Garde Arts Center

At the Garde Arts Center in New London, Connecticut, the staff keep seeing a little girl. She carries a balloon, and she walks the balcony of a 1,420-seat auditorium, above rows of empty seats. Visitors report her too. No one ever catches up to her.

The Garde opened on September 22, 1926, as a movie palace, screening the silent film *The Marriage Clause* to a room dressed up like a Moroccan desert. A 27-year-old painter from Denver named Vera Leeper had decorated the walls — not with a brush but with a knife, troweling a commercial product called morene straight onto rough cement to carve caravans and figures in bas-relief. The Garde's own history calls it the first theater in the country decorated that way. It was named for Walter Garde, a Hartford and New London businessman, and built by Arthur Friend, an early partner of Cecil B. DeMille.

The palace went up on a block that had just been cleared. A whaling-merchant Williams family mansion stood there until 1925, when it came down the year before construction. The family made its fortune in New London's whaling trade. And as locals tell it, the house watched several of its children die — the names, the count, the years are tangled across every retelling, but the grief is the part everyone keeps.

That lore is why the building keeps getting investigated. Ghost Hunters filmed an episode here in 2016 called "Haunting of the Garde," chasing the idea that one of the city's whaling families never left the land. The venue now leans in, running its own annual investigation with demonologist John Zaffis. Some accounts add a motionless man watching the empty stage, and a worker who swears something unseen caught him before he hit the floor.

The Garde's own event copy doesn't hedge. It says the activity is "continual" — ushers, performers, and guests of decades past "still coming to host guests, enjoy a show or perform on stage in their spectral form."

The girl with the balloon is still up on the balcony, watching a show no one is putting on.