Portsmouth Music Hall

The heavy stage curtain at the Portsmouth Music Hall bows outward and ripples as though someone is walking behind it, with no draft and no one on stage.

Patrons sitting in the mezzanine of the Portsmouth Music Hall have watched the heavy stage curtain bow outward and ripple as though someone was walking behind it, heard the fabric drag across the boards, and then watched it settle with no explanation and no one on stage. It happens often enough that the ushers have a practiced line for audience members who point it out: yes, we see it too.

The building at 28 Chestnut Street in Portsmouth has a complicated past. The original Temple, built in 1806 for religious concerts, burned in 1876. The current structure went up in 1878 as a secular opera house with a florid Victorian interior. Mark Twain read there. Harry Houdini performed. John Philip Sousa, Buffalo Bill Cody, and the actress Maude Adams all took the stage during the vaudeville decades. Portsmouth saw the hall through three near-death closures, the longest running from the 1960s until a community-driven restoration reopened it in 1988.

What complicates the haunting is what the block used to be. Before 1806, the ground the Music Hall sits on held pieces of the old Portsmouth almshouse and a short-term holding cell for debtors and the ill. Disease, poverty, and early death stacked up on this stretch of Chestnut Street before the Temple was ever built, and local tour guides at the Portsmouth Ghost Tour and US Ghost Adventures walk visitors through those records as context for what staff describe inside the theater.

Three recurring figures come up in staff and audience accounts. A bearded man in nineteenth-century clothing has been spotted in the aisles during slow matinees, usually seen from the corner of the eye and gone by the time anyone turns. A woman in a dark dress walks across the upstage area behind the curtain, sometimes while the curtain is down, sometimes while it's up and she's seen from the house. And a child laughs in the upper balcony, usually in the half-hour before house opens, usually at a volume that carries. The child is the one house staff mention most uneasily.

The Music Hall leans into the folklore in a careful, curated way. Their Bloodstone Ghost Tour, added to the seasonal calendar in the last few years, uses the building itself as the primary artifact. No props, no costumes, just the theater with the house lights off and a guide who knows where the sightings happened. It sells out every October. The hall has also hosted Do You Believe In Ghosts?, a paranormal event with investigators working live in front of an audience.

Portsmouth has a denser ghost-tour scene than almost any comparable New England town, and the Music Hall is the densest node on most of those routes. It's a venue that understands its story. A child's laugh in the balcony before the doors open. A woman crossing the upstage in front of a closed curtain. A curtain billowing outward on a stage with nobody on it.