Staff at the Mount Baker Theatre in Bellingham, Washington call her Judy, and she keeps to the corridor between the balcony and the mezzanine, calling the men who work there by name. The basement has something else in it.
The Mount Baker Theatre in Bellingham, Washington has a ghost who works one hallway. Staff call her Judy, and her route is the corridor running from the balcony down to the mezzanine. She is said to be fond of the men in the building, often calling them by name and touching them as they pass, with ushers, servers and projectionists all named as her targets. The founder of Bellingham Ghost Tours bills her on his route as "handsy Judy." Reports of the place being haunted go back to at least the 1970s.
Where she came from depends on who tells it, and both versions trace to a single article in the Bellingham Herald from April 2002. In one, her house stood on this block and was burned or pulled down to clear ground for the theatre, and she never forgave the city for taking it. In the other, she was the daughter of one of the men building the place, killed in an accident on the job. Nothing in the record picks between them. No source gives her a surname, an address on the block, a year, or one named witness.
Ground broke here in April 1926, and the theatre opened on 29 April 1927. Its own history describes that evening: whistles shrieking from Bellingham Bay, fire engine sirens ringing, streetcars clanging their bells as they carried patrons down. Robert C. Reamer designed the place gilded and domed, with a searchlight salvaged from the battleship USS Oregon set on top of the tower. The 1978 National Register nomination adds a detail no audience ever sees, a hidden passageway running the full perimeter of the auditorium, concealed inside the vaulted arches at ceiling level.
The basement has its own tenant. A black cat is reported down there, hunting mice, gone the moment anyone comes close. The regional visitor bureau's account traces it: a couple reported the cat near the backstage stairs, and research afterward turned up a black panther, travelling with a circus, that died in that room in the late 1930s. Nobody has produced the circus, or a record of the animal.
The theatre published that one itself. In April 2020 its own YouTube channel posted a walkthrough called "The Ghost Panther of Mount Baker Theatre." Out front, orbs are reported over the stage during performances, some witnesses saying they keep time with the music for the length of the show. The staff burn a ghost light at centre stage whenever nothing is running, which a visitor in 2014 was told is for the ghosts who want to perform, or want to watch. A worker there put Judy more plainly: "Judy is a flirt!"
The theatre's written history says none of this. Its venue history, its about page and its centennial pages run through the architecture, the restoration, the 1980 plan to chop the auditorium into multiple screens that public protest killed, and not one of them mentions Judy, or the cat, or the light they leave burning.
