{"id":1249,"slug":"plaza-theatre-performing-arts-centre-el-paso-texas","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["The Plaza Theatre opened on September 12, 1930, screening the musical Follow Thru for a capacity crowd of 2,410. Dallas architect W. Scott Dunne designed the Spanish Colonial Revival palace as an atmospheric house — a vaulted ceiling painted to hold twinkling stars and drifting clouds above a fantasy courtyard. It was advertised as the largest theater of its kind between Dallas and Los Angeles, and it shipped with a Wurlitzer Balaban III pipe organ, one of only six the company ever built.","Television and the emptying of downtown nearly killed it. In the mid-1980s the darkened theater was proposed for demolition to make a parking lot; the El Paso Community Foundation raised a little over $1 million in a six-week campaign — capped by a Rita Moreno benefit the night before the deadline — bought the building from its absentee owner, and deeded it to the city in 1990. A public-private restoration followed, and the Plaza reopened on March 17, 2006. The Wurlitzer, sold off to a Dallas pilot in 1972 and later rediscovered, was restored and returned to its original home that November."]},{"heading":"The Smoking Man and the other residents","paragraphs":["The most retold account is a former employee's story, preserved through a 2016 travel-site account and local TV retellings: sweeping alone late at night, she smelled cigarette smoke in a building where nobody smokes, raised the lights, and saw a pale man in a 1930s tuxedo seated at the balcony rail. 'We all have our time to die,' he reportedly told her, then plunged headfirst over the rail — and was sitting in the same seat again before she reached the stairs. Staff tell it as a loop he performs nightly.","The rest of the roster is standard theater lore: a shadow figure filed in the back row, a little girl heard giggling and bouncing a ball down the mezzanine stairs, red-orange lights crossing the mezzanine, and stage lights cycling with no hand on the board. Texas Highways named the Plaza one of the state's most haunted sites in 2019 — a reputation the dossier records as reported lore, which is all it has ever claimed to be."]}],"name":"Plaza Theatre Performing Arts Centre","aliases":["Plaza Theatre"],"type":"THEATER","type_label":"Theater","cats":["HAUNTED_PLACE"],"groups":["hauntings","institutions"],"desc":"Theater in El Paso; research record.","full_desc":"A theater in El Paso, Texas, Plaza Theatre Performing Arts Centre is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Theater in El Paso; research record. It sits in the archive under haunted places. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip.","address":"125 W Mills Ave","city":"El Paso","county":null,"state":"Texas","postal":null,"region":"South","lat":31.84778,"lon":-106.431106,"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. Precise location, historical chronology and current visitor conditions require independent enrichment. Confidence concerns provenance only.","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":530,"type":"HAUNTING","description":"Texas Highways recounts apparitions and unexplained electrical activity. An old theatre in El Paso, Texas keeps its dead in the dark between shows — the reports just turn the house lights up. The story is documented as legend — recorded and retold, never verified as fact. The haunting claim is now part of the site's identity, filed alongside the documented history.","evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","evidence_label":"Documented legend","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.65,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"5 of the Most Haunted Locations in Texas","url":"https://texashighways.com/travel-news/5-of-the-most-haunted-locations-in-texas/","publisher":"Texas Highways / Texas Department of Transportation","type":"TOURISM","authority":3},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"Texas Highways recounts apparitions and unexplained electrical activity. The theatre's reports favor the booth, the balcony, and the stage — the building's own logic of where a ghost would linger. The story is documented as legend — recorded and retold, never verified as fact. '5 of the Most Haunted Locations in Texas' carries the account. The tale is the site's other archive — oral, embroidered, and outlasting the documents.","earliest":null,"evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","source":{"name":"5 of the Most Haunted Locations in Texas","url":"https://texashighways.com/travel-news/5-of-the-most-haunted-locations-in-texas/","publisher":"Texas Highways / Texas Department of Transportation","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":"5 of the Most Haunted Locations in Texas","url":"https://texashighways.com/travel-news/5-of-the-most-haunted-locations-in-texas/","publisher":"Texas Highways / Texas Department of Transportation","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":1,"history":0,"legends":1,"entities":0,"sources":1}}