Rialto Square Theatre

At the Rialto Square Theatre in Joliet, Illinois, the staff have learned to greet their ghost out loud. When something tugs a sleeve backstage, pokes a rib, or pulls a handful of hair, the move is to say "Hi, Colin," because ignoring the boy only makes him work harder.

Colin is about four years old, by the account of the people who work there. Leann Hoffrogge, the Rialto's manager of event services, describes him plainly: "A little boy who's known as Colin, and he's about 4, and he likes the stage and is very mischievous." Annette Parker, the marketing director, puts the odds on him: "The little boy shows himself quite often. He's kind of a trickster, and eight times out of 10 he's there."

Here is the wrinkle the staff are honest about. The legend says Colin was a boy struck by a car in front of the theater and killed. So they went looking — dug through the old newspaper archives for the accident — and found nothing. No report, no name, no record that any boy ever died out front. The ghost is real enough to greet by name. The story underneath him isn't written down anywhere.

He isn't alone. Backstage, in the star's dressing room, staff name a woman called Vivian, who they believe was a vaudeville performer. There's a woman in white tied to the back staircase in most tellings, the balcony in others. And up in the auditorium balcony, a couple in period clothing.

The building opened in 1926 as a movie palace, a rotunda copied from Rome's Pantheon and a lobby copied from Versailles. In 2012, the Ghost Hunters crew filmed an episode here called "Curtain Call." Their meters spiked hard in the dressing room, high enough to disrupt the equipment. They caught a child's laugh on the audio.

The kind they greet by name. The one they can't find a record of.