The Haunting of St. Johns Twin Cinemas

Folklorists use the term “ostentation” to describe what happens when people revisit the sites of urban legends enough times that the visiting itself reinforces the legend. From there, the messy, disparate facts of local history get streamlined into punchy, theatrical narratives. Fact checkers be damned.

So, at least it seems, may be the case with the ghost rumored to haunt St. Johns Twin Cinemas, one of the more talked-about hauntings in the Portland area. Local history blogs and even one realty firm’s website will walk you through the story. Originally opened in 1913, what was then known as the Multnomah Theater screened silent films and hosted vaudeville shows. During this time, a performer was brutally murdered in the alleyway behind the theater, according to neighborhood lore.

Though the building has undergone renovations—once in 1983 and again in 2004—and changed owners several times, staff and moviegoers have for decades reported evidence of a haunting, including sudden temperature drops, phantom footsteps and, perhaps scariest but also most difficult to prove, the feeling of being watched.

“Whenever I’m in the women’s restroom alone, I feel like there’s someone in there with me,” Twin Cinemas regular Sasha Erickson tells WW.

That said, the vaudeville ghost is apparently a kindly spirit. He wears a top hat and cape, according to a blog on HauntedHouses.com, which added that he “considers himself to be part of ‘the team,’ and tries to be helpful.”

Though most of the theater employees I spoke with hadn’t yet met the ghost, Quay McMillin, a recent hire, bumped into him two weeks ago.

“I was cleaning the upstairs theater, and when I was throwing something away in the trash, I saw a person out of the corner of my eye on the ramp that leads to the bathroom—a tall man, brown hair, red coat, khaki pants, brown shoes,” McMillin said. “When I looked back, not even a second later, he was gone.”

No top hat or cape, but any good performance involves at least one costume change, right?

Testing the legend, the volunteer hobbyist group North Oregon Paranormal Investigations conducted a walk-through in 2009. The investigation collaborated with a psychic, but its strongest evidence was scientific—spikes in electromagnetic fields that didn’t align with the building’s modern wiring, particularly around the stage area and the older balcony sections.

The experts have spoken: St. Johns Twin Cinemas is definitely haunted.

The trouble is that there are virtually no historical news clippings or police records of an actor being murdered in the alley behind the theater.

Even though the original theater was built before St. Johns was annexed by the city of Portland, the town still had its own weekly newspaper—the St. Johns Review—which printed everything from global news to neighborhood gossip. Surely something would have turned up there. Not to mention, once St. Johns fell under the jurisdiction of the Portland Police Bureau, the city’s formalized county coroner system would have indexed any record of a homicide.

And St. Johns’ history is riddled with those. It’s really an ideal home for an unsettled spirit. In 1903, for example, two sisters who were part of the township’s elite committed a high-profile murder with arsenic. In 1949, a 15-year-old Roosevelt High School student was abducted and killed near present-day Cathedral Park while waiting for her bus.

Ghosts from both stories feature prominently in Slabtown Tours, a research-based walking tour company that explores several of Portland’s most notorious hauntings, as does the haunting of St. Johns Twin Cinemas. Yet even Slabtown Tours owner Tanya Lyn March, who has a master’s degree in historic preservation from Columbia University, admits the origin story doesn’t quite check out.

“There’s a huge amount of activity [at the Twin Cinemas] and, of course, people probably died. But the story about the gruesome murder of a vaudeville performer is a rumor,” March says. “Either way, theaters are incredibly superstitious places—the idea that the ghost of an old performer continues to haunt a stage is a great story. But here we get into the problem of ghost stories. There is no documented case of a bad death. But people have seen that ghost for years.”

Because both the Cathedral Park and the arsenic murders are well-documented historical events, it seems odd that the paper trail connecting the supposed murder of a vaudeville performer to a ghost story went cold. But then paper trails aren’t always so important. People love ghost stories.

“We don’t just run from scary things,” Dr. Jeannie Banks Thomas, a leading figure in folklore studies, writes in her book Putting the Supernatural in Its Place. “We run to them as well—and some of us do this commonly.”

Personally, I have no doubt that St. Johns Twin Cinemas is haunted. As far as the specter’s backstory is concerned, my theory is that it was pieced together over time to compete with Portland’s Bagdad Theater, which is haunted by a former stagehand rumored to have committed suicide backstage. To this day, he can be found sauntering behind the screen, whispering nonsense. Rumor has it, McMenamins Ghost Tours turns quite the profit.