PlayMakers Repertory Company Theatre

UNC's 1850 Greek Revival theater is haunted by Evan, a quiet 1940s watcher, and former UNC President David Swain, who moves props backstage.

The corn and tobacco carved into the Corinthian capitals of Playmakers Theatre are the tell. This is not a normal Greek Revival building. This is Alexander Jackson Davis trying to flatter a Southern agricultural state in 1850 by substituting the two crops the state actually grew for the acanthus leaves the ancients preferred. The result is a strange hybrid: a temple in Chapel Hill with sheaves of corn where the architecture book said there should be laurel.

Strange bones deserve strange stories, and the building has two ghosts.

Playmakers went up in 1850 as Smith Hall, a social venue for the University of North Carolina. Over the next seventy years it served as a law school, a biology lab, a bath house, and a library. The Carolina Playmakers drama troupe finally turned it into a theater in 1923. National Historic Landmark designation followed in 1973. Today it's one of the oldest surviving theater buildings on any American campus, and actors working there have, for generations, sworn they are not alone.

The first ghost is known as Evan. Drama students describe him as a quiet, critical presence in a 1940s-cut suit and tie who sits in the audience during rehearsals and watches. He is sometimes seen in the empty house before a run-through, occupying a seat in the middle rows. When an actor turns to look at him directly, he is no longer there. Evan does not move furniture or slam doors. He just watches.

The second ghost does not watch. He walks. Actors and technicians attribute the footsteps and the cold patches backstage to David Lowry Swain, who was president of UNC for thirty-three years and who died violently on August 27, 1868, after being thrown from a buggy in Chapel Hill. His connection to Smith Hall is circumstantial but unshakeable in the oral tradition of the theater: Swain ran the university when the building was new, and something about his death left him unwilling to leave the campus that defined his career. His footprint, if you want to call it that, is noisy. Props migrate overnight. Lights flicker during performances. Backstage doors close themselves in rooms with no draft.

The ghost light that burns on stage each night is standard theater practice: a single bulb on a stand, kept lit so nobody walks into the orchestra pit in the dark. At Playmakers, actors will tell you it serves a second purpose. Whether or not you buy Evan and Swain, the bulb gets left on.

It has been left on every night the building has been a theater.