Landers Theatre

A Ouija board session gave the Landers Theatre its most famous ghost, a janitor named Ned who supposedly died in a 1920 fire. One of the other ghost stories was admittedly fabricated by a local figure, but the green hazy shape in the balcony and the phantom baby falling from the upper level keep getting reported anyway.

Someone used a Ouija board in the Landers Theatre and got the name "Ned." That's how the ghost legend started. Ned was supposedly a janitor who died in a fire at the theater on December 17, 1920, and performers have been seeing a figure sitting alone in the balcony during rehearsals ever since. The fire was real. Whether anyone actually died in it is less clear: sources disagree, and the Ouija board session muddied the timeline further. But the sightings in the balcony have been going on for decades regardless of what started them.

The Landers Theatre opened on September 18, 1909, at 311 East Walnut in Springfield, Missouri. Designed by Carl Boller of the Boller Brothers firm, it was built by John and Douglas J. Landers in a Baroque Renaissance style that got it listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. The stage has hosted Fanny Brice, George Cohan, Lon Chaney, John Philip Sousa, and Lillian Russell, back when the theater operated as the Landers Orpheum and booked national vaudeville acts. The Springfield Little Theatre organization purchased the building in 1970 and has been restoring it to its 1909 condition ever since.

The theater claims at least three distinct ghosts, and the honesty around their origins is refreshingly messy. Chuck Rogers, a longtime Springfield figure, admitted that he started the story about an African-American man being stabbed to death in the second balcony during segregation-era seating. That particular ghost manifests as a green hazy shape, about five feet tall, hovering in the upper balcony. Whether the story came first and the sightings followed, or the other way around, is impossible to untangle at this point.

A baby falls from the upper balcony. Not a living baby, a replay. Actors practicing on stage describe seeing or sensing the fall repeated over and over, like a loop. Afterward, they hear crying, followed by a woman's voice offering comfort. The story behind it is that an infant was dropped from the upper level long ago, and the mother's ghost has been trying to soothe the child ever since. No specific date or name has surfaced for the incident.

A woman in Elizabethan dress watches from a window on the fourth floor. People see her from the street, blonde hair visible through the glass, looking down at Walnut Street. She doesn't appear inside the building, just at that window. Nobody has connected her to a specific historical figure, and Elizabethan clothing has no obvious link to a 1909 vaudeville house, which makes her one of the more puzzling figures in the building.

Spotlights turn on and off when unplugged. People feel taps on their shoulders in empty hallways. Cast members sense someone following them through backstage corridors. The Springfield Little Theatre leans into it, running haunted ghost tours of the building that walk visitors through the hotspots.

Theater hauntings tend to blur the line between genuine folklore and self-aware marketing. The Landers at least has the decency to admit which stories were invented and which ones just showed up. That distinction gets lost in most haunted-place listings, but at the Landers, Chuck Rogers volunteered the truth about the balcony stabbing unprompted. The other stories may or may not hold up to scrutiny. But the green shape in the balcony and the baby falling from the railing keep coming back, whether anyone believes their origin stories or not.