The Capitol Plaza Theater in Charleston, West Virginia is said to keep a father and his 8-year-old daughter in the balcony, front row, stage left. The mansion they supposedly lived in on this lot leaves no trace in any deed, survey, or history.
The Capitol Plaza Theater in Charleston, West Virginia has two ghosts in the balcony, and the story has them as father and daughter. He sits in the front row, stage left, while the performance runs. She sits up there and watches the show.
The girl is Molly Welch, eight years old, said to have died of pneumonia. HauntedPlaces.org puts her apparition in the front row of the balcony. A regional folklore blog that collected the theater's stories describes her as shy, the friendlier of the two, seen sitting up there or playing backstage, and says she once helped a performer with a costume change.
Her father John gets the darker half. The same blog calls him "the protective prankster of the building" and puts him in that same balcony seat, where the performers see him. The one spot in the building where people report an actual feeling is the pair of doors leading to the projection booth, where the air goes foreboding. That one is put on him.
What ties the two of them to the room is a house. The Welches lived in a mansion that stood on this lot, the story goes, before it came down to make way for the theater. What the story does not have is a date anyone agrees on. A ghost tour company dates the original structure to 1798. A haunted-houses directory says late 1700s, with generations of Welches in it for over a hundred years. HauntedPlaces.org puts the mansion on the property only between the 1830s and the 1860s. No deed, survey, or history turns up any of it. The 1985 National Register nomination narrates 123 Summers Street from 1912 forward and never mentions a Welch, a mansion, or a dwelling of any kind.
1912 is where the documented building begins: the Plaza Theatre, three stories of green glazed brick laid in black mortar, billed as the "Home of High Class Vaudeville and Novel Attractions." On November 15, 1923, fire brought the auditorium roof down and did an estimated $175,000 in damage. The owners gave up on vaudeville, rebuilt around film, and opened the new Capitol Theater in November 1924 with a Wurlitzer pipe organ that cost $25,000. Nothing in the record connects that fire to a single injury.
It ran as a movie house until the early 1980s, when the chains and the multiplexes finished it. After the Kearse Theater one block north came down for a parking lot, 28 local investors bought the empty building in December 1984 and brought it back. West Virginia State took it over in 1991 and put classrooms upstairs. Mountain Stage broadcast from the auditorium for years.
In March 2018 Resurrection Church bought the place for $280,000, the first sale since 1991. The auditorium is a sanctuary now, and the rooms upstairs are Sunday school. The balcony is still up there over the congregation, facing the stage, front row, stage left.
