Embassy Theatre

Stage manager Bud Berger worked the Embassy from 1936 until his 1965 death. He still checks seats during organ rehearsals.

Bud Berger doesn't haunt the Embassy Theatre. He keeps checking on it.

When the pipes were about to burst in a basement utility line, a director at the Embassy had dreams about Bud the night before. The staff investigated the next morning and caught the leak before it flooded the building. When an internal door alarm started sounding in an unoccupied backstage restroom, staff assumed a malfunction, until they looked and found a failing sewage pump about to back up into the theater. It's not a malicious ghost. It's a 29-year stage manager still doing his job.

The Embassy opened May 14, 1928 as the Emboyd Theatre, designed by John Eberson, the architect who invented the American atmospheric theater style, with A.M. Strauss. The building was wrapped on two sides by the 250-room Indiana Hotel, seven stories of terra-cotta that connected directly into the lobby. Inside is a Grande Page theater pipe organ that's still one of the best theater organs in use. The venue was renamed the Embassy in 1952 after Alliance Amusement Corporation bought it. A 1995 renovation upgraded seating and expanded the stage to the current 2,471.

Bud Berger worked the Embassy as stage manager from 1936 to 1965. He managed stagehands, handled the performers, and lived in an apartment inside the building in his later years. "Bud was known to have managed the Embassy as well as several other theaters in the area," executive director Kelly Updike told Visit Fort Wayne. "It's my understanding that he loved the building and took impeccable care of it." The theater archive contains around 600 photographs inscribed personally to Bud by performers who passed through between the 1930s and the early 1950s. He knew everyone. Everyone knew him.

The story staff repeat most often: a seat in the auditorium folds down on its own during organ rehearsals, as though a patron just sat down to listen. It stays down for a few minutes. Then it folds back up, and a seat in a different part of the house does the same. Organists and staff who've seen it describe it as Bud moving around to check the acoustics from different spots. Nobody finds it threatening.

The theater hosts paranormal events including a Haunted Objects Live show, and US Ghost Adventures runs a Fort Wayne tour that stops at the Embassy. Everything the venue puts out officially points back to Bud. Whatever else is in the building doesn't get named.

Every performance at the Embassy, somewhere in those 2,471 seats, at least one is being monitored by a man who hasn't missed a show since 1936.