Mt. Baker Theatre

Staff at this 1927 Moorish-Spanish movie palace in Bellingham have reported a ghost named Judy haunting the balcony-to-mezzanine corridor since the 1970s, plus floating orbs that dance over the stage during live performances.

Floating orbs drift over the stage during performances at the Mt. Baker Theatre, hovering above the performers and, according to more than a few witnesses, dancing along with the music. Staff in Bellingham's 1,517-seat Moorish-Spanish palace have been reporting phenomena like this since the 1970s, and the explanations keep getting weirder.

The theatre opened on April 29, 1927, designed by Robert Reamer, the same architect behind Yellowstone's Old Faithful Inn and Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre. William Fox, the Hollywood mogul, bankrolled the $300,000 construction as part of his national theater chain, and over eighty craftsmen skilled in stone masonry, carpentry, and plaster casting spent a year creating Reamer's extravagant Moorish-Spanish interior. A decommissioned searchlight from the battleship USS Oregon topped the 110-foot tower, its beam visible for sixteen miles when lit. The National Register of Historic Places added the building in 1978.

The primary ghost is a woman named Judy. Her backstory has at least three competing versions, and nobody has been able to confirm any of them. In one telling, her house was demolished to build the theatre. In another, her house burned down before construction began. A third version claims she was the daughter of a construction worker who died in an accident during the build. The origin is murky, but her territory is precise: Judy haunts a corridor leading from the balcony to the mezzanine, and that's where most of the encounters happen.

Staff attribute a wide range of activity to Judy. Locked safes found standing open in the morning. Soft voices calling names through empty rooms. Objects that shift position overnight when the building is closed and locked. She has a reputation for being particularly interested in male employees, chasing after them and, according to some accounts, trying to flirt. That's a personality trait you almost never hear attached to a theatre ghost, and it's what separates the Judy stories from the generic "building makes noises at night" category.

Judy isn't the only presence in the building. Geoffrey appears as a man in a pin-striped suit. A theater worker named Michael Chervenock, who worked at the Mt. Baker during the late 1970s and died in 1992, is said to linger as well. Staff members also report a ghost cat in the basement, which is either the strangest detail in this entire building or the most believable one, depending on how you feel about cats and their relationship to old theaters.

In August 2010, paranormal investigators affiliated with the Syfy Channel's Ghost Hunters spent a night inside the theatre alongside psychics. The investigation brought national attention to the building's already well-established local reputation. Bellingham residents who'd been telling these stories since the late 1970s finally had a cable TV audience listening.

The orbs remain the signature phenomenon and the hardest to dismiss. They appear over the main stage, typically during live performances, and multiple witnesses across unrelated events have described identical behavior: lights that seem to move in time with the music, hovering and pulsing through the duration of a show, then vanishing when the performance ends. A single event could be staged, but the same description from different audiences across years is harder to explain away. Cold shivers in specific hallways and objects being moved as phantom pranks round out the regular staff reports.

The Mt. Baker Theatre operates a full performance calendar today, hosting everything from touring Broadway productions to community concerts and film screenings. The building underwent significant restoration and remains one of the architectural gems of downtown Bellingham. The ghosts, if that's what they are, seem to approve of the programming. Judy in particular seems less interested in scaring people than in making sure everyone knows the theatre belongs to her.