Colonial Theatre

A shadowy projectionist keeps turning up in the booth and aisles of Laconia's Colonial Theatre, which hosted the 1961 Return to Peyton Place premiere.

"One of the handsomest play-houses to be found in New England," is how the Laconia press described the Colonial Theatre the week it opened in 1915. Over a century later, the man staff and townspeople keep spotting in the upstairs projection booth is the one nobody can put a name to. He stands with his hands at his sides, looking down at an empty house. He keeps showing up anyway.

The Colonial opened on Main Street in downtown Laconia with 1,231 seats and gilded ornament. For most of the twentieth century it did exactly what a small-city theater was built to do: vaudeville acts in the early decades, then movies, then a mix of both. John Philip Sousa played there. The world premiere of Return to Peyton Place was held there in 1961, which mattered to Laconia because Grace Metalious, who wrote the original Peyton Place novel, was a New Hampshire writer and local interest was intense. The theater ran for 86 years before it went dark in 2002.

Between the closure and the reopening, the building decayed. Pigeons got in through the roof. Seats rotted. The projection booth sat untouched, reels of old film still stacked where they'd been left. That's the period most of the early ghost stories come from, when the building was accessible to caretakers and occasional tours but mostly empty, and the security team and the few people checking on the space started describing footsteps on stairs that no one was climbing, lights flickering in patterns that didn't match the wiring, and doors opening and closing on the upstairs floors.

A $16 million renovation launched in 2017 and finished with a grand reopening in August 2021. The seating was reduced to about 750 to create space for multi-purpose programming, and almost every surface was rebuilt. The projection booth was preserved. So, according to staff, was the projectionist.

The specific sightings since reopening cluster in the same places. The projection booth, where a shadow figure has been seen bent over equipment that isn't there anymore. The side aisles, where a man in a dark coat has been glimpsed walking up toward the lobby and then not reappearing at the doors. The balcony stairs, where footsteps climb to the upper level and then stop partway. A 2021 Only In Your State piece on the haunting quotes staff who stopped being surprised early in the renovation, because the sounds kept coming even after the contractors had gone home.

Who the projectionist is, nobody's pinned down. Laconia historians haven't found a documented death in the theater, which is the usual anchor for this kind of haunting, and the ghost stories don't include a named person the way the Tilton Inn's Laura or the Country Tavern's Elizabeth did. He's just the projectionist, the figure who worked the booth for years of vaudeville and second-run films, and who apparently isn't ready to give the job up to a digital projector and a renovation committee.

The Colonial is a working theater again. Touring musicians, local productions, an annual Christmas Carol every December. Most nights, a new audience files into the 750 seats and nobody in the booth runs the show. The shadow in the upper aisle watches them anyway.