City Opera House

Patrons hear multiple children playing in an empty balcony at the 1891 City Opera House. The founding legend doesn't match what's heard.

The ghost legend at the City Opera House in Traverse City begins with a child falling from the balcony. Nobody can find the newspaper. Nobody can give you a year. The story gets told with confidence on ghost tours and by longtime staff, but if the incident is documented, nobody has produced the documentation. Keep that in mind while the rest of the accounts pile up, because a lot of the rest is specific in ways that a pure campfire invention usually isn't.

Patrons sitting in the orchestra during quiet moments have reported the sound of children playing somewhere above them. Not one child, children. Crying mixed in. Footsteps running along the balcony railing when the balcony is empty or closed. Several accounts from ushers describe a small figure glimpsed between the seats of the upper balcony, always briefly, always from the corner of the eye. Electrical problems show up in the reports too, houselights cycling without a cue, but the child accounts are what people remember.

The opera house was built in 1891 by three brothers-in-law, Anthony Bartak, Charles Wilhelm, and Frank Votruba. It seats 1,200. Architect E.R. Prall, out of Pontiac, designed it in the Victorian style with a tin ceiling, cast-iron detailing, and a proscenium deep enough for touring opera. It was the first building in Traverse City wired for electric lights. In 1891, in a peninsula town of a few thousand, that was an extraordinary statement.

For most of the 20th century the City Opera House hosted everything a small-town opera house was supposed to host: plays, vaudeville, high school graduations, dinners, dances, funerals. In 1980 Frank Votruba's descendants deeded the building to the city. A thirty-year, $8.5 million restoration finished its main phase in 2005.

Here's the complication: the "child fell from the balcony" origin story shows up in every retelling, but the accounts themselves don't match a single child. People hear multiple children. If the legend is clean, the phenomena are messier than the legend.

That mismatch is part of why this particular haunting keeps its grip. A Victorian opera house with one tragic child ghost would be a cliche. A Victorian opera house where decades of audiences have heard several children playing in a balcony they can't see into is a different kind of problem. Nobody has a tidy explanation for it.

Haunted Traverse Tours runs a lantern-lit ghost walk that stops here as one of the anchor sites on the route. Guides acknowledge openly that the balcony legend is undocumented. They tell it anyway because the audience keeps reporting the same sounds whether they know the legend or not.

The City Opera House is one of the last surviving Victorian-era opera houses left standing in Michigan. It took thirty years and a fortune to save it. Whatever is up in the balcony stayed through the decay and the restoration both, which is either a very old ghost story holding on or several generations of audiences all misinterpreting the same creaky Victorian carpentry. The first explanation is more fun. The second is probably truer. But in 2017, during a quiet matinee of a chamber concert, three patrons seated in different parts of the orchestra all independently turned to stare at the same empty section of the upper balcony at the same instant, and later compared notes about a small laugh.