Crump Theatre

The Lady in Black on the Crump's eastern staircase may be May Dema Keith, who died in a NYC hotel room in 1896 under a false name.

Colonel John A. Keith's only child registered at a New York hotel as "Mrs. Everett of Boston," then died two days later on May 6, 1896, from a gunshot wound the coroner ruled a suicide. Her family didn't buy it. May Dema had recently changed her will to benefit her husband, and the bruising on her body suggested a fight. They suspected murder. Her ghost may have come home anyway. Investigator Evel Ogilville thinks the Lady in Black who appears on the eastern staircase of the Crump Theatre in Columbus, Indiana, is May Dema herself, returning to the building her father built.

Keith put up Keith's Arcade on Third Street in 1871, a Civil War veteran and attorney with money and grief. His wife died giving birth to May Dema in 1861. By 1888 Keith was in an asylum, bankrupt, wrecked by alcoholism. John Smith Crump bought the property at auction in 1889 for $6,000 and added the theater that still bears his name. It opened October 30, 1889, as Columbus's first stand-alone opera house.

Workers have seen the Lady in Black on the eastern staircase for decades. She appears so solid and lifelike they mistake her for a living visitor until she vanishes at the top of the stairs. The resemblance between witness descriptions and the artist renderings of "Mrs. Everett" that ran in 1896 newspapers is what convinced Ogilville it's May Dema. Her dress in every sighting is the same deep Victorian black she would have worn in mourning.

She isn't alone. The Opera House Flats, the second-floor apartments above the theater, belonged to a woman named Golda Coombs until October 1920, when she was found dead in her bathtub from gas fumes and drowning. A large man has been reported in the Ladies Lounge restroom. Voices and laughter drift through empty rooms. A young boy has been seen, no name attached. Investigators have captured an EVP of a woman saying "thank you" and photographed lights being uncovered after being deliberately draped.

The building itself has had a rough century. Louis Holwager bought it in 1931. Architect Alden Meranda gave it the Art Deco marquee in 1941-42, the one that still glows when someone turns the fluorescent tubes on. Columbus Capital Foundation acquired the property in 1994. Regular movies stopped in 1997. The Fire Chief prohibited reopening in 2014 over structural deficiencies, and Indiana Landmarks put the theater on its Top 10 Most Endangered list in April 2019. It's still closed to the general public.

What it hosts instead are paranormal investigations, which the Foundation runs as fundraisers to keep restoration moving. A 135th-anniversary paracon in October 2024 drew investigators from across the region. A woman's voice saying "thank you" is the recording investigators still pass around.

The ghost people come to the Crump looking for may be a woman who died in a Manhattan hotel room 700 miles east of here, under a name that wasn't hers, for reasons nobody ever proved.