ACME THEATRE
Theater — 312 E. Main St., Riverton, Wyoming
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/acme-theatre-riverton-wyoming/

Theatre with a balcony-apparition tradition.

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.

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.

THE REPORT ON FILE
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.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Documented legend] apparition: 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.
  source: 15 Haunted Places to Visit in Wyoming (https://travelwyoming.com/blog/stories/post/haunted-places-to-visit-in-wyoming/)

SOURCES — 1 cited
· 15 Haunted Places to Visit in Wyoming — Wyoming Office of Tourism
  https://travelwyoming.com/blog/stories/post/haunted-places-to-visit-in-wyoming/

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