A man keeps turning up in the small upper balcony of the Concrete Theatre in Concrete, Washington. The owner felt something brush her arm up there and stopped being a skeptic. The state tourism office blames a projectionist nobody can name.
The Concrete Theatre in Concrete, Washington has a small balcony tucked into the top left corner of the auditorium, and people keep looking up and seeing a man standing in it. Valerie Stafford, who owns the place, has spotted him there. So have others, by her telling.
Stafford didn't arrive expecting any of it. "I am not particularly susceptible to paranormal experiences," she told a Seattle City Light feature in 2019. "But after spending time in the theatre alone, I have come to believe." What changed her mind was small and quiet. Sitting up in that balcony by herself, she says, things brushed against her arm, and more than once she was sure somebody was standing beside her.
Audiences have their own version. Stafford says people at theatre events have reported orbs in the auditorium and seats vibrating with nothing mechanical running underneath them. No audience member has ever put a name to it publicly. The accounts all come back through her.
Washington's state tourism site will tell you who he is: the ghost of a former projectionist. That is where it stops. No name, no employment record, no death record. Nothing in the HistoryLink essays, the Cinema Treasures listing, or the town's own heritage museum says anyone ever died inside a Concrete Theatre. And there have been three of them.
The first burned on September 14, 1916, in a fire of unknown origin. The manager, recorded as C.D. Stickney, reported a total loss, and the blaze took the three Pathé serials the house had running mid-story, the fifth chapters of "The Iron Claw," "The Red Circle" and "Neal of the Navy." He rebuilt. Seven years later that one burned too. He built a third time on a lot directly across the street, and that building is the one standing at 45920 Main Street today, the oldest theater in Skagit County. Its opening is dated 1923 by the local chamber and Clio, June 1924 by HistoryLink. It went on the state's register of historic sites in 1987, and when the industry went digital in 2012 the town raised more than $50,000 to put a new projector in the booth.
Stafford came back from ghost tours in New Orleans, Savannah and Atlanta in the early 2000s and went door to door down Main Street, asking business owners whether they thought their buildings were haunted. Enough of them said yes. The Concrete Ghost Walk ran its first season in 2006 and finished its twentieth in October 2025: 11 landmarks, 90 minutes, about 35 unpaid volunteers in costume playing a brothel worker, a bank robber, the brother of a girl who drowned in the Baker River.
The walk starts inside the theatre. Before she leads anyone out into the rest of the town, Stafford stands in that room and tells the group what has happened to her in it.
