public

Reported

Three people have died inside Kay's, and owner Patrick Morton doesn't shy away from saying so. Regulars and ghost hunters alike report that the place holds onto them — a weight in the wood-paneled air, a presence that lingers past last call. Some swear the mural's banjo-playing figure watches from a different angle than it did a moment ago. Stand at the bar long enough and you start to feel like someone is standing just behind you, leaning in — not threatening, exactly, but absolutely there.

Founded in 1934, Kay's Bar has been a fixture of Portland's Sellwood-Moreland neighborhood for over ninety years — a community watering hole that aged gracefully alongside its regulars, from swank nightspot to beloved dive. James Dickey's son claims his father drafted Deliverance here by hand during a poet-in-residence stint at nearby Reed College, which the mural's banjo-playing hillbilly seems to corroborate. Three deaths on the premises, per the owner. The record says neighborhood bar; the atmosphere says something else entirely.