PLAZA THEATRE PERFORMING ARTS CENTRE
Theater — 125 W Mills Ave, El Paso, Texas
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/plaza-theatre-performing-arts-centre-el-paso-texas/

Theater in El Paso; research record.

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.

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.

THE SMOKING MAN AND THE OTHER RESIDENTS
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.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Documented legend] haunting: 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.
  source: 5 of the Most Haunted Locations in Texas (https://texashighways.com/travel-news/5-of-the-most-haunted-locations-in-texas/)

SOURCES — 1 cited
· 5 of the Most Haunted Locations in Texas — Texas Highways / Texas Department of Transportation
  https://texashighways.com/travel-news/5-of-the-most-haunted-locations-in-texas/

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HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not.
Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/