Bijou Theatre

Thomas Atkins was shot at the bar of this 1817 Knoxville building over a glass of water in 1872. Staff still hear him asking for one.

At three in the morning on October 19, 1872, a man named Thomas Atkins walked into the bar inside what is now the Knoxville Bijou Theatre and asked for a glass of water. Thomas Sneed, who ran the building back when it was the Lamar House Hotel, decided to be a wise guy. "What do you want water for when you can have a man's drink?" Sneed pulled a pistol and shot Atkins dead in front of everyone. Some of the people who work at what's now the Bijou Theatre, the same building, think Atkins is still the thirsty one wandering through it 150 years later.

The Bijou opened as a theater in 1909, but the structure underneath it dates to 1817. It's the third-oldest building in Knoxville. Before it was a theater it was the Lamar House Hotel, the most prestigious lodging in town for most of the 19th century. Before that it was a private home, and during the Civil War it served as a Union army hospital after Confederate forces lost control of the city. Union General William Sanders was carried into the building with a sniper wound to the abdomen on November 18, 1863, and died in the bridal suite the next day. The Battle of Fort Sanders, fought a few weeks later, is named for him.

Three kinds of violent or premature death share one address: a Civil War general, a hotel patron shot over a glass of water, and an unknown number of soldiers who didn't survive the field hospital. Plus 200 years of guests, performers, and stagehands. The ghost stories follow the same pattern.

General Sanders is the most identified figure on the building's witness list. Staff describe seeing him in his Union uniform out of the corner of one eye, usually near the stairs to the second floor, vanishing instantly when looked at directly. The bridal suite where he died is on the third floor and is no longer used for performances or as a dressing room. Performers who've slept there describe being unable to stay the night.

Atkins is the second one. Bartenders working alone after closing have described whispering near the lobby bar and the sense of being watched from the empty stools. Glasses move. A few staff members swear they've heard a man's voice ask for a drink in a room they thought was empty. The story always lands on Atkins because he died asking for one.

The Bijou is also home to a small ghost most paranormal investigators identify as a child, possibly one of the children who died during the Lamar House years. Footsteps run across the upper balcony when nobody is up there. A woman's bathroom on the second floor has its own resident spirit, described by witnesses as small and unfriendly, who has slammed stall doors on people and made the lights cut out.

There's also a duel reference floating around the building's history. The Lamar House lawn was used at least once for a formal duel in the 19th century, and that fact gets folded into the haunting list whenever a tour guide runs out of named ghosts. The historical record on the duel is fragmentary, and most serious accounts of the building drop it.

The Bijou underwent a major restoration starting in 2004 and reopened as a working concert hall in 2006. It still hosts shows. The acoustic capacity is around 700 seats, and the building runs as a nonprofit. Crews who work the load-in and load-out describe equipment moving overnight and tools turning up in different rooms than where they were left.

Two centuries of overlapping use have produced a building where the haunting is plural, not singular. The General stays near the third-floor stairs. The child sticks to the balcony. The bathroom spirit holds her stall. Bartenders still get Atkins on their shifts, asking for water 152 years after Sneed shot him over a joke.