Mt. Baker Theatre

A 1,517-seat performing arts venue and national historic landmark built in 1927 in Bellingham's Art District.

The Mt. Baker Theatre opened on April 29, 1927, to a crowd that lined up around the block on North Commercial Street. Designed by architect Robert C. Reamer — the same visionary behind Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone and Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre — the building was one of Hollywood mogul William Fox's chain of national theaters, built by West Coast Theatre at a cost of $300,000. Over eighty craftsmen skilled in stone masonry, carpentry, and plaster casting spent a year creating Reamer's extravagant Moorish-Spanish interior, which blends French Baroque, High Gothic, Moroccan, Mediterranean, Italian Renaissance, and Egyptian Revival elements into a theatrical fantasy. On opening night, a searchlight salvaged from the decommissioned battleship USS Oregon revolved atop the theater's tower, casting beams visible within a sixteen-mile radius across Bellingham Bay.

The theater's most persistent spirit is a woman known only as Judy. According to long-standing legend, her home stood on the land where the theater was built and was razed to make way for construction. Reports of her presence date back to at least the 1970s, and theater workers — ushers, projectionists, servers, and actors — have all reported encounters. Judy haunts the corridor connecting the balcony to the mezzanine, where she calls male workers by name, whispers to them, and touches their arms and shoulders. Staff describe her as an amorous flirt with what some characterize as posh early-twentieth-century charm. An alternate origin story holds that Judy was the daughter of a construction worker who was killed in an accident during the theater's building, though the displaced-homeowner version is more widely repeated.

Judy is not alone. A well-dressed male apparition named Geoffrey appears in a pin-striped tuxedo and has been spotted in various parts of the theater. The building is also said to be haunted by Michael Chervenock, a theater worker during the late 1970s who died in 1992. Perhaps the most unusual resident ghost is a black panther: a couple once reported seeing the spirit of a large black cat at the bottom of the backstage stairs, and subsequent research revealed that a black panther from a traveling circus had died in that very room during the late 1930s. A spectral feral cat also haunts the basement, seen hunting mice before vanishing when approached.

Patrons have reported floating orbs above the main stage during performances on multiple occasions, with documented accounts from the late 1980s and 2009 describing luminous spheres circling the balcony that disappeared when directly observed. During a renovation, workers discovered a sealed safe in a former office-turned-storage room whose combination had been lost — they found it standing mysteriously open. The theater maintains a ghostlight on center stage at all times when no production is running, following a theatrical tradition meant to give spirits a space to perform and to ward off malevolent entities. In August 2010, paranormal investigators affiliated with the Syfy Channel's Ghost Hunters and accompanying psychics spent a night in the theater searching for evidence of paranormal activity.

The Mt. Baker Theatre was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 and narrowly escaped demolition when architect James Zervas rallied the community to save it. In November 1983, a partnership was formed making it a city-owned facility managed by the Mount Baker Theatre Corporation, a citizen-based nonprofit. Over $14 million in private donations funded multiple phases of renovation, and the theater today hosts more than four hundred events and 110,000 visitors annually. Its original Style 215 Wurlitzer pipe organ, Opus 1558, is one of only twelve worldwide still played in its original venue. Bellingham Ghost Tours, led by local paranormal investigator Chuck Crooks, features the theater as a regular stop on its downtown route, with Crooks citing the variety and depth of its ghost stories — from Judy to Geoffrey to the spectral panther — as the reason it remains one of his favorite locations.