In Brief
Staff at the Palace Theatre in Manchester, New Hampshire keep seeing a woman in white backstage. They call her Mary. A real woman did burn to death in the building next door in 1984, though no record ever ties the two together.
The Full Story
At the Palace Theatre in Manchester, New Hampshire, staff keep seeing a woman in white backstage. They call her Mary. NH Magazine describes her as a young girl in white; the regional accounts give her the name. Either way, she lingers near the wings, and she is the figure people there report most.
Most theatre ghosts are a name and a feeling and nothing you can check. This one sits next to something real.
The Palace opened on April 9, 1915, with a musical comedy called "Modern Eve." The name came from a public contest; a woman named Amelia Sansoucie won it. It was billed as "the only first-class theatre in New Hampshire that was fireproof and air-conditioned," the cooling supplied by fans blowing over ice blocks stored under the stage. Houdini played here. So did the Marx Brothers, Jimmy Durante, Bob Hope, Red Skelton. By the late 1960s the place had sunk to a warehouse, butchering equipment standing on the stage, and it was nearly torn down before a 1974 rescue brought it back and reopened it with Puccini's "Madame Butterfly."
Then 1984. A fire tore through the Hanover Street block and destroyed much of it. The theatre's original firewall is credited with halting the blaze and saving the rest of the street. A woman died in an apartment in the building physically adjoining the theatre. Theatre president Peter Ramsey has pointed to that death as part of why the place is called haunted.
No source names her. No source confirms she was Mary. The fire, the death, the firewall are all on the record; the link between the woman who burned and the woman in white is something people infer, not something anyone wrote down.
Mary is not the only one reported. There is a male presence, said to come through on EVP recordings, described as liking to yell at people. And there is a third, unnamed, blamed only when equipment fails and a production goes wrong on the night it matters.
In 2008 the TAPS team from Ghost Hunters filmed an episode here, "House of Spirits." Ramsey walked them through the building and told them the fire story himself. A local team came back in 2014 to film their own night inside. The theatre turned a hundred in 2015 and runs a full season today, audiences filing into the 880 seats the restoration left it.
And the firewall that stopped the blaze, the one piece of the building that decided who on Hanover Street lived through 1984, is still standing in the wall behind the woman in white.
