Fox Theatre

The Fox Theatre's backstage elevator travels between floors on its own, a nurse named Mary lingers in the original 1929 Shriners hospital room, and performers hear footsteps from empty audience seats. Two men who dedicated their lives to the theater had their ashes placed inside the Mighty Mo pipe organ, where they remain today.

Two men loved this building so much that their ashes are stored inside its pipe organ.

Bob Van Camp served as the Fox Theatre's house organist for over twenty-five years. When he died, his friends Joe Patten and Bob Foreman scattered his cremated remains in the ceiling above and between the chambers of the Mighty Mo, the Fox's custom-built Moller organ. The instrument has 3,622 pipes ranging from 32 feet tall to the size of a ballpoint pen. It was the second-largest theater organ ever built in America. When Patten died on April 7, 2016, at age 89, after living inside the theater for thirty-six years, his ashes joined Van Camp's in the organ loft.

The Fox opened on Christmas Day, 1929. It was originally commissioned as the Yaarab Shrine Temple for a 5,000-member Shriners organization, which explains the interior. Moorish arches. Egyptian columns. Islamic geometric patterns. A 140-foot-wide auditorium ceiling painted to look like a night sky with twinkling stars and drifting clouds. The .75 million project exceeded the Shriners' budget, so they leased the auditorium to movie mogul William Fox. For decades it was the most spectacular place to see a film in the Southeast.

The Shriners built a hospital room inside the theater when it first opened. A registered nurse staffed it full-time. At least one woman gave birth in that room during a show. The room is still there, tucked away from the public areas, and some guides claim a nurse named Mary watches over it. Visitors on the October ghost tours describe seeing a woman standing in the doorway of that room who isn't part of the tour group.

By the mid-1970s, the Fox was dying. Neglect and shifting entertainment trends forced it to close. The building was slated for demolition. Atlanta rallied. Citizens launched the 'Save the Fox' campaign and raised .8 million. On May 26, 1976, the Department of the Interior designated it a National Historic Landmark.

Joe Patten was central to that survival. He started volunteering in 1963, spending years rebuilding the Mighty Mo after it sat unplayable for fifteen years. On Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1963, the organ rose to glory with Van Camp at the keys playing 'Georgia on My Mind.' In 1980, the Fox's trustees gave Patten a rent-free, lifetime apartment inside the building, a 3,600-square-foot Moorish-styled suite tucked into the theater's upper floors. He lived there until his death. A real-life Phantom of the Opera who wasn't hiding from anyone.

The ghost stories center on the backstage elevator. It travels between the first and fourth floors on its own, doors opening to reveal an empty car. The legend ties it to the girlfriend of a former theater manager who died in the building. Staff and performers have described this for decades. The elevator arrives at their floor, the doors open, nobody steps out.

Performers report other things backstage too. Lights flicker in dressing rooms. Doors slam in empty corridors. Footsteps echo from the audience seats while performers stand alone on the main stage. The Fox's backstage is a labyrinth of corridors, stairwells, and storage rooms spread over multiple levels.

The Fox runs Haunted History Tours through September and October, a ticket, Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. They take visitors into the sub-basement, the hospital room, the backstage corridors. It's one of the few haunted tours in Atlanta that takes place inside a National Historic Landmark, and tickets sell out fast.

The elevator and the nurse and the flickering lights make for good October marketing. But the real presence in this building is Van Camp and Patten, two men who poured their lives into a theater and then asked to stay forever. Their remains sit inside an organ that still plays for sold-out crowds. Nobody had to ask them to haunt it.