BENSON HOTEL
Hotel — Portland, Oregon
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/benson-hotel-portland-oregon/

Historic hotel with Simon Benson apparition lore.

A hotel in Portland, Oregon, Benson Hotel is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Historic hotel with Simon Benson apparition lore. The name the accounts keep returning to is Simon Benson. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip.

The Benson is the lumber baron's hotel — the twelve-story brick-and-terra-cotta landmark Simon Benson built in 1913 as an annex to the Oregon Hotel, financed by the $4.5 million sale of the forty-six thousand acres of Columbia River timber he'd spent two decades accumulating. Doyle, Patterson and Beach designed it; the lobby is paneled in Circassian walnut and Italian marble, and it opened as Portland's finest — the hotel that anchored the Broadway business district the Lewis and Clark Exposition had started.
Benson himself was the city's philanthropist — the brass drinking fountains on the downtown corners, the polytechnic school, the park land — and the hotel was his monument. Presidents and film stars stayed; the '59 expansion doubled it; and Portlanders still claim the lobby is haunted by a gentleman in a suit who may or may not be Simon checking the till.
The file keeps the Benson: the timber fortune, the 1913 opening, the fountains and the lobby, and the hotel that Portland's most civic-minded millionaire left to the city.
The Benson is the archive's lumber file — the timber baron's hotel, the walnut lobby, and the Portland landmark the fountains paid for.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
The Benson is the archive's lumber file — the 1913 hotel, the timber-to-hospitality fortune, and the lobby that still defines Portland elegance.
A hotel built on timber keeps its fountains — the file's suggestion being that the Benson's hold is the legacy: the fortune made from forests, the hotel made from the fortune, and the city that still drinks from Benson's fountains.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Documented legend] apparition: Travel Oregon recounts a Simon Benson apparition wandering hotel halls. The hotel keeps the account on its own record — the sort of haunting a building earns one guest at a time. The story is documented as legend — recorded and retold, never verified as fact. The apparition is the file's anchor — every other report orbits it.
  source: Hauntingly Cool Ghost Tours in Oregon (https://traveloregon.com/things-to-do/culture-history/hauntingly-cool-ghost-tours-in-oregon/)

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Hauntingly Cool Ghost Tours in Oregon — Travel Oregon
  https://traveloregon.com/things-to-do/culture-history/hauntingly-cool-ghost-tours-in-oregon/

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HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not.
Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/