In Brief
The Mounds Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota sat empty as a warehouse for 34 years. When restorers got back inside, the 1967 candy wrappers were still on the floor — and the staff say three of the old workers had never left.
The Full Story
The Mounds Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota keeps three ghosts, and the staff have given each of them a job. There's Red, who ran the projection booth. Jim, who worked the floor as an usher. And Mary, a little girl who turns up on the stage.
The building opened in 1922 as a silent-movie house billed as "The Pride of Dayton's Bluff." It ran films for forty-five years — the first talkie was *My Man* with Fanny Brice in 1929 — until it closed in July 1967 and went dark. For the next thirty-four years it was a warehouse, packed with stored theater organs, and nobody bought a ticket inside it again.
When restorers finally got back in to bring it back as a community arts venue, they found the last show still lying on the floor. Candy wrappers. Popcorn boxes. Trash from 1967, as if someone had paused the place mid-screening and forgotten to come back.
The staff say the workers came back too. Red, as the story goes, spent his whole life in that booth, once jumped from the balcony to the aisle to impress a woman in the seats and broke his leg doing it, and died a year after the theatre closed. The people who work there now describe him as a prankster with a temper. A tour guide named Chanel Huston says she has a history with him. "He likes to touch people," she said, "and I tend to be one of the people he touches a lot."
Mary is the one the tours come for. She's said to giggle, hold hands, play with shoelaces, and clap along when people sing "If You're Happy and You Know It." Others describe a girl in a pink dress bouncing a ball across the stage. The tale told on the tours is that she was a little girl found dead in the lot beside the theatre, sometime in the late 1950s. No newspaper, no police record, no death certificate carries her — the only place she lives is the story.
The theatre leans all the way in. It runs its own basement tours and calls itself Minnesota's second most paranormally active place. An investigator named Justin Minor recorded a voice in the women's bathroom that he calls the best his group has ever caught. It says: "What's going on in here? You're overwhelming me."
A place that paused in 1967, and a staff that never quite emptied out.
