In Brief
The staff at the Akron Civic Theatre call him Fred — a janitor who spent his life mopping the 1929 movie palace and, by every account, never stopped. His territory is the restrooms, and he turns on anyone who leaves them a mess.
The Full Story
The Akron Civic Theatre in Akron, Ohio, has a janitor who never clocked out. The staff call him Fred, and his territory is the restrooms. Leave a mess and the story goes that he turns on whoever made it. Visitors near the sinks describe the feeling of being watched, anger and suspicion hanging in the air, the sense that someone who tended these floors for a living takes the disrespect personally.
The ghost historian Michael Kleen put it plainly: Fred "has no tolerance for people who disrespect his beloved theatre." The legend has him confronting anyone caught vandalizing the place, chasing them back out the door he guards.
Some accounts give him a name. They say Fred was Paul Steeg, a custodian who helped open the theater in 1929 and worked there until he died, and who promised before the end, "I'll always be here. I'll come back." That telling traces to an old Akron Beacon Journal retelling that's hard to track down now, so the name stays soft. The mopping is the part everyone agrees on.
The place he won't leave opened on April 20, 1929, as Loew's Theatre, a movie palace built for about $2 million. Its architect, John Eberson, worked in what he called the atmospheric style: the auditorium is staged as a night in an open-air Moorish garden, the domed ceiling projecting twinkling stars and drifting clouds over the seats. It's one of only five Eberson atmospheric theaters left in the country.
Fred isn't alone. People report a man in a formal black tuxedo with coattails seated up in the balcony, watching a stage with no one on it. No source has ever named him.
And then there's what runs underneath. The lobby sits over the Ohio and Erie Canal, at Lock 3, with a tunnel beneath the building. The story there is a young woman who drowned herself in the canal, seen walking the water's edge before she vanishes into the tunnel under the theater, sometimes heard crying. The canal was abandoned in 1913, its locks dynamited during the flood that tore through Akron that year, 16 years before the theater opened. Her legend may be older than the building above it.
An electrician named Michael Carmany worked the theater's hidden rooms in the late 1970s, putting together a haunted-house event back where the public never goes. He came away a believer. "More than once I saw the patron in the balcony," he said. "I believe I heard screams in the canal area but just assumed it was produced by the rushing water."
