Historic Everett Theatre

A performing arts venue opened in 1901 as the Everett Opera House, one of the city's oldest cultural landmarks.

The Historic Everett Theatre opened on November 4, 1901, as the Everett Opera House, an ambitious cultural landmark designed by architect Charles Herbert Bebb. Bebb had spent four years supervising construction on Adler and Sullivan's famed Chicago Auditorium, and he brought that theatrical pedigree to the Pacific Northwest with a $70,000 structure seating 1,200 people — remarkable for a mill town of just 7,000. His stucco facade featured finely detailed terra cotta moldings and an ornate entrance canopy of metal filigree, inspired by Henry J. Hardenbergh's American Fine Arts Society Building in Manhattan. In its early decades, the stage hosted some of the biggest names in American entertainment: Lillian Russell in 1907 and 1909, George M. Cohan in 1904, Eddie Foy and the Seven Little Foys, John Barrymore, Lon Chaney, and Nat King Cole.

The theatre's most compelling ghost story is inseparable from one of those performers. In the summer of 1906, a young vaudeville song-and-dance man named Al Jolson was performing as a solo act when his manager skipped town with the box office receipts, leaving him stranded in Everett. Jolson's bitter complaints about the incident appeared in New York trade papers. Nine years later, in 1915, he returned as a star leading a large company in his Broadway hit Dancing Around, pausing mid-show to reminisce about his earlier misfortune. The incident reportedly made Jolson so distrustful that he developed a lifelong habit of personally inspecting the evening's take before going onstage.

The theatre itself endured its own near-death experience on December 11, 1923, when the city garbage collector noticed smoke from the basement at 6:50 a.m. For three hours, three dozen firemen battled a blaze that destroyed the entire interior and caused the front wall to partially collapse. Before the ashes cooled, the Everett Improvement Company declared they would rebuild at once. The reconstructed New Everett Theatre reopened on August 29, 1924, at a cost exceeding $250,000, with a new 2/9 Kimball organ. After decades as a movie house, the theatre was triplexed in 1979, closed in 1989, and was saved by the Everett Theater Society, which reopened it on September 10, 1993, with a production of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean. Further restoration from 2000 to 2004 returned it to its 1924 appearance.

It was during this era of renewal that the ghost stories solidified. In 1993, The Seattle Times documented reports of multiple people spotting a gray-haired gentleman inside the old downtown theater on Colby Avenue. The apparition has a large, bushy moustache and his face remains fixed in an unsettling, ear-to-ear grin. Staff and patrons dubbed the spirit Smilin' Al, a tribute to Al Jolson — the performer who had the most dramatic and bitter experience at the venue, though nobody knows the true identity of the ghost. Could he have been a performer, a former employee, or an avid audience member who simply never left?

Employees report doors opening and closing on their own and lights switching on and off without explanation. Witnesses have described a shadowy figure surrounded by a glowing aura walking down one of the aisles. Psychics called to the theatre have reported sensing a strong supernatural presence. The theatre embraces its haunted reputation: the Bayside Neighborhood Association partners with the venue each Halloween for Fright Nights, billed as a haunted house presented by resident ghost Smilin' Al and the Apparitions. The Everett Museum of History includes the theatre as one of six stops on a haunted walking audio tour of downtown Everett, produced in 2018 by education director Chase Dermott and intern Elaine Carter, who researched around twenty candidate ghost stories before selecting the final six. Author Deborah Cuyle devoted a chapter to the theatre in her 2019 book Haunted Everett, Washington, describing the shadowy figures of former patrons and entertainers purported to roam inside the building. After 124 years, the theatre that once stranded the world's most famous vaudeville star still holds its audience — living and otherwise.