The Plaza Theatre in El Paso keeps a man in the balcony who announces himself by cigarette smoke in a building where nobody smokes. A former employee says he told her we all have our time to die, then went over the rail. Three times.
The Plaza Theatre in downtown El Paso has a man in the balcony, and he announces himself by smell. Cigarette smoke, in a building where nobody is smoking. Then small orange lights in the dark, like the lit ends of cigarettes. The stories call him the Smoking Man: elderly, in a tuxedo, his outline blurred, smoke trailing off his body.
The whole encounter traces to one anonymous account, published on the travel site Backpackerverse in 2016, surviving now only in the Internet Archive. A former Plaza employee who would only be called Ashley described sweeping between the first-floor seats late at night when the smell reached her. She raised the stage lights. A man was sitting in the front row of the balcony in a tux. "His skin was blurry," she said, "and trails of smoke seemed to emanate from all over his body."
He looked at her and said, "we all have our time to die." Then he stood, and went head-first over the rail. She heard him land. When she looked back at the balcony, he was sitting in the same seat again. He did it three times before she reached the lobby. She never worked there again.
Local news carried him too. KTSM's Andra Litton, running through El Paso's spookiest spots in October 2017, called the Smoking Man "the most disturbing story" at the Plaza, a man who "talks to staff and has been seen plunging head-first over the balcony." The same piece names the Plaza's other two residents: a shadow that sits in the back row, and a little girl heard giggling and bouncing a ball down the mezzanine stairs.
The house was built to look like somewhere else. The Plaza opened September 12, 1930, an atmospheric palace in Spanish Colonial Revival dress, its walls imitating medieval buildings and its ceiling a false night sky, hundreds of small lights for stars and machinery to drift clouds across them. The family that owned it wanted the site cleared for a parking lot. The El Paso Community Foundation stopped them, and the restored theatre reopened in 2006.
Texas Highways, the state's official travel magazine, named the Plaza one of the five most haunted places in Texas in 2019, then waved off half the roster. The woman in white, the man in black, the vanishing child with the ball: their "veracity lies in the retelling rather than the reoccurring," the magazine wrote. What it kept were the orbs, the electrical components switching on without power, the objects that move, and the red-orange light people report travelling through the mezzanine.
No record names the man on the balcony, or dates his fall. The people who ran it are less careful about it. Charles Russell managed the Plaza from 1940 to 1951, and at 90 he was asked about its ghosts. "Intelligent people don't believe in ghosts!" he said. "While I consider myself to be intelligent, if you ever spent the night in the Plaza Theatre, you might change your mind."
