In Brief
At the Louisville Palace in Kentucky, the chief engineer died in his basement office in 1965. Restoration crews kept seeing an old man in plaid and thick glasses — then a photo turned up, and the face matched exactly.
The Full Story
The Louisville Palace, a 1928 movie palace on South Fourth Street in downtown Louisville, kept its chief engineer long after he died in the basement. His name was Ferdinand Frisch, and everyone called him Fred.
Frisch came to Louisville from New Jersey and the merchant marines, and he looked after the building for nearly 40 years. On October 27, 1965, he had a heart attack in his maintenance office down in the basement and died there. The theater carried on without him until the early 1990s, when it closed for a full restoration and the crews moved in.
They started seeing an older man around the building. The same picture came back every time: a plaid work shirt, a flat-top haircut, thick black-rimmed glasses, there and then not there. Workers heard whistling and footsteps with no one near. One man dozing off on scaffolding near the open edge felt a voice in his ear say "wake up" in time to keep from rolling off.
Then somebody found a name scratched in the sawdust on the basement floor. It read "Ferdinand."
None of those crews had known Frisch. He'd been dead almost 30 years. The clincher came later, when his grandson gave the theater an old photo of him — a plaid shirt, a flat-top, thick black-rimmed glasses, the man they'd been describing all along. It still hangs downstairs in the catering room.
John Eberson designed the Palace as an atmospheric theater, a Spanish courtyard under a midnight-blue ceiling pricked with twinkling stars and 139 sculpted faces watching down on the lobby. It is the only theater of its kind left in Louisville, and Live Nation runs concerts and comedy and theater there year-round now.
Staff read him as protective. General manager Johnny Downs once chased flickering lights across different circuits for weeks, and the flickering stopped only after he found and fixed a leaking pipe backstage, as though Frisch had been pointing at it the whole time.
He isn't the only one they report. There's a Lady in Gray on the entrance stairs, in a high-collared 1940s dress, holding a folded program for a show that isn't running. The story has her take about five steps and disappear. But the engineer is the one they can put a face to. He came in from the sea, gave the building four decades, and died in its basement. The crews never met him. They just kept describing a man they'd never seen, until his grandson handed them the proof.
