The Bandage Man of Cannon Beach, Oregon

Nov 14

Along the sandy shores of Oregon, you’ll find the small coastal city of Cannon Beach, but to get there, you’ll most likely have to drive through highway 101. It’s a seemingly normal highway during the daytime hours of the day but, if you believe the legends, at night there is a mummy-like ghost that patrols the highway looking for victims.

The Legend of The Bandage Man

During the Second World War, sawmills in Oregon saw an increase in production as construction boomed due to labor shortages. As the men and women working at the mills rushed to complete their tasks, it’s no surprise the number of accidents shot up.

After a bad rainstorm, a logger slipped and slid onto one of the saw blades in a way that left deep gashes down his body. His co-workers were quick in getting an ambulance to arrive and seeing the severity of the cuts, the medics wrapped his entire body in bandages.

The ambulance sped off but coming upon a bend on Highway 101 near Cannon Beach, the slippery road caused the ambulance to crash. A short time later, police arrived finding the medics unconscious and the man, wrapped in bandages, gone.

A search was conducted over the course of the next three days but was eventually called off. There were no reports of him wandering into a hospital, no sightings, and many that due to his injuries, this dead body would be found eventually. The only thing ever found was a small piece of a bloody bandage.

The Bandage Man Returns

Several years later, a young couple parked their pickup truck along a secluded section of Cannon Beach on Highway 101 late at night. Moments after parking, the two heard rustling sounds coming from the nearby woods but assumed it was just the wind.

A smell of rotting flesh overtook the two as the truck shook as if someone had climbed onto the back. Looking through the small window, they were terrified to see a man covered in bloody bandages staring back at them.

The bandaged man began yelling out and banging on the top of the truck. The driver started up the car and peeled out of the spot, swerving down the road, nearly avoiding a crash. When they finally stopped and turned back, the bandage man was gone.

After driving to a well-lit area, the driver crept out of the truck and searched the back. There, he found a torn piece of the bandage man’s bloody bandages.

Since that day, there have been several reports of the bandage man appearing to others in the back or atop their cars. Some claim his appearance has caused multiple accidents and deaths.

The legends say the Bandage Man is now a type of ghoul or zombie looking to feed on flesh. Often, missing pets along Cannon Beach are later found half-eaten and said to be victims of the Bandage Man.

Others have said he is now a type of ghost that wanders around Highway 101 and Cannon Beach, with his spirit forever tied to the place where he died. If you ever drive along Highway 101 and a smell of rotting flesh invades your car, be careful, for the bandage man is somewhere close.

Other Versions

While the legend of the bandage man has endured the last 70 years, there aren’t a lot of variations to it. Usually, the variation comes from the decade the accident happened but almost always it’s the 1930s, 40s, or 50s.

As far as what created him, the most common origin is the sawmill accident but a few of the sources I found claim he was an electrician or firefighter. Either way, somehow the unnamed man became injured and was involved in an ambulance crash.

But Did It Happen?

It doesn’t appear the bandage man legend is based on a real person, instead, it seems the legend was constructed due to the social environment and the very real fear of a dangerous road.

In 1974 Debbi Gentling, a student at the University of Oregon and student of the folklore program wrote a research paper/study entitled “The Bandage Man: A Cannon Beach Legend”. In this paper, Gentling discusses the legend of the Bandage Man having been around and passed down since at least the 1950s but with no exact origin.

Looking through newspapers dating from the 1930s to the 1960s I couldn’t find any reports of a man disappearing from a crashed ambulance. But, I did find dozens of articles about crashes along Highway 101 resulting in multiple deaths and injuries. In fact, one article from 1954 calls a portion of Highway 101 “Death Row”.

Like the legends of Riverdale Road, another supposedly haunted road with dozens of accidents, it’s entirely possible the legend was created because of the multiple deaths that have occurred in the area as a way to “explain” them.

Adding to this theory, at the time Highway 101 was also known to be extremely dangerous due to several narrow curvy sections and its propensity to flood during rainstorms. In the mid-1950s and early 1960s changes to highway 101 that included widening the road and removing the dangerous areas, reduced overall accidents.

But by this time, the legend of the bandage man who would cause some of the accidents had already spread. Maybe the legend gained traction to serve as a warning to drivers and teens who would drive at night along the road.

One last piece to the puzzle, are the bandages. For this, I believe the answer is Hollywood. Highway 101 was completed construction in 1926 and just six years later Universal Pictures released The Mummy starring Boris Karloff.

While it was a modest success, between 1940 and 1944, during the time the bandage man legend spread, Universal Pictures released 4 more Mummy movies.

I think it’s pretty safe to say the widespread knowledge of a mummy-like monster helped spread the legend of the bandage man. A legend that also gained traction due to the dangers of the road the monster was said to haunt.

So while I can’t definitively say this is how the bandage man started, I can say the legend of the bandage man never happened.