Orpheum Theatre

The site has housed a stage since 1890, when the Grand Opera House opened at Main and Beale billed as the classiest theatre outside New York City. It joined the Orpheum vaudeville circuit in 1907, ran nearly two decades of the circuit's best, and burned to the ground in 1923 after a Blossom Seeley performance.

The replacement opened in 1928 — a Rapp and Rapp palace costing $1.6 million, double its predecessor's size, with gold leaf, marble, chandeliers and a Mighty Wurlitzer. When vaudeville waned, the Malco chain turned it to first-run movies in 1940; by 1976 single-screen economics were done and demolition was discussed. The Memphis Development Foundation bought it in 1977, restored the Orpheum name and put it on the National Register — among the first Memphis buildings so listed — and has since spent more than $15 million keeping it a world-class performing-arts house.

Mary is the working ghost. Employees report a little girl singing in the empty theatre, running feet where no one is, dressing-room doors that close themselves, and a presence anchored to seat C-5 on the mezzanine — or, in other accounts, the first box, where a patron at a Jerry Seinfeld show felt tapping on her shoulder all evening and turned to find no one. She is said to favor the Wurlitzer, dancing to its songs after hours.

Staff accounts keep arriving in the modern register: a theatre employee who brought her three-year-old to work during auditions came away a believer after the child reported company no adult had seen. The house keeps a second named ghost as well — Eleanor, the sad one, said to weep in the upper balcony when it is empty. Television psychic Sylvia Browne, reading the theatre by phone in 2010, filed a dissenting ledger — Mary was not a child but a Civil War-era nurse named Mary Margaret Forrester searching for a soldier named David, sharing the building with a 1902 suicide named Clifford — which the archive files as a reminder that even the ghosts get rewritten.

The Orpheum is counted the second most haunted building in Memphis, after Ernestine and Hazel's up the street, and it wears the ranking lightly — staff tell the stories on record and the Tennessee State Museum has filmed them. The record keeps an opera house, a fire and a $1.6 million palace. The legend keeps a girl who never got to see the show — the archive's finding being that she has attended nearly every performance since 1928, from a seat the ushers know by number. The dollhouse, per the file, keeps moving.