Louisville Palace Theatre

Chief engineer Fred Frisch died here in 1965 and the crew still leaves his booth light on. A Lady in Gray walks five steps and vanishes.

Ferdinand "Fred" Frisch died in his basement office at the Louisville Palace on October 27, 1965, after nearly forty years as the theater's chief engineer. He had a heart attack at his desk. Crew members today will tell you he never really clocked out. They call him Bernie, because someone down the line started doing that and it stuck, and they leave one light burning in the projection booth for him most nights because it used to be his route home.

Look up at the ceiling of the main auditorium and you're looking at a painted sky: stars, drifting clouds, a trompe l'oeil balustrade that tells you you're sitting outside in a Spanish courtyard. The architect John Eberson called the style atmospheric, and when the Palace opened on September 1, 1928, it was one of the finest examples of it in the country. It still is. On a slow Tuesday night between shows, it's also one of the emptiest rooms in downtown Louisville. Some of the people who work there say it's never really empty.

Bernie is only the most talked-about of the Palace's ghosts. Before the Palace was the Palace it was the Loews United Artists Theater, and Fred Frisch took care of the place through every version. Staff describe him as a presence that shows up during slow evening hours in the back of the house and in the lobby near the mechanical rooms. Crew members on late strikes have heard heavy footsteps walking through the basement corridor toward his old office. When they get to the office, the light is on. They turn it off. It's on again in the morning.

Then there was the projectionist. Nobody recorded his name. The staff version goes like this: during the Palace's run as a movie house, one of the projectionists had a heart attack on shift. The crew tried to carry him down the booth stairs on a door they'd pulled off its hinges, and he fell from the door and died on the landing. The story isn't on any plaque, but it's the same version every time I hear it, and multiple current and former crew members say the projection booth feels watched. One specific step on the staircase down from the booth has been described as the coldest spot in the building. In July.

The Lady in Gray shows up last in most conversations and first in the photographs guests sometimes send to the box office. She wears a high-collared 1940s dress, her hair pulled up, and she carries a folded program from a show that isn't currently running. Employees have spotted her walking up the stairs near the main entrance, or coming slowly down one of the aisles during a quiet matinee. She takes about five steps and then isn't there anymore. A staff member in the 2010s turned to help her with directions mid-sentence and found herself talking to an empty row.

Children giggle in the women's restroom beyond the Ladies' Parlor. A chandelier in one of the side lobbies swings slightly when the air handler is off. A touring company's stage manager who had worked the Palace a dozen times once sent a tech crew home an hour early because the ghost light on the stage kept going out when it wasn't unplugged. She's an atheist. She told that story at a bar on Fourth Street and somebody bought her the next round.

The Palace today is a working concert hall. Touring Broadway shows, comedians, podcasts, bands. The building books three hundred performances a year, which means thousands of visitors, which means the stories keep piling up. Staff don't bring them up to every guest, but ushers between house opens and show calls will usually answer a direct question about Bernie. After a show has let out and the theater is dark except for the one light by the booth, the crew walks past it and leaves it alone. Fred Frisch took care of this building for forty years. Nobody on the current team is about to tell him to clock out now.