The Bandage Man of Cannon Beach

A famous urban legend from Cannon Beach dating to the 1960s involving a mummy-like figure wrapped in bandages who appears along Highway 101.

The legend of the Bandage Man is one of Oregon's most enduring and distinctive pieces of paranormal folklore, a story that has haunted the stretch of Highway 101 between the Highway 26 junction and the north entrance to Cannon Beach since at least the 1950s. The tale emerged during an era when Oregon's sawmills were operating at peak capacity, and the coast highway had earned the grim nickname "Death Row" from newspaper reporters covering the frequent crashes on its treacherous curves.

The most common version of the origin story begins during World War II, when increased wartime lumber demand led to severe labor shortages at Oregon's coastal sawmills, and exhausted, undertrained workers were pressed into dangerous service. During a heavy rainstorm, a logger slipped and fell onto one of the saw blades, suffering deep gashes across his entire body. His coworkers got him to the medics quickly, and given the severity of the lacerations, the emergency crew wrapped his entire body in bandages from head to toe before loading him into an ambulance for the hospital run down Highway 101. On a particularly treacherous bend near Cannon Beach, the ambulance crashed. When police arrived at the wreckage, they found the medics unconscious but no trace of the injured logger. A three-day search of the surrounding forest yielded nothing except a single piece of bloodied bandage. The logger was never found, and his body was never recovered.

After the accident, reports of a terrifying figure began circulating among locals and travelers. Witnesses described a creature covered in dirty, bloody, oozing bandages, walking with an unnatural gait along the roadside or through the forests near Cannon Beach. The Bandage Man carried with him a foul, putrid stench of rotting flesh that often alerted people to his presence before they could see him. He was said to prey primarily on teenagers parked in their cars along the highway, and on drivers of pickup trucks and convertibles, leaping into the back of vehicles only to vanish before reaching town.

The most widely retold encounter dates to the 1950s, when a young couple parked in a truck near Cannon Beach heard rustling in the bed of the vehicle, then detected a horrible smell. When they turned to look, they saw the bandaged figure peering through the rear window at them. The creature began banging its fists against the glass. The driver gunned the engine and sped away, and when they stopped at a safe distance, they found a bloodied bandage left behind in the truck bed.

Variant versions of the legend substitute the logger for an injured fireman, an electrician, or other workers, but the core elements remain consistent across all tellings: the figure is always wrapped in bandages, always carries the stench of decomposition, and always haunts the roads near Cannon Beach. In 1974, University of Oregon folklore student Debbi Gentling documented the legend in a research paper titled "The Bandage Man: A Cannon Beach Legend," confirming that the story had been circulating and evolving through oral tradition since at least the 1950s.

Some researchers have noted that the timeline of the legend's emergence coincides with Universal Pictures' series of Mummy films. Highway 101 was completed in 1926, and between 1940 and 1944, Universal released four Mummy sequels following the 1932 original starring Boris Karloff. The widespread cultural image of a bandaged, lurching monster may have influenced the shape the legend took. The Cannon Beach History Center and Museum has acknowledged the Bandage Man as a significant piece of local folklore, describing the original logger as having been "chopped up" in the sawmill accident. Whether the Bandage Man is the ghost of a real logger, a folk creation born of dangerous roads and horror movies, or something else entirely, the legend continues to be told along the Oregon coast, and the stretch of Highway 101 near Cannon Beach remains one of the most atmospheric drives in the Pacific Northwest.