Roseland Theater

A music venue in Old Town Chinatown originally built as the Apostolic Faith Church in 1922. Converted to the Starry Night music venue in 1982.

The Roseland Theater occupies a building at 8 Northwest Sixth Avenue in Portland's Old Town Chinatown district that was constructed in 1922 by the Apostolic Faith Church. Church members razed an older building that had housed a saloon on the site and erected a two-story brick structure entirely with donated labor, with a footprint of 100 by 100 feet. The upper floor consisted of a large meeting hall seating 1,150 people, designed with music in mind -- a raised platform could hold up to seventy people, including a forty-piece orchestra. In 1982, nightclub promoter Larry Hurwitz converted the building into a music venue called Starry Night, and for several years it was one of Portland's premier rock clubs.

The haunting at the Roseland traces to a real and documented crime. By January 1990, Hurwitz had been making tens of thousands of dollars selling counterfeit tickets to shows at his own club. The scheme was exposed at a John Lee Hooker show on January 20, when patrons discovered their tickets were fraudulent. Hurwitz needed a fall guy and chose his twenty-one-year-old publicity agent, Timothy Moreau. But Moreau refused to take the blame and threatened to go to police with what he knew. On January 21, 1990, Hurwitz met with associates Harvey Freeman and George Castagnola, and Castagnola volunteered to help kill Moreau and hide the body. Moreau vanished, and despite intensive searches, his remains were never recovered, though investigators believe he was killed in the building and his body disposed of in the Willamette River.

The case went cold for nearly a decade. It was journalist Jim Redden, writing for Willamette Week, whose investigative reporting helped break the case open. In 2000, Hurwitz was convicted after pleading no contest to murder and received an eleven-year sentence, of which he served eight years. George Castagnola pleaded guilty to his role in the murder and was sentenced to ten years. The venue had changed hands and been renamed the Roseland Theater during a 1991 ownership transfer, but the building's dark history followed it.

Staff and concertgoers at the Roseland report hearing whispers and voices in the hallways when no one else is present, described as angry or agitated in tone. Ghostly murmurs and talking have been heard in the ballroom area when the venue is empty, as though a conversation is taking place just out of earshot. People have reported seeing a ghostly face in the upper windows of the building from the street. Cold drafts sweep through the venue with no apparent source, and the sound of footsteps in empty corridors has been noted by staff closing up after shows. The paranormal activity is widely attributed to the spirit of Timothy Moreau, the young man who was murdered within these walls for refusing to participate in a criminal scheme and whose body was never given a proper burial.

In 2008, Willamette Week named the Roseland the Best Haunted Venue in Portland. The building continues to operate as a live music venue, hosting concerts nearly every week. For most patrons, the energy comes from the music. For a few, particularly those who linger in the hallways after the crowd has gone, there is something else entirely.