Iroquois Theatre Site (Death Alley)

The 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire killed 602 people in a "fireproof" theater during a holiday matinee, and the narrow alley behind the building where bodies were laid in rows is now called Death Alley. Performers at the modern theater, including SNL's Ana Gasteyer, have seen groups of figures in period clothing backstage who vanish when approached.

Six hundred and two people died inside a theater that had been open for five weeks. The Iroquois Theatre on West Randolph Street in Chicago advertised itself as "absolutely fireproof." On December 30, 1903, during a holiday matinee of "Mr. Bluebeard," it became the deadliest single-building fire in American history.

The audience that afternoon was mostly women and children. Schools were out for the holidays. Around 3:15 p.m., during the second act, a spark from a stage light caught the curtains. Eddie Foy, the Chicago-born comedian starring in the show, took the stage and tried to keep the crowd calm. He sang. The orchestra kept playing. Stagehands scrambled behind the curtain, but the asbestos safety curtain jammed partway down and wouldn't seal.

Then someone opened a backstage door. The rush of outside air created a fireball that blew through the auditorium. The crowd surged toward the exits and found doors that were locked, bolted, or opened inward against the crush of bodies. People stacked up against doors they couldn't push open. Within 15 minutes, 571 were dead inside the building.

Behind the theater, a narrow icy passage called Couch Place became the scene of a second horror. Roughly 120 people fell from incomplete fire escapes or jumped from upper exits into the alley. Firefighters laid the dead in neat rows along the pavement. The passage earned a new name that day: Death Alley.

Conde Nast Traveler has named Death Alley one of the 42 most haunted places in the world. The narrow passage still runs behind what is now the James M. Nederlander Theatre at 24 West Randolph Street (the original Iroquois was demolished in the mid-1920s and completely replaced by the Oriental Theatre, a new building on the same site). Pedestrians use the alley as a shortcut. Many of them report feeling a presence following them, hearing whispers, or sensing cold hands on their shoulders only to turn around and find nobody there.

Ana Gasteyer, the SNL alumna who played Elphaba in "Wicked" at the theater from 2005 to 2006, described her experiences on "Celebrity Ghost Stories." While flying above the stage on the wire rig, she would look out to the wings and see groups of people gathered together, "almost like families, gatherings of people that were together." When she landed, nobody was there. On another occasion, near a stairwell backstage, she passed a woman with two children, a boy and a girl, dressed in turn-of-the-century clothing. She rounded the corner and they were gone. Her dresser told her the sightings always picked up around December 30. (Gasteyer later told The A.V. Club she had "augmented the story for cash.")

Other performers and crew have reported shadow-like figures in the balcony during rehearsals and figures in period clothing on the back stairs.

The fire's legacy extends far beyond ghosts. It drove the nationwide adoption of panic bars on exit doors, outward-opening exits, operational fire alarms and sprinkler systems, fire-resistant curtains, and emergency lighting. Every time you push a crash bar to leave a building, you're using a reform that came from 602 people dying in a "fireproof" theater on a Wednesday afternoon.

The alley still functions as a loading dock for the theater. Trucks park there during the day. At night, it's just a passage between two buildings. But the temperature drops as you walk through it, and the air feels heavier than it should for an open-air alley in downtown Chicago.