O'Kane Building

The largest commercial building in Bend, built in 1916 by Hugh O'Kane with reinforced concrete. Designed by the Beezer Brothers of Seattle at approximately 26,000 square feet.

Hugh O'Kane was born in 1854 in Bushmills, County Antrim, Ireland, near the famous whiskey distillery, and by the time he arrived in Bend, Oregon in 1904, he had already lived several lives. His claimed adventures included boxing in Cape Town, smuggling arms into Cuba for rebels that resulted in nine months of imprisonment at Morro Castle, and encounters with Old West figures like Doc Holliday and Calamity Jane. In Bend, O'Kane opened The Office saloon at the corner of Bond and Oregon streets, a business he ran twenty-four hours a day with rotating staff. He understood that visiting sheepherders and cowboys arriving with a year's pay would spend freely, so he added bunks and a restaurant to his saloon so a man could eat, sleep, drink, and gamble without ever leaving the premises.

Fire seemed to follow O'Kane. The Office saloon burned down within a year of opening. Undeterred, he rebuilt on the same site, constructing the Bend Hotel, which quickly became a Central Oregon landmark and gathering place for businessmen and travelers alike. Then on August 30, 1915, fire destroyed the Bend Hotel as well. After losing two wood-framed buildings to flames, O'Kane hired the Beezer Brothers architectural firm of Seattle to design something that could not burn. The result was the O'Kane Building, a two-story, 26,000-square-foot commercial structure built of reinforced concrete, brick, and plaster, completed in 1916. It was the first reinforced concrete building in Bend and was described at the time as the largest and finest business building in town. O'Kane, who by then weighed about 300 pounds, spent most of his afternoons lounging in a chair propped against the building he had finally built to last.

O'Kane was more than a saloon keeper. He served as a city alderman and, alongside Maurice Cashman and Father Luke Sheehan, helped establish St. Charles Hospital in 1917 and St. Francis Church in 1920. When the Ku Klux Klan held a meeting at a local theater, O'Kane attended to provide security for Father Luke's speech challenging the Klan's persecution of Catholics. When O'Kane died in 1930, he left a substantial bequest to St. Francis Parish that enabled the parish school to open in 1936.

The paranormal activity in the O'Kane Building spans its multiple floors and has persisted across decades and through numerous business tenants. People passing by on Oregon Avenue at night have reported seeing strange lights moving on the top floor of the building when no one should be inside, accompanied by unexplained smoke drifting past the windows. A ghost waitress is heard shouting orders in the restaurant space, her voice sharp and urgent as though calling out to a kitchen that closed generations ago. In the basement, an old man's apparition has been seen by workers and visitors, a figure who seems connected to the building's earliest days. Almost every business that has occupied the space has reported weird occurrences, from objects moving on their own to unexplained sounds in empty rooms.

Visitors on Bend Ghost Tours, which include the O'Kane Building on their route, have captured photographs showing unexplained mists, shadow figures, orbs, and what appear to be faces in their images, anomalies that were not visible to the naked eye when the photos were taken. The O'Kane Building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986 and today hosts several businesses including Smith Rock Records and Red Chair Gallery. Tour operators note that while the paranormal activity is well documented by visitor accounts, the specific identities of the spirits haunting the building remain unknown, though the building's violent history of fires and O'Kane's own larger-than-life personality offer no shortage of candidates.