Palace and Majestic Theaters

The Palace and Majestic Theaters in Bridgeport, built in 1922 with 6,300 combined seats, have been abandoned since the 1970s. Construction disturbed a possible Native American burial ground, and police paranormal investigators have captured shadow figures and EVP inside the decaying Beaux Arts complex that occupies an entire city block.

When construction crews built the Palace and Majestic Theaters in Bridgeport in 1921, they dug up Native American artifacts. The Golden Hill Paugussett tribe had a settlement nearby, and the speculation since has been that the construction disturbed old graves. The building has been empty for over fifty years. Whatever was disturbed has had plenty of time to settle in.

The Palace and Majestic Theaters sit at 1315-1357 Main Street in downtown Bridgeport, occupying an entire city block between Congress and Arch Streets. Theater mogul Sylvester Z. Poli hired architect Thomas W. Lamb to design the complex, which also included the Savoy Hotel in the front section. Poli's Palace Theatre opened on September 2, 1922, with 3,700 seats. The Majestic opened two months later on November 4, with 2,600 seats. Combined, the complex could hold more than 6,000 people in a single evening. It was the biggest movie theater ever built in Connecticut.

The interiors were absurd. Beaux Arts style. Vaulted ceilings, gilded hand-carved moldings, a giant Hall theater organ. The exterior was brick and concrete finished to look like granite, five stories tall, steel-framed and meant to last. Poli built a chain of vaudeville theaters across the Northeast, and the Bridgeport complex was his flagship.

Loew's acquired the Palace in 1934 and ran it as Loew's Poli Theater. As long as Bridgeport's factories kept running, the theaters kept filling. When the factories started closing in the 1960s and 1970s, the audience disappeared. The Majestic closed in 1971. The Palace followed in 1975. The Savoy Hotel shut down too. The entire block went dark.

It hasn't reopened. The complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, which protects it from demolition but doesn't fund restoration. Repeated efforts to bring it back have failed. The building stands vacant and decaying in downtown Bridgeport, boarded up and off limits.

In August 2010, Bridgeport police sergeant James Myers and his partner Martin Vincze from the East Coast Paranormal Police investigated all three spaces: the Poli Palace, the Majestic, and the Savoy. Myers runs 826 Paranormal (826 is his badge number). Inside the theaters, the team reported shadowy figures moving through the auditoriums and captured electronic voice phenomena.

One theory about who's in there involves Dutch Schultz, the Prohibition-era rum runner who did significant business in Bridgeport during the 1930s. Schultz was murdered in New Jersey in 1935, but a researcher named Witkowski speculated that his connections to Bridgeport might explain some of the activity. Another account, posted online in 2021, claims a "famous gangster killed two bosses on the 2nd floor" of the complex, leaving two ghosts behind. The details are murky and unverified, but they fit the era. The 1920s and 1930s were violent decades in Bridgeport, and a theater complex of this size would have attracted every kind of business.

The Native American burial ground theory is the most persistent. Artifacts were found during original construction, the Golden Hill Paugussetts were in the area, and the timeline works. If graves were disturbed in 1921, the building has been sitting on them for over a century.

What makes the Palace and Majestic unusual among haunted theaters is their scale. This isn't a creaky playhouse with one ghost in the balcony. This is 6,300 seats across two auditoriums, a hotel, five stories, an entire city block of abandoned Beaux Arts grandeur, decaying in the dark. The gilded moldings are flaking. The organ is silent. The vaulted ceilings hold nothing but pigeons and shadows.

The building was designed to hold thousands of people in a state of wonder. Now it holds something else entirely. Whatever moves through those auditoriums has had fifty years of emptiness and darkness to make the space its own.