Elsinore Theatre

Owner George Guthrie watches rehearsals from the empty seats. A balcony ghost and a bathroom-mirror blood stain round out the cast.

The Elsinore Theatre was named for the Danish castle in Hamlet, which is the play that opens with a dead father walking the battlements of his own building. Whoever named the place in 1926 may have been making a joke. Or they may have been laying down a marker. Either way, the theater has spent a hundred years living up to its namesake.

The dead father here is George Guthrie, who built it. Performers rehearsing on the stage have looked out into the empty house and seen Guthrie sitting in the seats, watching the way an owner watches, the critical, possessive attention of someone who used to oversee every performance. He owned and ran the theater for twenty-eight years before selling to the Foreman Brothers in 1954, and architect Ellis Lawrence's gothic-castle facade had cost over two hundred thousand dollars when the doors first opened on May 28, 1926. Sousa played here. So did Clark Gable, Jack Benny, Gregory Peck, Bonnie Raitt. After Guthrie sold, the building slowly deteriorated, came within a hair of demolition in 1980, was saved by the Save Elsinore Committee, and was restored in time for its sixtieth anniversary in 1986. A second restoration finished in 2004.

Through every one of those decades, Guthrie has stayed in his seats. Night-shift workers have caught his shadow crossing the stage when the only light is the single bare ghost light, the one bulb theatrical tradition leaves burning overnight. He moves props during rehearsals. He drops small pebbles on performers from up in the rigging. Performers have described a column of cool air that settles over the downstage right corner during late rehearsals and follows them when they move, holding through the warmest stretches of August.

A second presence haunts the upper balcony. The story attached to her holds that George Guthrie's daughter fell to her death from that balcony, and her shape has been seen by guests playing near the railing where she died. Researchers have not been able to confirm the historical record on this one, and a number of people consider it a legend that grew up around the building rather than a documented event. The dark figure on the balcony, however, has been reported often enough that it is part of the regular tour patter.

The men's restroom has a third entity, attributed to a young boy who was killed in or near the theater. The detail that gets repeated, the one patrons describe in language that sounds like the same person wrote it twenty different times, is blood that appears on the bathroom mirror and is gone the next time someone looks. Skeptics point to the theater's age, to wind moving through old infrastructure, to a building purpose-built to amplify and project sound. Those things are true. The blood on the mirror is harder to explain that way.

The Elsinore has attracted the interest of the genre's working professionals. Amy Bruni of Ghost Hunters has spoken about the building. Greg and Dana Newkirk of Kindred Spirits have presented findings at events the theater has hosted. The building draws tens of thousands of visitors a year, a substantial percentage of whom have come because they want to be in the same room with George Guthrie as much as they want to see the show. The theater that took its name from Hamlet's castle has, in the end, given Salem the same thing Hamlet's castle gave Denmark: a beautiful old building, a play in progress, and a former master of the place watching from the dark.