Tower Theatre

A historic theater in downtown Bend with a tradition of keeping a ghost light on 24/7. Named for its distinctive tower.

Edgar and Myrtle Thompson arrived in Bend, Oregon in 1910, a married couple with modest ambitions and a love of music. They opened a music store, but the small frontier town could not sustain a business selling only instruments and sheet music, so they split their enterprise into two halves: a music store and a furniture shop. The arrangement worked, and the Thompsons became part of the fabric of downtown Bend. Then in 1924, Edgar died, leaving Myrtle to manage both businesses alone. She decided to downsize, and sold half of her property to the Tower Theatre Company, which would eventually build the Tower Theatre on the site.

The Tower Theatre itself was constructed in 1940 in roughly three months by two shifts of workers employed by local contractor Fred Van Matre. The original seating capacity was 998, and the thirty-by-eighteen-foot stage hosted vaudeville shows, community concerts, weekly amateur hours, fashion shows, plays, and first-run movies. It became the cultural heart of Bend, the place where the community gathered for entertainment and shared experience. For over eighty-five years, the Tower Theatre Foundation has operated as a nonprofit performing arts organization, and the theater remains Central Oregon's leading venue for live performance.

The Thompsons never left. During a performance one evening, a gentleman on stage looked out into the audience and saw, in the very back row near the lighting equipment, a little old lady and a little old man seated together, watching the show with quiet contentment. He proceeded with his lines, looked away, and when he looked back, they were gone. The woman was identified as Myrtle Thompson. The couple has been seen repeatedly over the decades, always together, always in the same area of the theater, apparently enjoying performances from beyond the grave just as they must have enjoyed them in life.

A medium who visited the theater reportedly communicated with the spirits and relayed a specific request: Myrtle wants her own seat at the Tower. The theater obliged. Seats 105 and 106 in Row M, located in the far back of the floor seating next to the sound control booth, are now informally reserved for Edgar and Myrtle. The seats are available for the living to use, but theater staff and regular patrons know whose seats they really are. Performers and audience members have reported seeing the elderly couple materialize in those seats during shows, watching with the same quiet pleasure described in the earliest sighting.

Following theatrical tradition, the Tower Theatre maintains a ghost light that stays on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In theater lore, a ghost light is a single bare bulb left burning on an empty stage to appease the spirits that inhabit the space, ensuring they have light to perform by when the living have gone home. At the Tower Theatre, the tradition carries particular weight, given that at least two identified spirits are known to frequent the building.

The Tower Theatre is included on the Bend Ghost Tours route, operated in partnership with the Deschutes Historical Society, and the story of Edgar and Myrtle Thompson is considered one of the most compelling and well-documented hauntings in Central Oregon. Unlike many ghost stories built on tragedy and violence, the Tower Theatre haunting is a love story: a couple who came to Bend to sell music, who sold their land so a theater could be built, and who returned after death to enjoy the very performances their sacrifice made possible.