Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions – Part 3

GHOSTS

[Thank you for reading “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms,” my survey of the paranormal beliefs and traditions of theater folk.  I’m up to Part 3 now, the start of my accounts of some of the stories about theater ghosts and haunted playhouses.  (Parts 1 and 2, posted on Rick On Theater on 14 and 17 August, respectively, covered the superstitions to which actors and other theater workers subscribe.) 

[I’m starting off with tales of hauntings in regional theaters, that is, theaters outside New York City.  (Part 4, coming up, will recount the ghost stories associated with houses in New York, mostly the Broadway theaters.)  As I observed in Part 1, nearly every theater seems to be inhabited by at least one spirit, especially the old houses (or ones built on the site of an older structure).

[After reading Part 3, below, you’ll be convinced that that’s probably true.  By the time you get through Part 4, you’ll be certain of it!  So, relax and indulge your supernatural tendencies and read about some of the spooks that haunt our entertainment centers.

[“Only . . .,” as Tevye, the milkman of Fiddler on the Roof, says to his wife Golde when he’s about to tell her a different kind of theater ghost story (one told in a play, as distinguished from one told about a playhouse), “don’t be frightened!”]

Let’s move on to the pièce de résistance of theater superstitions: haunted theaters.

No type of building is as frequently haunted as theaters.  (Cemeteries aren’t buildings, so they don’t count.)  Just about every theater has at least one resident ghost.  If the Soviet formula for concrete was one part cement, one part sand, and one part microphones, the builders’ plans for a new theater seem to be: one seating area, one performing area, one back-stage area, and one ghost.

Theaters that don’t have their own specter can always rely on one spirit to pay them a visit: the ghost of Thespis.  When anything goes wrong in the theater, believers can point to the ghost of Thespis as the culprit if they don’t have their own house spirit.

Thespis is mostly a legendary figure in Western theater lore as almost nothing is known about his life.  A singer of dithyrambs (songs about stories from Greek mythology) in Ancient Greece, he flourished in the 6th century BCE. 

Aristotle (384-22 BCE) records that Thespis was the first performer to step out from the chorus and speak dialogue as a character in the story.  That made him the first actor and, coincidentally, the inventor of Greek drama.  It’s from his name that we get the term for ‘actor’ in the English-speaking world: ‘thespian.’  Thespis won the first documented competition for the best tragedy in 534 BCE at the City Dionysia in Athens.

People who work at theaters around the country (indeed, probably around the world, but I’m going to limit my coverage to the U.S.—plus one) have frequently told of eerie happenings that they can’t explain.  The most common occurrences of this sort, I suspect, are encounters with someone who formerly worked or appeared at the theater but still hangs around after his or her final curtain has rung down. 

“There are several levels of haunting,” instructs Playbill, “ranging from the odd unaccountable noise to actual knocking . . ., to the mysterious opening of doors and cabinets, or the flickering of lights.”   Author Robert Viagas continues:

Sometimes there is a strange cold spot in a room, a colored mist, a floating orb in a photograph, an inanimate object that moves without anyone touching it . . . or the echo of a disembodied voice.  Sometimes you may see a wispy manifestation, a contorted face in a mirror or window.  More rarely you see a full human figure, sometimes ectoplasmically white or sometimes in full natural color.  Even more rarely, the figures speak.  Or touch.

(There are plenty of accounts of ghosts and specters in New York City’s many performance venues, but for the last four years, American Theatre, the monthly magazine about the non-profit theater scene in North America published by the Theatre Communications Group, has posted a yearly article on theater ghost stories from regional companies. 

(Since they mark Halloween, the articles, written by AT managing editor Russell M. Dembin, are all published—only on the journal’s website—on 31 October; when that date rolls around again this year, we’ll see if AT will continue the series beyond last Halloween.  Most of the stories about the regional theater ghosts below are drawn from Dembin’s reports.  I’ve cherry-picked some that seem most intriguing.)

The Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, California (about 10 miles northeast of Los Angeles), has had so many reported sightings and unexplained events that the theater hosts groups who wish to explore the building (built around 1912) for evidence of the paranormal.

There’s even a staff member whose duty, among others, is to coordinate with the paranormal groups.  She herself has reported that after arriving at her office below the prop loft early one morning, she heard overhead what “sounded like a woman walking around in high heels.  Our prop master would never, ever wear high heels,” she asserted.  “Plus I was the only one there, ’cause it was so early in the morning.”

