In Brief
The Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colorado has a resident ghost named George Paper, a mid-century manager. Legend says he hanged himself in the stage lighting, and staff still see him run across rooms and vanish. The bar next door is named after him.
The Full Story
At the Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colorado, the ghost has a name, an old suit and hat, and a habit of running. Staff describe a tall man dashing across a room or down the balcony stairs, then vanishing. They call him George Paper, after a man who managed the theater in the middle of the last century.
The way the lore tells it, George died here. He was up in the stage lighting, the story goes, fixing a rig, when he slipped and hanged himself in the dangling wires. That is the version the ghost tours and the haunted-house sites repeat, and it is the version that explains why the lights are his.
It is also the version that doesn't quite match the record. By accounts of his obituary in the local Daily Camera, George Paper died in April 1944 at Fitzsimons Medical Center, with no accident mentioned at all. No primary copy of that obituary has turned up, so both versions ride on retelling. But the gap is the whole story: the legend hangs him in the rig, and the paper trail puts him in a hospital bed.
Either way, staff say he stayed. Lightbulbs go missing from backstage. Switches flip, faucets run, doors open in the men's room next door. There are cold spots in the third-floor VIP room and the old projection booth, both of which were once George's apartment in the building.
During a 1980s break-in, a burglar told police he "kept running into a tall, old man in a suit and hat."
The building opened as the Curran Opera House in 1906 and became the art deco Boulder Theater in 1936. It books concerts now, the Pixies and Bonnie Raitt and Johnny Cash having all played the room. When the lounge next door reopened in 2008, the staff named it George's Food and Drink, in his honor. The tagline they ran: "if you come alone, everyone dines with George."
