Orpheum Theatre
Orpheum Theatre is a theater in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Theater associated with documented cultural history. HauntHunt files it with haunting reports. Ask the file who haunts it and it answers: Larry. The dossier holds 1 reported claim, 1 legend and 1 named or described presence — all telling, no verified spine yet, and the file says so plainly. Access details are unverified — research before visiting.
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Is Orpheum Theatre haunted?
The record holds 1 claim, 1 legend, 1 named entity — 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 house opened at full dress. On October 2, 1913, patrons paid the unheard-of price of five dollars a seat to fill the new Orpheum at 315 North Phillips Avenue — a thousand seats the Solari brothers had built for $63,200 as a state-of-the-art vaudeville stage. A railroad spur ran to the backstage door so touring companies could unload animals, props, and wardrobe trunks directly onto the boards; Jack Benny, Stan Laurel, Edgar Bergen, and the Seven Little Foys all played the room.
The Orpheum booked live acts until 1927, when the Minnesota Amusement Company turned it into a second-run and B-movie house. The Sioux Falls Community Playhouse bought the building in 1954 and made it a stage again; the city owns it now, and it went on the National Register in 1983. It is the oldest theater in Sioux Falls — and, by local account, not entirely empty between shows.
Larry
The reports begin in the community-playhouse era. Radio personality and actor Ray Loftesness was among the first to encounter the unexplainable there in the late 1950s; the most repeated account has a performer delivering a line toward the balcony in 1959 and seeing someone up there who should not have been. Staff and actors have since reported footsteps, blown fuses, dropped sandbags, and lights and sounds from the projection booth — a room with one entrance that was empty every time anyone checked.
In 1972, technical director Jack Mortenson was sweeping the stage after rehearsal, cutting a clean path through the dust, when he noticed a small rectangle lying in the section he had already swept. It was a tintype photograph of a bearded man with an intense stare and rosily tinted cheeks. There was no plausible way for it to have fallen there; the lighting grid above could only be reached by a ladder that was pulling away from the wall. He set the tintype on the lighting board and left by the front door, taking care not to run. No one ever identified the man, and the photograph later disappeared.
What the file makes of it
One telling gives the ghost a motive: an actor who hanged himself after failing to win the part of Romeo. The file files that as local folklore — a name and a biography handed to a presence that nobody has documented. The archive also keeps a cautionary exhibit: in 1981 the Argus Leader staged a double-exposure-style photograph at the Orpheum to give the appearance of a ghost, meaning at least one piece of the legend was manufactured on purpose.
Between the printed prank and the tintype sits the honest residue — decades of staff accounts, attached to a theater old enough to have earned them. The spirit's name is Larry. Nobody knows why.
The record of claims
A spirit called Larry is associated with footsteps. An old theatre in Sioux Falls, South Dakota keeps its dead in the dark between shows — the reports just turn the house lights up. The claim is neighborhood knowledge — retold locally, verified nowhere. 'The Haunted Indoors of Eastern South Dakota' carries the account. The sounds are the site's most consistent claim — the one detail witnesses agree on.
A spirit called Larry is associated with footsteps. Orpheum Theatre's lore is cast like a company: the workers who never left and the audience that never quite emptied. It survives as local folklore, which is to say it survives because people keep telling it. Sources including 'The Haunted Indoors of Eastern South Dakota' keep the claim in circulation. The story outranks the documentation, which is how you know it's folklore.
Alleged entities
A spirit called Larry is associated with footsteps. The theatre's reports favor the booth, the balcony, and the stage — the building's own logic of where a ghost would linger. The report is preserved in sources like 'The Haunted Indoors of Eastern South Dakota'. The lore has a face now: Larry. The file stays open on it.
Sources on file
- 01The Haunted Indoors of Eastern South DakotaTravel South Dakota · tourism · A3
Field notes & open questions
Discovery pass. Earliest attestation, primary history, precise location and current access require independent enrichment.