Other Pasadena Playhouse staffers in the theater have also reported footsteps above their heads when no one else was around or ghostly whistling in the basement late at night.  The common belief is that

It’s the spirit of Carrie Hamilton (1963-2002), an actress, singer, and playwright who was the daughter of Carol Burnett, a member of the Pasadena Playhouse board.  The small theater upstairs was rededicated to Hamilton after her death from complications of lung cancer and people have claimed to have seen a woman of Hamilton’s age there wearing a white or yellow dress

Staffers at Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre have reported several incidents of spectral encounters.  Since 1977, the company has occupied an 1883 building (the former stable for the horses of Toronto’s streetcar company) and at least one apparition was dressed in Victorian garb.

That appearance was reported by YPT’s administrative director.  Like the Pasadena Playhouse staffer, he was alone in the old building, working late rather than early.  He was locking up for the night and on the second floor, he checked the ladies’ restroom to see that the lights had been turned off.  He saw that they had been and turned around quickly to head down to the lobby.  

In front of him on the staircase, he saw a young woman in a Victorian-style “chocolate brown satin formal outfit with a floor-length skirt and waist-length jacket.”  The woman looked at the admin director, seemingly alarmed that he’d seen her.  She dashed down to the ground floor, but by the time the admin director followed her seconds later, she’d disappeared.

Probably almost everybody knows the little poem about the man who wasn’t there:

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there!

He wasn’t there again today,

Oh how I wish he’d go away!

(It turns out, serendipitously, that there’s a theater connection here: the poem was a song from a play William Hughes Mearns, 1875-1965, wrote at Harvard in 1899.) 

Another spirit encounter, the sighting of a “man who wasn’t there,” was reported by YPT’s director of operations.  He’d also come in to work early one day, around 6:30 in the morning.  He was coming from the basement up to the Green Room, and as he reached the top of the stairs, he saw the theater’s cleaner pushing her janitor’s cart out of the Green Room.  (An explanation of what the Green Room is is provided in Part 1 of this series.)

Following behind the cleaner, the ops director saw a tall man with no facial features wearing a brown suit.  The ops director glanced away for a second, wondering who the man could be at that early hour.  He had an eerie, bad feeling—and by the time he looked up again, no one was following the cleaner.

Most of the theater ghost stories are about unnamed or unidentified spirits appearing or leaving traces in the theater.  Some have presumed identities, like the spirit of Carrie Hamilton at the Pasadena Playhouse.  Another named ghost manifested itself at the GALA (Grupo de Artistas LatinoAmericanos) Hispanic Theatre in Washington, D.C., as told by the company’s production manager.

Established in the old Tivoli Theatre, opened in 1924 as one of the largest movie palaces in D.C., the theater has experienced a series of weird occurrences.  Mysteriously, the production manager explained, the lights would turn off in the middle of meetings, static would come out of the speakers, the thermostat would be turned all the way down, and the staffer said that she heard someone “when locking up the building before.  One of my painters said she saw [someone] when she was doing an overnight paint call.”

To whom was all this spectral activity attributed?  Harry Crandall, who built the Tivoli and owned a chain of movie houses in the Nation’s Capital. “The rumor,” noted the production manager, “is that he hung himself inside the Tivoli.”

The truth is that Crandall (1879-1937), despondent over the collapse in a two-day blizzard in Washington of his Knickerbocker Theater and the subsequent bankruptcy of his company, killed himself by gas in his apartment.  Reginald Geare, 1889-1927, architect of the Knickerbocker and the original designer of the Tivoli—he was fired after the roof of the Knickerbocker fell in—also committed suicide over the disaster, which killed 98 moviegoers, including a congressman, along with a number of prominent political and business leaders.

(Side note: Geare also designed D.C.’s Lincoln Theatre, one of Crandall’s houses, which has a connection to my family, as I describe in “Lincoln & Howard Theatres: Stages of History,” posted on Rick On Theater on 2 December 2011.)

A number of staffers at the Alley Theatre of Dallas have reported feeling “presences” or sensing figures rushing by them in or around the Hubbard Theatre, housed in the building that’s been the company’s home since 1968.  The theater’s also been the setting of a number of eerie experiences.

The troupe’s director of operations and events himself has several tales of ghostly presences.  One’s an experience that even led some of the housekeeping staff to quit.  One night after a performance, the husband-and-wife cleaning team “witnessed a bloody female figure standing onstage,” and “screamed, ran out of the theatre . . . .”  That act seemed to have unnerved another housekeeper in the lobby and they left the building and didn’t return.

The Alley ops-and-events director continued,

We investigated, of course [and] . . . there was nobody here, but everybody that’s in the housekeeping department said they had been seeing things like somebody walking into the restrooms at night, assuming it was a staff member, but they never came out.  So that when they went into the restrooms, there was just nobody there.  I had several members that were very nervous after that and would refuse to clean anything by themselves.

