the strange arithmetic of the place. Myrtle Thompson owned the ground before there was a theater on it, sold off the half that became the Tower, and watched it open in 1940. Eight decades later you can buy her seat for the evening. But when the lights go down, everyone who works there seems to agree on whose it really is.
