Elkhart Civic Theatre

Percy Hilbert is said to haunt the 1897 Bristol Opera House. But his daughter Mary, still alive, says he wasn't evicted. He went where the work was.

The Elkhart Civic Theatre doesn't perform in Elkhart. It performs in Bristol, ten miles east, at 210 E. Vistula Street, in the 1897 Bristol Opera House, which the company restored for use as a community theater. Along with the building, they inherited Percy.

Percy is Percival Hilbert, a man whose family lived in the opera house basement during the Great Depression. The part that everyone tells is: he was evicted from his home, had nowhere else to go, moved his wife and two daughters into the lower level of the theater, and stayed. The part people forget to tell is that his daughter Mary Hilbert is still alive, in a nursing home in California, and that when someone relayed the eviction story to her, she corrected it. Her father, she said, didn't get evicted. He went where the work was. Her sister Roberta was also part of the family. The ghost legend has the family down as anonymous and tragic; the family itself has them as two named daughters and a father who made a rational economic move during a bad decade.

Either way, Percy seems not to have left.

The company's actors know the list. Things fly off shelves. Small objects levitate. People catch light moving through dark rooms with no source for the beam. Percy himself is blamed for the usual: brushing against people in the costume room, tugging curtains, hiding in the wings, rearranging props mid-run.

The backstory doesn't need Percy. The building is nearly 130 years old. It was nearly lost. It sits in a small Elkhart County town with one main street, and the theater company that saved it has grown into one of the most award-winning community theaters in the country. The ghost story is a layer, and the Mary Hilbert correction is a second layer that undercuts it. What's left, when you strip the layers, is a very old opera house and a crew that has spent decades working inside it.

The theater runs a full season every year. Ticket holders sometimes ask at intermission if the building is really haunted. The crew's answer is some variant of yes, mostly Percy, watch your props.