                                                                                                 

At the Pittsburgh Playhouse, there are several ghosts who haunt the complex in the Oakland section of the city off the campus of Point Park University, of which the theater’s now a division.  At least two have legends connected to the theater or its buildings.  (Pittsburgh Playhouse moved out of its complex of converted buildings three miles from the university campus in 2018.  These tales are associated with the old facilities; I don’t know if the ghosts followed the company.)

“The Lady in White haunts the Rauh Theatre,” said the Pittsburgh’s producing director, referring to its prior main performance space in the former 19th-century German Club.  The story dates back to the late 1920s or early 1930s when the theater was still the German social hall.  A woman in a white nightgown came stalking her wayward husband. In one version of the legend, she was an actress who’d discovered her husband was having a tryst with one of the ladies from the upstairs bordello.  In some tellings, this occurred on their wedding day.

The wedding reception was being held in the downstairs restaurant of the German Club. The Lady in White climbed the steps in a rage, found her husband in flagrante delicto with his paramour, and shot them both dead.  Then she leapt off the balcony to her death, the gun still in her hand.  Reportedly, she still paces that balcony.  (In other versions, the Lady in White shot herself after killing her husband and his woman.)

In recent times. the spirit of the Lady in White appeared as a woman in a long, white nightgown who paced the Rauh balcony, said the producing director, “back and forth calling her dead husband’s name.”

The Lady in White is a disconsolate spirit, said the staffer, but John Johns, another presence at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, is a different matter when he often frequents the Rockwell Theatre, another of the company’s venues.  Johns was an actor at the playhouse starting in the 1930s—though by day, it’s said, he was an accountant.  (The troupe has its origins in 1933.)  

One evening in the 1950s or ’60s, Johns was performing at the Rockwell, costumed in a tuxedo, when he suffered a heart attack onstage.  His castmates carried the actor up to his dressing room, number 7, to wait for the ambulance, but Johns died before they could get him into the room.

In some versions of the account, Johns wasn’t performing that evening, but attending a banquet in the restaurant downstairs.  He customarily wore a tux in the evening; he was reported to have been a handsome man who liked to dress elegantly.  In any case, since that night, people claimed to have heard disembodied footsteps climbing the stairway to dressing room 7, always stopping just outside the door.

“On nights when the theatre has no audience,” recounts the Pittsburgh’s producing director, “he has been known to pop in many different theatre seats clapping for those rehearsing onstage.”  He’s also known to check the props and help with the set construction.  Always dressed in his tux, he’s been seen dancing on stage with the Lady in White as well.

(There’s a caveat regarding John Johns: research shows that the actor did exist and was a Playhouse regular, but there’s no published obituary for him.  Furthermore, a former staffer at the Pittsburgh who knew Johns affirmed that he died at the Oakland Veterans Hospital, not at the theater.)

The David Henry Hwang Theater in Los Angeles, is the Little Tokyo home of the East West Players.  The theater’s in the Union Center for the Arts, built in 1922 as the first Union Japanese American Church.  The EWP director of production explained that during World War II, when Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated to concentration camps, African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos moved into the neighborhood, which became known as Bronzeville during the war period; a predominantly black congregation moved into the church.

EWP staffers say they’ve had a number of unexplained experiences at the theater.  The director of production affirmed that he’d heard many stories during his time at the theater “of an old man (the former groundskeeper of the building) who sits in the balcony (the old choir loft).”  He adds, “Actors have complained about people watching auditions when no one was actually there.  Some employees have encountered specific smells when he’s around, but he seems to be a pretty benign spirit.”

A member of the Penobscot Theatre Company, which occupies the Bangor Opera House in Maine, claimed he’s had many ghost encounters at the theater.  The Opera House, built in 1920, is located in the city that inspired the fictional town of Derry, author Stephen King’s frequent setting for his horror and supernatural fiction. has been the troupe’s home since 1997.  Bangor’s oldest performance space, the opera house stands on the site of another theater which opened in 1882 and burned down in 1914.  

One story tells of a firefighter who died in that blaze and still haunts the new theater.  Penobscot actors frequently see a dark apparition in the former balcony that now serves as a storage space, and some believe that it’s the firefighter.

A recent appearance happened during a production of Wait Until Dark in the fall of 2018.  The longtime troupe member, who was in the cast (as “Sgt. Carlino,” one of the bad guys in Frederick Knott’s terror play), described the specter as a “big, tall man in the balcony,” and dark “like a shadow.”  The actor noticed this figure while onstage during a recent performance. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell,” he says, “because spot-ops [spotlight or followspot operators] can be up there.  But no one is up there for this show.”

