Fulton Theatre

Fourteen Conestoga people were murdered in this Lancaster theater's basement in 1763. Marie Cahill haunts the stage-right staircase.

Fourteen Conestoga people were murdered in the basement of what is now the Fulton Theatre.

Lancaster ghost tours tend to skip over that part. On December 27, 1763, a group of colonial militia calling themselves the Paxton Boys rode into town, broke into the workhouse and jail where the Conestoga had been placed for their protection, and killed everyone inside. Men, women, children. The site sat empty for years afterward. When the Fulton Opera House was built on the same footprint in 1852, the foundation stones of that jail were kept. They're still down there.

Lancaster likes to lead with the theater's grander history. The Underground Railroad stop under Sheriff David Miller. The Civil War use as an armory and field hospital. The Marx Brothers and Sarah Bernhardt on the main stage. All of that is true. But the basement foundation is where the oldest and most specific paranormal reports come from, and the staff here have stopped pretending otherwise.

The named ghost is Marie Cahill, the Woman in White. She appears on the spiral staircase by stage right, wearing a long white dress. A stagehand who didn't recognize her introduced himself and asked her name. "Marie," she said. Then she was gone. Research later turned up an actress named Marie Cahill who performed at the Fulton frequently during the opera house years at the turn of the century. She'd been dead for decades.

The Whistler is the one the stagehands talk about. A carpenter working late on a set was approached by a man in a waistcoat and stiff collar who asked for a cigarette, and fled the building when the figure walked through the wall. Performers have complained for years about whistling and clapping backstage that no one can find the source of. Actors hate it, because backstage whistling is a theater superstition about bad luck, and in a basement that used to be a jail where fourteen people were murdered, you pay attention to superstitions.

Then there's the Grandfather in the Gallery. A spotlight operator during a performance noticed an elderly man seated in the balcony watching intently. After the show, he mentioned the man to the lead actress, who had said her grandfather had attended. The actress stopped him. Both of her grandfathers were dead. Neither had ever seen her perform.

Ghost Adventures filmed here for a Portals to Hell episode, and their team reported voices in the basement that seemed to be speaking Susquehannock. The Lancaster Paranormal Society has documented EVPs and equipment failures in specific zones, along with eight-to-ten degree temperature drops logged between the wings and the staircase by stage right, and again at the lowest level of the basement where the original jail stones are still set into the wall. The theater offers occasional ghost tours run by staff who work there every day, and the stories they tell aren't the sanitized version.

The Fulton is still a working regional theater, staging Broadway-scale productions year-round, and most audiences never go below the lobby. The people who do go down there are technical staff loading out equipment late at night, and they've been reporting the same handful of experiences for a hundred and fifty years.

Marie is the charming one. The basement is the one that doesn't let go.