Liberty Theatre

There's a man at the Liberty Theatre in Astoria, Oregon who is always dressed for a night out he never gets to finish. He turns up in a white tuxedo and a Panama hat, and the people who have seen him over the years call him Handsome Paul — a nickname that is purely about the wardrobe. Nobody knows who he was in life. Witnesses say he has been appearing since not long after the theater opened, though that timeline isn't pinned to any record.

The theater opened on April 4, 1925, and it opened as a kind of proof. Two and a half years earlier, on December 8, 1922, a fire tore through downtown Astoria and took more than 200 shops, restaurants, and boardinghouses with it. The Liberty was the first theater rebuilt afterward — Italian Renaissance styling, around 700 seats, 12 oil murals of Venetian canals painted down the auditorium by a local artist named Joseph Knowles. Opening night screened Harold Lloyd's silent comedy Hot Water, with an organist accompanying live on the Wurlitzer. It was the city telling itself the worst was over.

Paul is not the only thing in the building. An elderly woman has been seen on the premises too. And most mornings the strangest part is the most ordinary one. Staff arrive to find the popcorn machine and the soda fountain already running, switched on overnight in an empty theater. Doors knock. Doorknobs rattle on their own. A volunteer named Kim, who worked there from 2016 to 2019, said that on her very first night something pulled her long hair hard while she stood at the lobby stairs.

And then there is the door. Down on the lower level, one of the Liberty's own doors opens straight into the Astoria Underground, the warren of tunnels beneath downtown tied to the waterfront's old trade in smuggling and shanghaiing. In 2018 the Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures came to film there, and Zak Bagans and his crew went down through that door, following the tunnels until they surfaced beneath a butcher shop. The underground walls still carry char from the 1922 fire, a burn line that climbs halfway up the brick and simply stops.

So the theater built to prove the fire was finished keeps a door into the part of town the fire never fully left. And up in the seats above all of it, a man in a white tuxedo goes on waiting for a night out that the Liberty has owed him for a hundred years.