Bird Cage Theatre

Ownership passed from the Hutchinsons to Hugh McCrum and John Stroufe and then, in January 1886, to Joe Bignon and his wife Big Minnie, who renamed it the Elite — a name that never took. Acts on the stage included Mademoiselle De Granville, billed as the Female Hercules, who lifted heavy objects with her teeth, and a young Eddie Foy, who played two weeks in 1882 and called the place a coffin on account of its shape. Upstairs ran fourteen box compartments — the cribs, draped stalls rented to prostitutes — hanging from the ceiling like the cages that gave the house its name. The end came with the mines: when the Grand Central hoisting works burned on May 26, 1886, the pumps failed, the shafts flooded, silver slid, and by 1892 the Bird Cage went dark. The building was sealed with its contents and not seriously disturbed until new owners opened it in 1934 and found the 1880s waiting inside.

The story the basement tells is the file's set piece. For the better part of a decade — 1881 to 1889 by the usual count — a poker game ran in the cellar around the clock, seats opening only when a player went broke or died. The buy-in is given as a thousand dollars, the house took ten percent, and the names dealt in over the years include Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Diamond Jim Brady, and George Hearst. Local arithmetic puts the money that crossed the table around ten million dollars. The Bird Cage table is still down there, with the chips and the cards the way the last hand left them — which is to say, the way the story needs them.

The reports run on the building's own logic. Staff and visitors file music, laughter, and glasses clinking in an empty saloon; figures on the stage and in the balcony boxes; a woman in period dress crossing the floor; sudden smells of cigar smoke and perfume. Television crews have obliged: Ghost Hunters investigated in 2006, Ghost Adventures in 2009, both claiming voices and responses on cue. As with most of Tombstone, the reports are anecdotal, abundant, and very good for business.

What remains is nearly everything. Because the theatre was sealed rather than stripped, it survives as arguably the most intact boomtown interior in the West — the stage, the boxes, the cribs, the poker table, the bullet holes counted and recounted by guides. The dead, if they are there, have the courtesy to stay in character. The file notes only that the twenty-six killed here left no ghosts with names attached, while the building itself, unpicked for forty years, needed no haunting to be worth the admission.