{"id":236,"slug":"old-lawrence-community-theatre-building-lawrence-kansas","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["The haunting here has a birth certificate: one photograph. The building at 1501 New Hampshire Street went up in the 1950s as the Full Gospel Christian Assembly church and was bought in 1984 by Lawrence Community Theatre — founded by Mary Doveton in 1977 — which opened its renovated stage in January 1985. In 1987, during a dress rehearsal of \"Pack of Lies,\" photographer Jack Riegle shot an image that shows a translucent woman standing between two actors — a woman matching nobody in the building, captured years before Photoshop made such images cheap.","What followed reads like a standard theater file, but it all cites the photograph as patient zero: cold spots on stage, a felt presence in the empty seats, props and set pieces found moved, lights that misbehave, and one actress's report of being shoved down a stairway by unseen hands."]},{"heading":"After the company left","paragraphs":["The theatre itself moved on — a long, difficult search ended in a new building on Bauer Farm Drive, where the company now operates as Theatre Lawrence — and 1501 New Hampshire went back to being a church: Vintage Church uses the old stage and two hundred seats for services and concerts.","The file keeps the honest frame the local paper used in 2010: the photograph is unexplained rather than proven, and the decades of bumps afterward may be a reputation the building inherited from a single strange exposure. A former church turned haunted theater turned church again is a good enough file as it stands."]}],"name":"Old Lawrence Community Theatre Building","aliases":["Vintage Church"],"type":"THEATER","type_label":"Theater","cats":["HAUNTING"],"groups":["hauntings","institutions"],"desc":"Theater associated with documented cultural history.","full_desc":"Old Lawrence Community Theatre Building is a theater in Lawrence, Kansas. 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.","address":"1501 New Hampshire Street","city":"Lawrence","county":null,"state":"Kansas","postal":null,"region":"Midwest","lat":38.959551,"lon":-95.265468,"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":183,"type":"HAUNTING","description":"Former theater accounts mention cold spots and flickering lights. Old Lawrence Community Theatre Building'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 account appears in 'Haunted Kansas Road Trip: 13 Spooky Locations to Make…'. 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":"Haunted Kansas Road Trip: 13 Spooky Locations to Make Your Blood Run Cold","url":"https://www.travelks.com/blog/stories/post/haunted-kansas-road-trip-13-spooky-locations-to-make-your-blood-run-cold/","publisher":"Kansas Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"Former theater accounts mention cold spots and flickering lights. Old Lawrence Community Theatre Building's lore is cast like a company: the workers who never left and the audience that never quite emptied. The claim is neighborhood knowledge — retold locally, verified nowhere. The retelling is the record now — the legend metabolized the facts long ago.","earliest":null,"evidence":"LOCAL_FOLKLORE","source":{"name":"Haunted Kansas Road Trip: 13 Spooky Locations to Make Your Blood Run Cold","url":"https://www.travelks.com/blog/stories/post/haunted-kansas-road-trip-13-spooky-locations-to-make-your-blood-run-cold/","publisher":"Kansas 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":"Haunted Kansas Road Trip: 13 Spooky Locations to Make Your Blood Run Cold","url":"https://www.travelks.com/blog/stories/post/haunted-kansas-road-trip-13-spooky-locations-to-make-your-blood-run-cold/","publisher":"Kansas Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":1,"history":0,"legends":1,"entities":0,"sources":1}}