Avon Theatre

Troy Taylor, who has investigated haunted places for decades, saw a ghost at the Avon Theatre and calls it only his second personal sighting ever. The 1916 movie palace in Decatur has produced dozens of witness accounts since reopening in 1999, with most pointing to former owner Gust Konstantopoulos, a Greek immigrant who ran the theater for forty years before his death in 1965.

Troy Taylor has spent decades investigating haunted places across Illinois. He's written more than 100 books on the subject. And in all that time, he's only seen a ghost twice. The second time was at the Avon Theatre in Decatur.

Taylor was alone in Skip Huston's office above the lobby when a figure walked past the open doorway. Not a shadow, not a blur. A man, moving with purpose. Taylor followed him into the adjacent room and found it empty. The only sound was a door softly clicking shut.

The Avon opened on November 28, 1916, designed by architect R.O. Rosen with 1,080 seats and a price tag of $40,000. It was considered a ridiculous gamble. Movies were a fad, the skeptics said, a novelty that would pass. The interior featured fancy plasterwork, lion-head light fixtures, and a reclining nude goddess holding out a laurel crown above the proscenium arch. It was one of the most expensively decorated movie houses in the country, all built for a medium nobody believed would last.

Gust Konstantopoulos, a Greek immigrant, bought the theater with his brothers in 1927 and ran it for nearly four decades. He became the Avon's public face, greeting every patron who walked through the door. When Gust died in 1965, the theater lost more than an owner. It lost its personality.

The building went through hard years after that. Revenue dried up during the 1980s. The Avon became the last theater still operating downtown. It finally closed in April 1986.

Skip Huston reopened it in 1999 as an independent and art film house, showing limited releases that would have been unthinkable for old Decatur. Almost immediately, things started happening.

The first report came on opening night. Projectionist Chris Barnett couldn't get the equipment working. He heard a quiet voice, so faint he almost missed it, suggesting a different wire configuration. He tried it. The projector fired up. That same evening, someone saw a figure in the upstairs bathroom. Nobody else was up there.

Skip himself had the clearest encounter. In spring 1995, before the reopening, he was in the second floor hallway near the letter room when a man appeared in the doorway. Medium height, slender build, late fifties or early sixties, gray and black close-cropped hair. Skip said the figure looked completely solid, not transparent, not glowing. The man turned and walked down the hallway, then vanished.

The description matched Gust Konstantopoulos.

During an October 1998 Haunted Decatur tour, more than fifteen people in the balcony watched a shadowy figure lean against the railing. The crowd panicked. People shoved toward locked doors. Skip's tour assistant quit that same night.

Staff have described seeing transparent figures sitting in the theater seats, watching films alongside paying customers before fading out within seconds. A woman in a blue dress has been spotted on multiple occasions. An old man in a 1930s uniform, believed to be a former ticket-taker, shows up near the entrance.

Dale Kaczmarek's Ghost Research Society brought a team of nine investigators on June 23, 2012. They recorded electromagnetic readings of 15.3 to 27 milligauss on the theater's back wall, despite no AC wiring in the concrete. They captured a male voice in the upstairs hallway during a session where only three women were present. Nicole Tito felt hands touching her back and head while standing alone in that same hallway.

The Avon closed for good in February 2025, following the death of Skip Huston. The marquee went dark on a building that had survived 109 years of skeptics, economic downturns, and multiplexes.

Gust Konstantopoulos spent forty years greeting people at the front door of the Avon Theatre. If the staff accounts are accurate, he picked up where he left off about thirty-four years after he died.