In Brief
At the Landmark Theatre in Syracuse, New York, a young actress named Clarissa is said to materialize and scold people breaking theater etiquette — smokers most of all. She arrives on the smell of lilacs. Once, ghost hunters say, she answered a question no one asked.
The Full Story
At the Landmark Theatre in Syracuse, the ghost people talk about most is an actress named Clarissa, and she has rules. The story goes that she appears as a pale figure in a white dress to people breaking theater etiquette, smokers worst of all, materializing to tell them to put out their cigarettes. She arrives on a phantom smell of lilacs, said to have been her favorite flower.
Clarissa died here in 1930, after a fall from the balcony. Whether she fell or jumped depends on who's telling it. One version has her throwing herself off after losing a part she'd auditioned for. But the detail people keep coming back to isn't the death at all. It's a recording. During a balcony investigation, ghost hunters say they captured a woman's voice answering a question nobody had asked. It said, "I fell off."
She isn't alone in the building. Two others are said to keep working it the way they did in life, neither of them interested in the audience. Oscar Rau was a stagehand. The popular telling has him dying by electrocution at the lighting board, though at least one account disputes that, and his ghost is reported to flip the lights on and off backstage and tinker with the equipment when something has him restless. Charlie was the janitor in the 1970s, a caretaker who lived in the basement and died there of natural causes. He's said to still drift through overnight in his 1970s clothes, moving piles of dirt and debris from one place to another, never quite finished with the work.
The active spots get named the way regulars name them. The back of the auditorium. The Red Room. The Walnut Room. And the basement, which people who go down there call the catacombs.
All of this sits inside a building that nearly didn't survive to be haunted. The theater opened in 1928 as Loew's State, the work of architect Thomas W. Lamb, who called the style "European, Byzantine, Romanesque." It had a Tiffany chandelier built for Cornelius Vanderbilt's mansion, sold off in the 1970s. Low attendance closed the doors in 1975, and a nonprofit formed to save it from the wrecking ball, pulling it back through community fundraising and, eventually, a $16 million renovation.
So the building is a working Broadway house again, hosting Hamilton and Wicked, the seats full. And every October, the people who run it lean into the rest of it. They open the doors to the Central New York Ghost Hunters for a night of investigation, and they hand the dark over to whoever stayed behind in it.
