Orpheum Theatre, Memphis

The corner of South Main and Beale streets has been home to a theatre since 1890, when the Grand Opera House opened there, billed as the finest playhouse outside New York. It joined the Orpheum vaudeville circuit in 1907 and took its name. On the night of October 16, 1923, half an hour after the last patrons left a show by the singer Blossom Seeley, fire broke out and the building burned to the ground while a huge crowd watched.

The New Orpheum rose on the same site, designed by the Chicago firm of Rapp and Rapp and opened on November 19, 1928 – a gilded French Renaissance palace with crystal chandeliers, a Mighty Wurlitzer organ and seats for well over 2,000, among them a separate balcony for Black patrons under segregation. Malco bought it in 1940 and ran it as a cinema; when it closed in 1976 and demolition was discussed, the Memphis Development Foundation stepped in, restored its old name in 1977 and made it the city’s home for touring Broadway shows.

For more than half a century, staff, performers and patrons have said the theatre is haunted, above all by a girl they call Mary. Accounts of who she was differ: she was hurt in a car accident in 1921, or struck by a trolley outside the theatre in 1928 and carried inside, where she died. A group of paranormal researchers from what was then Memphis State University, using séances and a Ouija board, concluded instead that she died in a fall elsewhere downtown in 1921 and simply wandered into the theatre afterwards and stayed. No record of a girl matching any version has been published.

Memphis historian Vincent Astor and others have claimed as many as six further spirits, including a man some call David, said to be waiting to lead Mary on, and an unhappy presence called Eleanor in the balcony foyer. The theatre has embraced its ghost as a friendly member of the house – she is said never to have disrupted a performance.

Performers and staff describe a girl of about 12 with braided brown hair, in a white dress or what looks like a school uniform, sitting in a mezzanine side box with a blank stare, and a sudden, clammy cold in the balcony foyer that Vincent Astor likened to putting a hand into a tub of raw liver. Other unexplained incidents around the building have been attributed to the theatre’s ghosts for decades.

A side box on the mezzanine level for Mary; the balcony and balcony foyer for “Eleanor”; Sightings of Mary are most often reported by performers looking out from the stage.

Mary is one of Memphis’s best-known ghosts, featured in local Halloween coverage, books on Tennessee hauntings and city ghost tours. The theatre is also a landmark of Beale Street’s revival and one of only a handful of American movie palaces with its original Wurlitzer organ still in place.