{"id":1938,"slug":"roseland-theater-portland-oregon","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["The Roseland was a church before it was a club — the brick building the Apostolic Faith Church raised at NW 6th and Burnside in 1922, built with donated labor, the upstairs sanctuary that seated 1,150 under the three-tier sign that declared Jesus The Light Of The World. Larry Hurwitz bought it in 1981 and made it Starry Night — the club where Metallica and the Beastie Boys played the room the congregation had built for worship.","The murder that gave the building its ghost was real. Tim Moreau was twenty-one, the club's publicity director, a Reed College student — and on January 23, 1990, the day after The Oregonian exposed a counterfeit-ticket scheme tied to the club, Hurwitz called him into the office. A sound engineer held Moreau down while Hurwitz strangled him with a garrote made from a broom handle and speaker wire. The body went out in garbage bags, in a Cadillac trunk, into the Columbia Gorge — and it was never found. Hurwitz was convicted in 2000, served eight years.","The new owners renamed the place Roseland in 1991 — expressly to bury the Hurwitz association. It didn't take. The staff and the concertgoers kept reporting the young man in the hallways — the presence they call Tim, in the building where his body left and never came back. Willamette Week named it the city's Best Haunted Venue. The church became a club; the club became a crime scene; the crime scene kept the name it was given to hide the crime.","The Roseland is the archive's body-never-found file — the church-turned-club where the owner's publicity director was strangled in the office and buried where even the killer couldn't find the grave again. The ghost has a name and an open grave."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["The Roseland Theater is the archive's unresolved-murder file — the Apostolic Faith church that became Starry Night, where Tim Moreau was strangled in 1990 and buried in the Gorge where his body was never recovered, renamed Roseland to bury the association and haunted anyway.","A venue renamed to bury a murder keeps the name it was hiding from — the file's suggestion being that the Roseland's hold is Moreau himself: the twenty-one-year-old whose grave is unmarked somewhere above the Columbia, still reported in the hallways of the building that changed its name to forget him."]}],"name":"Roseland Theater","aliases":["Starry Night"],"type":"THEATER","type_label":"Theater","cats":["HAUNTED_LOCATION"],"groups":["hauntings","institutions"],"desc":"Music venue included on a local ghost-story route.","full_desc":"Roseland Theater is a theater in Portland, Oregon. Music venue included on a local ghost-story route. Built as an Apostolic Faith church in 1922; converted to Starry Night in 1982 and renamed Roseland in 1991. Local lore holds that Travel Oregon recounts haunting stories associated with this tour stop.","address":"8 NW 6th Ave","city":"Portland","county":null,"state":"Oregon","postal":"97209","region":"West","lat":45.536951,"lon":-122.649971,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"ACTIVE","access":"PUBLIC","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":"https://roselandpdx.com/","phone":null,"year_built":1922,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Tourism also links a 1990 murder; original court/newspaper documentation pending. Concert access does not authorize paranormal investigation.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":66.9,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.85,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":0.8,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0.7,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":990,"type":"REPORTED_PRESENCE","description":"Travel Oregon recounts haunting stories associated with this tour stop. An old theatre in Portland, Oregon keeps its dead in the dark between shows — the reports just turn the house lights up. The story is documented as legend — recorded and retold, never verified as fact. Sources including 'Hauntingly Cool Ghost Tours in Oregon' keep the claim in circulation. The haunting claim is now part of the site's identity, filed alongside the documented history.","evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","evidence_label":"Documented legend","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.6,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Hauntingly Cool Ghost Tours in Oregon","url":"https://traveloregon.com/things-to-do/culture-history/hauntingly-cool-ghost-tours-in-oregon/","publisher":"Travel Oregon","type":"TOURISM","authority":3},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[{"description":"Built as an Apostolic Faith church in 1922; converted to Starry Night in 1982 and renamed Roseland in 1991. The theatre's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. Media accounts document it — reported history rather than legend. Sources including 'About Roseland Theater' carry the record. Documented ground is what separates this file from pure legend — this is part of it.","evidence":"MEDIA_REPORTED","date_start":null,"date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"About Roseland Theater","url":"https://roselandpdx.com/about-us/roseland-theater/","publisher":"Roseland Theater","type":"OFFICIAL_SITE","authority":2}}],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"Travel Oregon recounts haunting stories associated with this tour stop. Roseland Theater's lore is cast like a company: the workers who never left and the audience that never quite emptied. It's a documented legend: the telling is real, the contents remain folklore. The report is preserved in sources like 'Hauntingly Cool Ghost Tours in Oregon'. Every community keeps one story like this; this is theirs.","earliest":null,"evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","source":{"name":"Hauntingly Cool Ghost Tours in Oregon","url":"https://traveloregon.com/things-to-do/culture-history/hauntingly-cool-ghost-tours-in-oregon/","publisher":"Travel Oregon","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}}],"entities":[],"events":[{"name":"Concert venue conversion","type":"ADAPTIVE_REUSE","date_start":"1982","date_end":null,"description":"The former Apostolic Faith church in Portland reopened in 1982 as the Starry Night concert hall — later the Roseland Theater — and its conversion from sanctuary to rock venue became Portland music lore, complete with reports that someone, or something, still occupies the balcony. The venue's haunting reputation is now part of its marketing.","evidence":"ADAPTIVE_REUSE","source":{"name":"About Roseland Theater","url":"https://roselandpdx.com/about-us/roseland-theater/","publisher":"Roseland Theater","type":"OFFICIAL_SITE","authority":2}}],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Operating or preserved theater; tours or event tickets may be available—check the official site.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Hauntingly Cool Ghost Tours in Oregon","url":"https://traveloregon.com/things-to-do/culture-history/hauntingly-cool-ghost-tours-in-oregon/","publisher":"Travel Oregon","type":"TOURISM","authority":3},{"name":"About Roseland Theater","url":"https://roselandpdx.com/about-us/roseland-theater/","publisher":"Roseland Theater","type":"OFFICIAL_SITE","authority":2}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Roseland Theater","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roseland_Theater","desc":"Music venue in Portland, Oregon, U.S.","extract":"The Roseland Theater, sometimes called the Roseland Theater and Grill, is a music venue located at 8 Northwest Sixth Avenue in the Old Town Chinatown neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, in the United States. The building was originally a church, constructed by the Apostolic Faith Church in 1922. In 1982, Larry Hurwitz converted the building to a music venue called Starry Night. In 1990, the club's 21-year-old publicity agent was murdered in one of the theater's hallways; Hurwitz was convicted for this murder ten years later. Hurwitz sold the club in 1991, claiming he had lost support from the local music industry. The venue was given its current name during the 1991 ownership transfer. During ","img":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/59/Roseland_Theater%2C_PDX_%282014%29_-_08.JPG/330px-Roseland_Theater%2C_PDX_%282014%29_-_08.JPG?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail","score":108,"lat":45.5233,"lon":-122.67615},"counts":{"claims":1,"history":1,"legends":1,"entities":0,"sources":2}}