Boulder Theater

Theater manager George Paper died in 1944. His ghost runs through the balcony and flicks lights in the lounge next door, renamed in his honor.

George Paper isn't a menacing ghost. He's a prankster in a suit, and the bar next door to the Boulder Theater was renamed after him. George's Food & Drink, which took over the lounge space in 2008 and was later replaced by The Ghost BBQ, got its name because the staff got tired of pretending the dead manager wasn't showing up.

Paper managed the theater in the 1940s. The story that gets passed around is that he was fixing a lighting rig above the stage, slipped, and got tangled in the wires, hanging himself by accident. The specific year is 1944, though the details vary in the telling. His obituary in the Daily Camera doesn't mention any accident and lists Fitzsimons Army Hospital as his place of death, which complicates the clean version of the story.

Clean or not, people have been seeing him since the building's 1980s renovations. The Boulder Theater opened in 1906 as the Curran Opera House, got its art-deco makeover and its current name in 1936, and sat empty through most of the 1980s before a $200,000 restoration reopened it as a concert venue in 1988. Something about the construction brought him out. Witnesses started describing a male figure moving through the building during renovations. The reports never stopped.

The activity clusters around two spots. One is the lounge next door. A talent buyer at the venue watched a male figure dash through the space and duck down, and the lights at the main bar have a habit of turning on and off on their own. The other is the balcony. A house manager at the theater described a figure running down the balcony stairs and vanishing at the bottom. Running is the common thread. George doesn't linger. He moves.

The bathrooms get their own set of accounts. Doors swing open on their own, faucets turn themselves on, and employees have described a tall man in a hat disappearing into a stall, leaving a cold spot behind. The third-floor VIP room and the old projection room, which once made up George's apartment, draw the strangest reports.

The Boulder Theater books concerts now, not ghost tours. Bonnie Raitt, BB King, Leon Russell, and a hundred other acts have played the stage Paper was supposedly fixing when he died. Most Friday-night audiences have no idea the manager from the 1940s is part of the evening's staff. The ones who work there know. They leave the lights alone.

If Paper died at Fitzsimons and not on the stage, the lighting-rig version is a story the theater picked up later, more theatrical than 'he got sick.' The obituary sits in the Daily Camera archive, one column, no mention of wires or a fall. The employees still leave the lights alone.