Palace and Majestic Theaters

In Bridgeport, Connecticut, a retired police sergeant walked through two boarded-up theaters that had been empty for decades, and what he reported seeing was shadows. Dark shapes moving down the staircases and through the walls. He'd photographed orbs. He'd heard, somewhere in the dead air, what he called "the muffled hum of a crowd."

The crowd is the part that lands. Because the Poli Palace and Majestic, side by side at 1315 Main Street, were built to hold one.

Theater mogul Sylvester Z. Poli put up the whole block in the early 1920s — a five-story Beaux Arts slab of steel and concrete with two enormous theaters in the rear and the 109-room Savoy Hotel out front. The Palace seated roughly 3,642, the largest movie theater Connecticut ever built. The Majestic held more than two thousand. Together they were designed to seat a state of wonder, night after night.

Then Bridgeport's factories closed, the audiences vanished, and the lights went out — the Majestic in the early 1970s, the Palace in 1975, its final run as an adult-film house. Nothing replaced them. The building was added to the National Register in 1979, which keeps the wrecking ball away but pays for nothing. So it just stood there, rotting in place. Torn stage curtain. Peeling paint. A chandelier still hanging in the Palace over rows that no longer exist — in the Majestic, every seat has been stripped from the floor and balcony.

A $400 million plan to bring it back collapsed in 2021. As of the latest reporting, no construction has begun.

Into that building, around 2010, walked Sergeant James Myers. He runs a paranormal group; a colleague recorded an EVP that sounded like a young girl saying "Hellooo!" on the hotel's second floor. Ghost-lore sites repeat the same two things over and over: shadow figures, and voices in the empty rooms.

Myers came out with one phrase for the place. A sense, he said, of sadness and loss.