In Brief
At the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, the ghost the staff market every October isn't the strangest thing in the building. A house organist's ashes were scattered in the attic above the organ he played for 25 years, and locals say he still plays it on quiet nights.
The Full Story
The Fox Theatre in Atlanta keeps a handful of ghosts on the October tour, but the one nobody put on a poster sits in the attic above the organ.
His name was Bob Van Camp, and he was the Fox's house organist for more than 25 years. The instrument he played is the "Mighty Mo" — a 1929 Möller with 3,622 pipes across five chambers, the second-largest theater organ in the country. After Van Camp died, his ashes were placed in the attic over the organ chambers, so they rest above the Mighty Mo for good. Local lore holds that on quiet nights, his spirit still plays it.
He's the second organist the building wouldn't let go. The man who spent 30 years rebuilding the Mighty Mo, Joe Patten, was nicknamed the Phantom of the Fox — and he wasn't a legend. In 1979 the theatre gave Patten a lifetime, rent-free lease on a hidden 3,640-square-foot apartment beneath the Moorish dome, the old Shriners office suite, and he lived there for more than 35 years. He died in 2016, at 89. Nobody had to ask either man to haunt the place. They both stayed on their own.
The marketed ghosts are good Halloween theater. The Fox runs Haunted History Tours every fall into the sub-basement and an old on-site hospital room furnished with 1929 artifacts — a hospital bed and a chair, where staff say most of the activity gets reported. They'll tell you about Mary, a nurse who haunts that room, and Roosevelt, who used to work the boiler room. The story goes there's a backstage elevator that travels between floors on its own, tied to the girlfriend of a former manager who died in the building.
"There's a hospital bed, a chair, and it's just the creepiest space ever," one Fox executive said of the room.
But the elevator and the nurse are tour lore. The ashes in the attic are a man who loved this theatre enough to never leave it.
