Hollywood Pantages Theatre

At the Hollywood Pantages Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, a woman sings in the empty house. Staff and audiences have reported her voice in the auditorium for decades, drifting down from the mezzanine when no one's on stage.

The story behind her is one nobody can prove. As it's told, a young woman — an aspiring performer — died in the mezzanine during a show in 1932, two years after this Art Deco movie palace opened. There is no official record of any death inside the Pantages. No coroner's file, no newspaper, no name. The singer has never been given one. The death is the legend's premise, not a fact.

What keeps the story alive is one night in 1994. During a live performance, the story goes, her voice came through a stage microphone and out over the monitor system — heard by the whole audience, carried as if someone were singing into the mic, while the stage stood empty. She's said to favor Andrew Lloyd Webber, singing along to "Phantom of the Opera" and "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat."

She isn't the only one said to linger. Howard Hughes bought the theatre in 1949 and kept his personal offices on the second floor. The story goes that assistants up there know he's coming when the room fills with cigarette smoke — which the real Hughes, a famous germaphobe, despised. By the oft-repeated account, a tall, lanky figure in a plain suit strides around a corner and walks straight through a wall that used to be the doorway to his office, sealed up in a remodel.

Hughes had a private door from that office to the back of the balcony. During rehearsals, staff say, a man is seen sitting alone back there, watching the empty seats, and vanishing when security walks toward him.

Two ghosts, two floors. The one upstairs they can put a name to. The one downstairs only sings.