New Amsterdam Theatre

Olive Thomas is the most active ghost on Broadway, and she has a routine. Staff at the New Amsterdam Theatre greet her photograph at the entrance when they arrive — a ritual Disney institutionalized after too many incidents — and security does a nightly sweep for fans who hide in the balconies hoping to stay past closing. Thomas was a Ziegfeld Follies girl who died in Paris in 1920 at twenty-five, poisoned by her husband Jack Pickford's syphilis medication — accident, suicide, or murder, depending on who tells it. She's been seen in the New Amsterdam ever since: a woman in a green dress carrying a blue bottle, walking through walls on the way to the stage she never stopped wanting.

The theatre she haunts was called 'The House Beautiful' the morning after it opened in 1903 — the Times barely mentioned the play, which was A Midsummer Night's Dream, and spent the review on the building. Florenz Ziegfeld moved the Follies in in 1913 and ran them for fourteen years — Will Rogers, Fanny Brice, W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, and the line of chorus girls Ziegfeld 'glorified,' of whom Olive Thomas was the most beautiful and the most doomed.

The theatre became a movie house in 1937 and decayed with Times Square until Disney leased it in 1995 and restored it — the renovation that anchored the 42nd Street revival. Aladdin plays there now. The Art Nouveau interior is a landmark; the ghost is on payroll. Olive Thomas died a hundred and five years ago and still gets greeted at the door.