Roseland Theater

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.