In Brief
First Avenue in Minneapolis is Prince's old stage and the set of Purple Rain. It is also where staff keep seeing a woman in a green jacket in the fifth bathroom stall, her neck wrenched to the side, and where a sealed wall once turned up a single booth.
The Full Story
First Avenue, the black star-covered nightclub at 701 First Avenue North in Minneapolis, is Prince's home stage and the building where most of Purple Rain was filmed. Walk past the dance floor to the women's restroom, though, and the staff there will tell you about the fifth stall.
A woman stands in it. Staff describe her the same way every time: a green jacket, and her neck wrenched hard to one side, as if by a noose. People in the ladies' room report her cries coming from that stall. Mpls.St.Paul Magazine put it plainly, that patrons "attest to encountering a spectral woman wearing a green jacket."
The story behind her goes back before the music. The building opened in 1937 as a Greyhound bus depot, all blue brick and checkered terrazzo, and the legend told there is that a woman once waited in it for a man coming home from the war. She learned he had died in combat. She hanged herself in the depot restroom, the story goes, and she never left. The depot became a club called The Depot in 1970, then Uncle Sam's, then Sam's, and finally First Avenue on the last day of 1981. Through every name, people kept reporting her.
She does not stay in the stall. Concertgoers say they have seen her moving among them on the dance floor, and that she appears to have no legs at all. DJs report the record players acting on their own and screaming, moaning, or groaning coming through their headphones. One employee said her hair was pulled on work nights. A prankster spirit the staff call Flippy gets blamed for the sound of bar stools being flipped onto tables after closing.
Then there is the wall. Sometime during his run as general manager from 1980 to 2010, Jack Meyers opened a sealed cavity near the Record Room and found about twelve feet of empty space, with one object inside it.
"And there was only one thing in there: a big booth, like a pew," he said. As for the booth, he relayed only the rumor: the story is that the woman died there.
Here is what no one can produce. No newspaper, no death record, no name. The depot tragedy that supposedly started all of it has never been found in print, and the apparition's reported clothing points as much to Vietnam as to the war the legend names. The story has been told the same way for decades by the people who work there. The record holding it up has never turned up at all.
