Landers Theatre

During rehearsals at the Landers Theatre in Springfield, Missouri, people in the upper balcony report a baby falling. Not once — over and over, the same drop on a loop, and after it the sound of crying, and then a woman's voice trying to soothe it. No one can say whose baby, or when, or why. There's no name and no incident behind it. It just keeps happening.

The strange thing about the Landers is how honest it is about the rest of its ghosts. The man who ran the theater's tech for decades, Chuck Rogers, came right out and said he made one up. He'd point tour groups at carpet stains in the second balcony and tell them a man had been stabbed to death there, just to let their imaginations run. None of it was true. He invented it.

Even the building's most famous ghost started as a parlor game. The story goes that a staffer sat on the auditorium stairs with a Ouija board, and a name came back. "What came back was that this person's name was Ned," Rogers said, "and he used to be a janitor here." Folklore later pinned Ned's death on the theater's great fire — a December 18, 1920 boiler explosion that had the stage fully ablaze by 1:30 in the afternoon. The fire was real. The asbestos curtain saved the house. But by the theater's own account, no one died in it. Ned's death is a story laid over a real event.

So the Landers can hand you the receipts on where most of its hauntings came from. A Ouija board. A storyteller with a good eye for a carpet stain.

It's the rest it can't explain. There's a hazy green shape, roughly five feet tall, that people keep reporting in the upper balcony, on the landing of the west stairs. There's a long-haired blond figure in Elizabethan dress that people on the street say they've seen at a fourth-floor window — never once from inside the building, only from below. Spotlights are said to switch on and off when they're unplugged. People feel a tap on the shoulder in empty hallways, or the sense of being followed through the backstage corridors. Rogers himself once watched a figure cross the lobby late at night and walk toward the auditorium, then vanish when he followed it.

None of those carry a name or a date or a story behind them, which is exactly what's unsettling about the place. The Landers will tell you which of its ghosts it built. It just can't account for the ones that showed up on their own — the green shape on the stairs, and the baby that keeps falling, over and over, to a crowd that isn't there.