Cincinnati Music Hall

Cincinnati Music Hall is one of the great Victorian auditoriums in the United States, a Venetian Gothic landmark of red brick and ironwork in Over-the-Rhine. It was designed by Samuel Hannaford and built between 1876 and 1878 on land the city had bought on Elm Street in 1818. The main hall opened on 14 May 1878, and the building has been home to the May Festival, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Pops and the Cincinnati Opera. It also hosted the 1876 Republican and 1880 Democratic National Conventions. It became a National Historic Landmark in the mid-1970s, and a $143 million renovation reopened it in October 2017.

The ground beneath it is the key to its ghost stories. An 1830 map shows a potter’s field on the block, where the city buried paupers, immigrants and people who died without friends. After the cholera outbreak of 1832 the site continued as a pauper’s cemetery until 1857, then briefly became a park. When the foundation was dug in October 1876, workers found human remains, and crowds watched boxes being filled with bones; the Music Hall Association’s W. H. Harrison, who also sat on the board of Spring Grove Cemetery, arranged a plot for the proper reburial of the skeletons. More remains turned up when a tunnel was dug in 1927, when three coffins, one marked for George Pollock, who died in 1831, were uncovered and souvenir hunters carried off bones, and again in 1988, when elevator-shaft drilling brought up more than 200 pounds of bones and the coroner investigated. Bones turned up again during the 2016–17 renovation, and were believed to have been reinterred at Spring Grove.

The ghost reports are the kind that circulate among staff. The Friends of Music Hall record Erich Kunzel, the late Pops conductor, saying he believed the spirits in the building were friendly, and Cincinnati Opera’s Patricia Beggs recalling that in the 1990s an employee’s three-year-old son pretended to perform on an empty stage and said a man in box 9 was waving at him. A box-office worker reported that the window bell rang repeatedly with no one there, and then felt a tug on his sleeve and saw a little boy in knickers and a cap. A former night watchman, John Engst, wrote in 1987 of hearing music from no source and a tingling feeling by the first-floor elevator shaft. Staff talk of a singing woman, visitors in old-fashioned clothes, angry whispers in the elevators and the sense of being watched.

Many of those who work there say the experiences are happy ones, and some think the spirits are former patrons who loved the place, while others have never had one. The building’s acoustics, drafts and a history of renovation may explain some of the sounds. The burial ground itself is documented fact, and the reburials at Spring Grove show a long tradition of trying to treat the dead with respect, which is as much a part of the story as the ghosts.

A window bell ringing with no one there, a small boy in knickers and a cap, a man waving from box 9, a singing woman, whispers in the elevators, music from no source and a feeling of being watched.

Box 9 and the stage, the box-office window, the first-floor elevator shaft and the elevators; the south end of the building stands on the old potter’s field.

Music Hall’s ghosts are discussed by the Friends of Music Hall, who ran guided ghost tours, and by Cincinnati media at Halloween. Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops made the hall known to a national audience.