In Brief
The Ritz Theater on Wyoming Avenue in Scranton has a ghost that does something most don't. It sings — alone, from the attic. Below it, footsteps cross the staircases and shapes move through the corridors. Three hauntings, three floors.
The Full Story
The Ritz Theater in Scranton, Pennsylvania has a ghost that sings. Not a knock, not a cold spot near a stage, but a voice, unaccompanied, drifting down from the attic of the building at 222 Wyoming Avenue. The Lackawanna County Haunted Trail lists it plainly: "ethereal singing emanating from the attic." It's the strangest of three things people report at the Ritz, and the three of them split neatly by floor.
Below the singing are the staircases, where the same trail describes "faint footsteps echoing." Below those run the corridors, where it lists "otherworldly apparitions." Most theaters get by with one ghost and one cold spot. The Ritz keeps three separate hauntings, stacked one above the other through the building.
It's a building that has had a lot of voices pass through it. The place opened on September 2, 1907, as the Poli Theatre, built by vaudeville magnate Sylvester Poli for around $250,000, with a facade by architect Albert E. Westover and seating for more than 2,000. In its vaudeville years it was Scranton's premier stage, and the roster that played it reads like a marquee of the whole era: Harry Houdini, W.C. Fields, Mae West, Will Rogers, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Fanny Brice. Scranton audiences were famously hard to win over. The saying around the circuit went, "If you can play Scranton, you can play anywhere."
It changed names the way old theaters do. It was renamed the Ritz in 1930, when it gave up live acts and switched to showing movies. Then it was remodeled in Art Deco and renamed the Comerford in 1937, the second balcony torn out in the process and the seating dropped to around 1,600. None of that history is tied to the singing in any record. There's no death here, no fire, no projectionist who stayed behind. The lore at the Ritz has no name attached to it at all, only a floor where the voice comes from.
In late 2023 the building was bought by Josh Balz, former keyboardist of the band Motionless In White, who reopened it in 2024 after roughly a million dollars of work. He filled it with his own aesthetic, a cluster of tenants that all lean into the dark: a goth bar called Noir Dark Spirits, a tattoo studio, a mead hall with axe throwing, a goth ice cream shop. A man who built a brand on the macabre moved into a theater that was already, quietly, occupied, and put a bar three floors below the one that sings.
