In Brief
The NorShor Theatre in Duluth, Minnesota sits on a lot that has burned three theaters to the ground. After the 1895 fire, a young woman in sleepwear drifted the charred ruins at midnight — and faded to nothing when anyone got close enough to speak.
The Full Story
The NorShor Theatre in Duluth, Minnesota stands on a piece of ground that has burned three theaters off it. The Grand Opera House went up in 1883 and was gone to fire by 1889. The Masons built the Temple Opera House next, and on October 12, 1895, it burned to the ground in about 30 minutes. The present building — opened as the Orpheum in 1910, remade in Art Deco as the NorShor in 1941 — is the third to stand on that lot.
It was the second one that left a ghost.
The Temple Opera House belonged to Duluth's Masons, who used it for degree plays, and its last show was an actor named Daniel Sully in a comedy called "Daddy Nolan." Then the fire took it in half an hour, and in the months after, the charred ruins drew Duluth's most famous haunting.
In the late winter of 1896, people reported a young woman in pajamas walking the wreckage at midnight — attractive, somewhat sleepy-looking, calm. By the account in the News Tribune of March 1, 1896, roughly 20 reputable witnesses saw her: businessmen, doctors, police officers. One walked right up to her. "I came within a few feet of the girl and spoke to her," he told the paper. "Imagine my surprise when the figure faded away before my sight and I found myself addressing space."
Word spread. Crowds of about 300 gathered at the ruins for midnight watch parties, until pranksters with white cloth muddied the whole thing and the sightings thinned out. No record ever tied the woman to a name, or to anyone who died in the fire. The paper only wondered, in print, whether "some dark crime was committed on that eventful night."
The ruins became a roller rink, and in 1910 the Orpheum rose on the site, big enough to draw Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and Cab Calloway through town. The 1941 remodel turned it into the Art Deco NorShor. The local press now calls the theater "part of" that very ground. The Duluth Playhouse restored it and reopened it in 2018 as a roughly 600-seat venue, and it runs a full season today. Haunted-Duluth roundups say a former performer lingers backstage there, her voice carrying from the dressing rooms — though no one credible has put a name to her either.
Three theaters, one lot, and a woman nobody could ever account for.
