Palace Theatre

A woman named Mary died in the 1984 fire next door to Manchester's Palace Theatre. Staff have watched her cross backstage in a white dress ever since.

During the 1984 fire that damaged apartments adjoining the Palace Theatre, a woman named Mary died. Staff at the theatre in Manchester say she still walks the backstage area in a white dress, usually in the narrow hallway between the dressing rooms and stage left, and that is the ghost most of them will talk about on the record.

The Palace opened on April 9, 1915, at 80 Hanover Street, built in under a year by developer Victor Charas as the only fireproof, air-conditioned first-class theatre in New Hampshire. The stage hosted Harry Houdini, Jimmy Durante, Bob Hope, Red Skelton, and the Marx Brothers during vaudeville's last good decade. It converted to a movie house in the 1930s, struggled through the 1960s, nearly got demolished in 1974, and was saved by a community fundraising campaign that restored it as a performing arts venue. It turned 100 in 2015 with a year-long anniversary season.

Mary is the main story, but she is not the only one. There is a male presence in the basement that multiple investigation teams have run into. When New Hampshire Project Paranormal spent a night in the theatre in 2014, they recorded an EVP of what sounded like a man yelling during a quiet moment in the orchestra pit. Ghost Hunters picked up similar activity years earlier and left with audio that got cleaned up and released on the show. Staff describe him as crankier than Mary, more territorial, and mostly confined to the sub-stage area where old props and scenery get stored.

The third presence is quieter and more mechanical. Whenever something goes wrong during a production, sound cues that misfire, lighting boards that reset mid-show, an orchestra pit elevator that stalls on opening night, the stage crew blames a ghost they have never named. Technical directors have rotated through the building for decades. Each one inherits the same complaint from the last: the electrical in this place has a personality.

The Palace stands out against other theatre ghosts in New England because the 1984 fire is a real event with a real casualty. Most theatre hauntings trace back to apocryphal accidents that nobody can source. Mary is findable. The fire made the Manchester Union Leader. An apartment resident died in a building physically connected to the theatre, and sightings started showing up in staff accounts within a year. For a theatre-ghost story, that is an unusually clean chain of evidence.

The Palace runs a full season now, plus a second venue called the Rex down the street. Mary has her hallway. Ask a stage manager on a Tuesday afternoon in October and you will get a shrug and a specific piece of tape on the floor where the wardrobe racks used to sit.