{"id":272,"slug":"mounds-theatre-st-paul-minnesota","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["The Mounds Theatre went up in 1922 on Hudson Road in St. Paul's Dayton's Bluff neighborhood, a silent-movie house with a stage for live acts. Remodelings around 1933 and 1950 kept it running until it closed in July 1967; it spent more than three decades as a warehouse. In 2001 George Hardenbergh donated the building to the Portage for Youth, whose director Raeann Ruth led a renovation — funded partly by a city STAR grant — that reopened it in October 2003 as a grassroots theater and community center for the East Side.","The haunting surfaced early in the renovation and became programming. The theater now bills itself as Minnesota's second-most paranormally active location and runs \"Real Haunted Tours\" each October — one-hour guided nights through the dark auditorium, with a longer version that adds the basement and time to investigate alone."]},{"heading":"Three resident spirits","paragraphs":["Folklore names three resident spirits, and tour lore gives them the theater's own geography: a little girl reported on the stage, plus the usual company of footsteps and voices in the empty house. The accounts live where a converted movie house keeps its dark — backstage, balcony, basement — and none of them predates the early-2000s renovation, which is when the owner announced the building was haunted.","The file reads the sequence plainly: a rescued neighborhood theater that found its resident ghosts during construction and built an October season around them. The tours are documented; the spirits remain reported."]}],"name":"Mounds Theatre","aliases":[],"type":"THEATER","type_label":"Theater","cats":["HAUNTING"],"groups":["hauntings","institutions"],"desc":"Theater associated with documented cultural history.","full_desc":"Mounds Theatre is a theater in St. Paul, Minnesota. Theater associated with documented cultural history. HauntHunt files it with haunting reports. 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. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told.","address":null,"city":"St. Paul","county":null,"state":"Minnesota","postal":null,"region":"Midwest","lat":44.948901,"lon":-93.104063,"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":"Discovery pass. Earliest attestation, primary history, precise location and current access require independent enrichment.","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":208,"type":"HAUNTING","description":"Folklore names three spirits, including a girl onstage. An old theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota keeps its dead in the dark between shows — the reports just turn the house lights up. Local lore carries the account; no documentation has ever caught up with it. Sources including 'Minnesota's Spookiest Sites' keep the claim in circulation. It's the kind of claim that outlives debunkings — too many witnesses, too few explanations.","evidence":"LOCAL_FOLKLORE","evidence_label":"Local folklore","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.7,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Minnesota's Spookiest Sites","url":"https://www.exploreminnesota.com/seasons/fall/spookiest-places-minnesota","publisher":"Explore Minnesota","type":"TOURISM","authority":3},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"Folklore names three spirits, including a girl onstage. Mounds Theatre's lore is cast like a company: the workers who never left and the audience that never quite emptied. It circulates as local folklore — the kind communities keep rather than verify. The report is preserved in sources like 'Minnesota's Spookiest Sites'. Legends accrue where records go silent; this one filled the gap and stayed.","earliest":null,"evidence":"LOCAL_FOLKLORE","source":{"name":"Minnesota's Spookiest Sites","url":"https://www.exploreminnesota.com/seasons/fall/spookiest-places-minnesota","publisher":"Explore Minnesota","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":"Minnesota's Spookiest Sites","url":"https://www.exploreminnesota.com/seasons/fall/spookiest-places-minnesota","publisher":"Explore Minnesota","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":1,"history":0,"legends":1,"entities":0,"sources":1}}