In Brief
At the Mantorville Opera House in Minnesota, workers cutting into a basement wall found a mummified cat sealed inside the masonry. Now it's counted among the building's ghosts, and it's not even the busiest one — that's Ellen, who plays pranks during shows.
The Full Story
At the Mantorville Opera House in Mantorville, Minnesota, workers renovating the basement cut into a wall and found a cat inside it. Mummified, cemented into the masonry, with no record of how it got there or when. The find came somewhere in the building's mid-2000s refurbishment, and ever since, staff have counted that cat among the resident ghosts. It's said to haunt the sound booth.
It is not even the busiest spirit in the building. That one is Ellen.
The staff named her after years of hearing someone climb the stairs to the dressing rooms behind the stage when no one was there. Annie Johnson, who runs the theatre company's board, calls Ellen "our main ghost." She's known for pranks during productions — small things that go wrong on a night when the house is full. Props move. A fog machine switches on mid-show. Most of the tellings hang that one on Ellen, though at least one credits Harold instead.
Harold is the grumpy one, the spirit investigators say lingers down in the basement. Some of them figure he was the building's architect, though no record of the 1918 building names anyone, so that stays a hunch passed between ghost hunters. The board counts at least four spirits in all: Ellen, the cat, a piano player they call Robert Sorenson, and Harold. None of the three named people turn up in any historical record. They're names the living gave the things they couldn't explain.
The basement is where most of it happens. Visiting investigators report cold spots, the feeling of being watched, and flashlights that switch on and off on command, caught on video. Upstairs, people describe the thump of cowboy boots crossing the empty second-floor hallway, and lights that flick on after they've been shut off.
The strange part is how ordinary the building's history is. Built in 1918 from local limestone — the last structure ever made of it, raised by community money after a fire took part of downtown — the place has been almost everything. A speakeasy during Prohibition. A silent movie house. A roller rink. City hall. A civic center. It only became a 150-seat playhouse again in the 1970s, and the restoration that brought it back later earned a statewide preservation award. The theatre company that runs it now stages plays year-round, rents the place out, and openly invites paranormal investigators in.
Hawk Horvath is one of them. He's hunted ghosts here for well over a decade, across dozens of visits, and he doesn't find the place frightening. "There is nothing negative or harmful there," he says. The spirits, by his account, just float around and watch.
Which is its own quiet unease — a building full of them, and the man who knows it best says none of them mean you any harm.
