A light above the balcony at the Majestic Theatre in Dallas comes on by itself, and the staff hold that seat for the next show. They say it belongs to Karl Hoblitzelle, who opened the place in 1921 and has been dead since 1967.
The last thing one employee at the Majestic Theatre in Dallas did every night was lock the office door that opens into the theatre. He'd come back the next morning and find it standing wide, the room behind it cold in a way the season didn't explain. He locked it again. Same thing the next morning, and the next. When he finally said something, his manager laughed at him. It was only Karl. Karl liked that door for checking on things.
Karl Hoblitzelle opened the Majestic at 1925 Elm Street on April 11, 1921, the flagship of his Interstate Amusement vaudeville circuit. His architect, John Eberson, hung a ceiling of mechanically drifting clouds and twinkling stars over walls painted with Roman gardens. Hoblitzelle died in 1967, and people who work in the building have been describing him at work in it ever since.
He has standards. The ghost tours tell of a woman backstage late one night who felt the room go cold, stepped away from a stage prop for a moment, and came back to find it gone. It never turned up, and the theatre had to replace it. Her boss knew exactly what had happened: Karl hides props and costumes that aren't good enough. Scenery shifts with nobody near it. Phone lines light up when no one is calling.
The house he is minding has outlasted everything around it. Houdini played here, and Mae West, and Duke Ellington. The last picture ran on July 16, 1973, the James Bond film Live and Let Die, and then the Majestic sat dark for a decade while the wrecking crews worked their way down Elm Street. Brian De Palma shot the concert scenes of Phantom of the Paradise inside the empty building in 1974. The Palace, the Melba, the Capitol, the Rialto: all gone. The Majestic reopened in 1983 and is the only theatre left standing from Dallas's Theater Row.
In 2017 the Dallas Morning News asked the people who work there what they'd seen. A maintenance man named Fernando Ramirez said he had seen the ghost several times. A security guard, Jonas Griffin, said the elevator does things nobody asks it to do. Others describe a man sitting up in the balcony who isn't there by the time anyone climbs the stairs to check on him.
Then there is the light. A single fixture above the balcony switches itself on, and the staff long ago settled on what it means: Karl wants his seat held for the next show. They hold it.
Karl Hoblitzelle is buried in St. Louis, in the city where he was born, a long way from Elm Street. Dallas owns his theatre now, and nothing the city or the venue publishes about the building admits there is a ghost in it. The seat gets held anyway.
