Apollo Civic Theatre

A 1914 Martinsburg theater designed by the architect of the ill-fated Knickerbocker Theatre, the Apollo was converted into a flu hospital in 1918 and has been actively haunted since the 1970s. Two named ghosts, Charlie (a former caretaker in a fedora) and George (a cigar-smoking audience member), have been seen by multiple witnesses over four decades.

A board member was taking a curtain call in the early 1980s when he looked into the audience and saw an old man in a plaid shirt, sitting in the back rows, smoking a cigar. The man looked entirely real. Then he was gone.

That's George. He shows up during performances, watches with apparent interest, and leaves behind the smell of cigar smoke in sections of the auditorium where nobody has smoked in decades. A Civil War re-enactor once ran into him in the ladies' room (George is, by several accounts, not a polite ghost).

The Apollo Civic Theatre opened on January 19, 1914, designed by Reginald Wycliffe Geare, a Washington D.C. architect who specialized in theaters. Geare also designed the Knickerbocker Theatre in D.C., which collapsed under record snowfall on January 28, 1922, killing 98 people. A grand jury indicted Geare for manslaughter, though he was never convicted. His career never recovered. The Apollo, built eight years earlier, survived.

Originally a vaudeville house and movie theater, the Apollo hosted Will Rogers and Tex Ritter during its golden years. The upstairs rooms served community dances, cotillions, wedding receptions, and conventions. Then came the fall of 1918. When the Spanish flu overwhelmed Martinsburg's medical facilities, the Apollo was converted into a hospital. The dead and dying filled a building designed for laughter. An estimated 675,000 Americans died in the pandemic, and field hospitals set up in theaters and public buildings became sites of concentrated suffering that paranormal researchers believe can leave an imprint.

The other named ghost, Charlie, appears outside the building. Believed to be a former caretaker, he shows up near the entrances wearing a fedora pulled low over his eyes, collar turned up, hunched over like a man arriving for his shift on a cold night. He looks solid and real until the moment he isn't.

Beyond Charlie and George, the theater produces a steady catalog of strangeness. Hangers launch off shelves in the dressing rooms with a force that gravity and vibration can't explain. Heavy, deliberate footsteps cross the ballroom when every door is locked and the room is confirmed empty. The most unnerving reports describe laughter, conversation, and the clinking of dishes and glasses coming from inside the locked building, the sounds of a party that nobody alive is throwing.

The Apollo is now part of West Virginia's official Paranormal Trail. Mid-Atlantic Paranormal Investigations runs year-round group investigations, and the theater hosts Apolloween every Friday and Saturday in October. Dark Whimsical Art, a paranormal team that has investigated the building multiple times, describes their findings as among the most compelling they've encountered.

This is a theater that never really emptied out. Between the 1918 flu dead, the decades of performers, and whatever Charlie and George are up to, the Apollo has more going on after hours than most community theaters have during showtime.