Old Lawrence Community Theatre Building
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.
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Is Old Lawrence Community Theatre Building haunted?
The record holds 1 claim, 1 legend — filed as reported, not verified. The heaviest filing is classed local folklore. The archive documents the claim; it takes no position on the ghost.
The record — long form
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.
After the company left
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.
The record of claims
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.
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.
Sources on file
- 01Haunted Kansas Road Trip: 13 Spooky Locations to Make Your Blood Run ColdKansas Tourism · tourism · A3
Field notes & open questions
Discovery pass. Earliest attestation, primary history, precise location and current access require independent enrichment.