{"id":1810,"slug":"acme-theatre-riverton-wyoming","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["The Acme won a fight before it was a building. In the 1910s Belle Mote — a Riverton businesswoman whose husband initially refused to back her and who was reportedly turned away from a rental on the grounds that film was not a woman's industry — opened a movie house anyway and ran her competitor out of business inside a year or two, taking his theater's name with the victory. The Acme's permanent Main Street home followed, opening July 14, 1920.","Mote ran it as a community engine, not just a screen. For the 1923 release of The Covered Wagon she put the film's local Arapaho cast members on stage and had them stump around the region doing publicity stunts; the campaign won her a silver cup and, by local account, the director's verdict that it was the best the film got anywhere. Ownership later passed to Tom Knight, a future mayor, and through chains to Barry Cinemas in 2012. The Acme still shows first-run movies, among Wyoming's oldest working theaters."]},{"heading":"The report on file","paragraphs":["Wyoming's tourism office carries the Acme's ghost story in its haunted-places roundup: a shadowy figure patrons have reported watching films from the balcony, sometimes speculated to be a vaudeville-era performer who never left. Riverton Museum lore adds footsteps like crunching popcorn in an empty house. Nothing identifies the figure or dates the first report; the file keeps it as a documented legend — a theater that never quite empties, in the telling if not in fact."]}],"name":"Acme Theatre","aliases":[],"type":"THEATER","type_label":"Theater","cats":["HAUNTED_LOCATION"],"groups":["hauntings","institutions"],"desc":"Theatre with a balcony-apparition tradition.","full_desc":"Acme Theatre is a theater in Riverton, Wyoming. Theatre with a balcony-apparition tradition. It sits in the archive under haunted locations. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend — all telling, no verified spine yet, and the file says so plainly. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. The dossier keeps the place and the story in the same record — which is what the archive is for.","address":"312 E. Main St.","city":"Riverton","county":null,"state":"Wyoming","postal":null,"region":"West","lat":43.026256,"lon":-108.381303,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"UNKNOWN","access":"UNKNOWN","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Pass 1 source-grounded discovery; independent historical verification, coordinates and current access still pending. Confidence measures attribution quality, not paranormal reality.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"LOW","score":43.1,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0,"source_quality":0.6,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":939,"type":"APPARITION","description":"Wyoming Office of Tourism recounts an alleged former performer watching from the balcony. Acme Theatre's lore is cast like a company: the workers who never left and the audience that never quite emptied. '15 Haunted Places to Visit in Wyoming' preserves the telling; the record keeps it filed where it belongs, as lore. Whatever walks there, it walks often enough to keep the reports coming.","evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","evidence_label":"Documented legend","entity":null,"where":"Balcony","first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.6,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"15 Haunted Places to Visit in Wyoming","url":"https://travelwyoming.com/blog/stories/post/haunted-places-to-visit-in-wyoming/","publisher":"Wyoming Office of Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"Wyoming Office of Tourism recounts an alleged former performer watching from the balcony. Acme Theatre's lore is cast like a company: the workers who never left and the audience that never quite emptied. It's a documented legend: the telling is real, the contents remain folklore. Sources including '15 Haunted Places to Visit in Wyoming' keep the claim in circulation. Every community keeps one story like this; this is theirs.","earliest":null,"evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","source":{"name":"15 Haunted Places to Visit in Wyoming","url":"https://travelwyoming.com/blog/stories/post/haunted-places-to-visit-in-wyoming/","publisher":"Wyoming Office of Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}}],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Access details are unverified; research before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"15 Haunted Places to Visit in Wyoming","url":"https://travelwyoming.com/blog/stories/post/haunted-places-to-visit-in-wyoming/","publisher":"Wyoming Office of Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":1,"history":0,"legends":1,"entities":0,"sources":1}}