Broadway After Dark: 3 Haunted Theaters
The single bulb left burning on every empty Broadway stage is called a ghost light, and at these three houses the name feels earned: a Follies dancer, a producer who never moved out, and a vaudeville palace said to hold a hundred spirits, all within a few blocks of Times Square.
Map the Theaters, South to North
New Amsterdam Theatre: Good Night, Olive
The Art Nouveau jewel that opened in 1903 was the home of the Ziegfeld Follies, and of Olive Thomas, a Follies dancer who died in 1920. Staff and performers have reported her for a century, a young woman in a green dress carrying a blue bottle, drifting through the aisles and backstage halls. Restored to its 1903 grandeur, it still earns a nightly good night to Olive from the crew.
Belasco Theatre: The Producer Upstairs
David Belasco built this theater in 1907 and lived in a ten-room duplex above it, wired so he could watch every performance. He died in 1930, but the story goes that he never left his theater; actors and staff have described a figure in his signature clerical collar in the balcony and the old apartment. The gilded, Tiffany-glassed interior only deepens the sense that someone is still watching.
Palace Theatre: A Hundred Spirits
To play the Palace was once the summit of American vaudeville, and since it opened in 1913 the house has gathered a reputation for staying crowded long after the audience leaves. Performers have counted more than a hundred spirits, among them a cellist in the pit and a little girl watching from the balcony. In a recent feat of engineering the entire theater was lifted some thirty feet skyward, and its ghosts, by all accounts, rose with it.