Among the other ghosts that haunt the Bangor theater, most are poltergeists (German for “noisy ghost” or “noisy spirit,” from the combining form of poltern, ‘to make a rumbling sound’).  They cause occurrences like eerie plumbing phenomena.  But another haunt in the opera house is the manifestation of a “little girl in a light dress with long, flowing hair.  Transparent and kind of fuzzy, not in focus,” according to a troupe production stage manager.

New Orleans is rife with spirits, ghosts, and ectoplasmic emanations.  At Le Petit Théâtre du Vieux Carré in the city’s famed French Quarter, founded in 1916, there are many tales of hauntings, including one of the spirit of an actress who “threw herself from the catwalks, got caught by a rope from the fly system on her way down,” and died, all for the unrequited love of the production’s leading man, according to the theater’s former technical director.

The TD insisted that he’s “[n]ot much of a believer in the ghostly apparitions” and never paid much attention to the stories of the paranormal at the Petit Théâtre.  As he put it, things changed one early morning about 3 a.m. when he was working alone in the theater, preparing for the next production.

Uncharacteristically, the TD recounted, the French Quarter, usually alive with sound and movement at all hours, was quiet.  At one point,

he was facing the stage from the edge of the apron, with his back to the house.  “With no warning, a loud swoosh was heard from the stage right leg curtain [see part 2], and it fluttered just like something was rapidly sliding down it, jerking near the bottom and waving about as if someone was shaking up against it.  Nearly as quickly as it started, the curtain became calm, swinging from upstage to downstage like a lazy pendulum from near its base, till it settled finally on its own, as if nothing untoward had occurred.”

“Hello?!” he called out, his voice shaking “from the injection of adrenaline I’d just been dosed with.”  He shouted the names of the few others with keys to the building—he doubted that someone would stop in at that hour on a weeknight with an early call the next day, but there was no other explanation.  “Slowly I made my way to the center of the stage, eyes locked on the now quiescent curtain, hoping against hope to see someone putzing about or staged behind the curtain, ready to laugh at my reaction, combined with a hearty back slap and a, ‘Go home, Alex!’ Nothing.”

He continues, “On profile now with the errant velour, looking directly stage right at it, I took a quick glance to see if the air conditioning could cause such calamitous careening from the curtain.”  The air conditioning was off. “Nothing had fallen from the defunct catwalk, nor the batten the leg was hung from.  As I dared to get closer, now slightly more cautious than a moment before, I started to hear the sound again.  Right in front of me!  The billow began its fateful trip down the inky black, inherently flame-retardant fabric, almost frenzied this time.”

At that point [the tech director] dropped his work, raced out of the theatre, “swore not to work in that place alone at night again, and dodged the foot traffic on Bourbon and Chartres Streets on my bike all at the same time and before the cursed ghost of showmances past could complete the reenactment of her fateful fall.”

The TD admitted that “Le Petit may very well not be haunted.”  He’s “still on the fence about the paranormal,” he continued.  He couldn’t explain what happened in the theater early that morning, and he added,  “[D]arned if anyone else can either!”

The Tenth Avenue Arts Center (also known as the Tenth Avenue Theater) in San Diego is home to at least four spirits and one suspected spectral visitor.  Built in 1924 as the First Baptist Church of San Diego’s chapel for military personnel and converted to a performance space in 2007, the theater seems to revel in its ghostly history. 

It authorized Alex Matsuo, an actor, director, playwright, and paranormal researcher, to research and write The Haunting of the Tenth Avenue Theater (2015; Llewellyn Publications) and it stages performances that evoke (if not invoke) the haunted reputation of the theater.  The theater also hosts a Halloween “paranormal investigation” by an organization called TheDeadTalk. 

Participants might expect to meet some or all of the theater’s spooks, which began to appear as soon as the old chapel started serving as a theater.  According to the website of the Association of Paranormal Study, manifestations include “voices from a child running up and down the stairs to orders being barked in a British accent” and more.  

The child is a little girl called “Missy” who died in the 1960s by falling down the stairs while playing “a chasing game” with one of the church’s ministers.   The minister with whom Missy was playing hanged himself out of guilt over causing the little girl’s death.

The barked orders heard in the theater come from a British World War II lieutenant who was killed in Japan. His spirit possessed the doctor who had treated him; the doctor came to San Diego and to the chapel to pray for the men who’d perished.  The lieutenant’s ghost then left the doctor’s body but apparently stayed around the chapel building even after it was converted into a theater.

