In Brief
At the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, the staff still talk about Ben, a stagehand who carried a red toolbox everywhere. He retired half a century ago and later died. They say a 1985 renovation woke him, and tools left out backstage keep turning up moved.
The Full Story
At the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, the crew aren't convinced an old stagehand named Ben ever clocked out. He worked here decades ago, carried a red toolbox everywhere he went, retired about half a century ago, and later died. "He was a stagehand. He had his red toolbox that he carried around all the time," the theater's engineer, Dan Zimmermann, told CBS Minnesota. The crew say his apparition turns up in the dark when the house is closed, and tools left out backstage are found moved from where they were set down.
The way the staff tell it, Ben went quiet for years, and then a renovation woke him. During work on the building in the mid-1980s, commonly given as 1985, crews pulled back a false ceiling and found a second balcony nobody knew was there, sealed away for decades. On it was a note addressed to Ben. It was removed, and what it said was never written down anywhere. No one alive knows what it told him. Some of the staff believe its discovery is the moment his spirit stirred.
Since then, the reports cluster in that rediscovered balcony when the house is empty, and witnesses describe dark spots and patches of sudden cold scattered through the building. One incident in particular stuck with people. A piece of ceiling material fell between the heads of two backstage workers, with a dark figure seen vanishing above. The part that nobody can square is that the ceiling there wasn't even made of plaster.
Ben isn't the only name the staff keep. They also tell of Veronica, a former performer whose singing is sometimes heard echoing through the auditorium when the theater is supposed to be closed and empty. No record ties her to a real person; she is a name and a voice in the dark, nothing more. One of the two labors and one performs, which is a fitting split for a building that has spent its whole life as a stage.
It opened in 1910 as the Sam S. Shubert Theater, the oldest theater still standing in St. Paul. It became a movie house in 1933, then hosted A Prairie Home Companion under Minnesota Public Radio, and took the Fitzgerald name in 1994 in honor of the St. Paul native F. Scott Fitzgerald. First Avenue bought it in 2019 and runs it as a live venue today. Through every name the place has worn, the crew keep listening for a man with a red toolbox they never quite saw leave.