The fourth ghost at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center is a woman named Carol Laroc (or Lorac, but I think that’s a typo; I’ll call her Carol to be safe).  Carol was a devoted member of the church congregation; she had obsessive-compulsive disorder and still keeps an eye on the building.

There may be a fifth ghost in the theater, suspected because of unexplained occurrences in the early mornings, but the source hasn’t been identified yet.  It’s thought to be a young boy haunting the building’s basement.

(Some research was conducted on the ghost stories connected with the theater, but no confirmation could be found for either the tragic tale of Missy or the putatively suicidal priest.  There’s no record of any accidental fall at the church, either.  No word concerning the other suspected supernatural stories was provided.)

The Lincoln Square Theater in Decatur, Illinois, is known as one of most haunted places in the area, and possibly even in the whole country. The Lincoln Theater (the name was simplified at one point in its long history, dropping the “Square”) was built on the same plot where the Priest Hotel burned down in 1915, and the new theater opened in 1916.  Two men died in the fire, but there were also hotel guests who were never accounted for after the fire, so the death toll is believed to be much higher. 

Starting in the 1930s, ghost stories began to circulate.  One story is about “One-Armed Red,” a stage hand during the vaudeville era.  The legend is that during a performance, Red—his real name is lost to history—fell off a grid 75 feet above the stage and his arm got caught by a hook and torn from his body.  The story says he died almost immediately. 

Red’s spirit stalks the theater, but he’s not the only one.  Sightings include a woman in a long, white, old-fashioned dress, for instance.  Many other manifestations have appeared to theater workers, but most haven’t matched Red’s description.  (For one thing, Red had distinctive, bright auburn hair.) 

Some people believe that the other spirits are the ghosts of the victims of the hotel fire.  Reported encounters at the theater have included footsteps, cold chills, hooded figures, and being touched by someone.

The legend aside, Red did die at the Lincoln Theater, but not from a fall.  He also had really lost an arm, but it was from combat in Europe in World War I—and he was a phenomenon back stage at the theater, out-working his younger fellow stage hands and doing it all with one arm.  One afternoon, Red took a nap back stage and simply never woke up.

The Orpheum Theatre in Memphis, Tennessee, was originally built in 1890 as the Grand Opera House; in 1907, the theater became known as the Orpheum.  Principally a vaudeville house, it burned down in 1923.  The new building opened in 1928 and is listed on the National Registrar of Historic Places.  According to rumors, the theatre is haunted by the ghost of a 12-year-old girl named Mary.

Mary had no connection to the Orpheum in life, and stories vary concerning how she came to haunt the theater.  The most common explanation is that she was killed nearby in an accident.  In one version, young Mary was injured in a car accident in 1921, while in another she was struck by a trolley in 1928.  In both tellings, the injured Mary was carried into the Orpheum, where she died and her spirit stayed in the theater.

In 1979, a group of paranormal investigators from what was then Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) examined the Orpheum using séances and a Ouija board and determined that the little girl died in 1921 in a falling accident in downtown Memphis.  Mary’s ghost simply wandered into the Orpheum after the accident.  She liked it there, so she stayed.

Apparently Mary, described by those who’ve seen her as a shy little girl with brown braids and a white dress, likes to play pranks on the living.  People have reported hearing her giggle or walking up and down the aisles.  Other reports include doors opening and closing on their own, flickering lights, tools emptied into toilets, and doors swinging open and shutting loudly.

Such happenings even spooked Yul Brynner (1920-85) while he was rehearsing for The King & I in 1982.  A séance was also performed in 2019 by the touring cast of Fiddler on the Roof to try to contact Mary and anyone else haunting the theater.  While her blank stare and ethereal appearance have unnerved some of those who’ve seen her, Mary’s never been known to disrupt a performance.

Some people connected with the Orpheum claim to know of as many as six other spirits in addition to Mary who inhabit the theater.  One has a curious relation to the little girl’s spirit.  He’s known as David (though that’s just a name of convenience) and he’s waiting to escort Mary to “the other side.”  Since she likes the beautiful old theater and refuses to leave, however, David can’t leave either and therefore he must spend eternity in the Orpheum with her.

[There are nearly endless stories of haunted theaters, almost always of old buildings and usually associated with tragedies or accidents in the theaters—though not always.  I’ve selected a few of the ones I found for retelling here, but this barely scratches the surface.

[“Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions,” Part 3, has focused on the ghost tales of theaters around the country (plus one in Canada) outside of New York City.  On Sunday, 23 August, I’ll post the fourth and final installment of this series, which retells several of the ghost stories about some of the country’s theater capital’s 41 Broadway houses.  Please return to Rick On Theater for the completion of my spooky series.

[Just remember what Tevye says, though . . . .]