Rivoli Theatre

The Rivoli's women's restroom has been flushing toilets and opening faucets by itself for decades. Staff blame "Lady Rivoli."

The women's restroom does things it shouldn't. Faucets open by themselves, lights flicker, stall doors swing, and toilets flush when nobody's in them. The women's room at the Rivoli Theatre on East 10th Street is the busiest haunted corner of the building, and the one most former employees will bring up first. Whatever is happening there has been happening for decades.

The ghost locals have named is called Lady Rivoli. She was a patron in life, according to the version of the story that's gotten printed most often, and she spends her time moving work equipment out from under people who need it. Tools turn up in rooms nobody left them in. Cookware goes missing. Cigarette butts appear in ashtrays that were empty a minute before. An ex-employee from the late 1970s and early 1980s said they used to see a man in a hat sitting in the second or third row before the theater opened for the day, and once got told to stop making so much noise by someone who turned out to be working on the other side of the building. A well-dressed couple, the man in an old-fashioned tuxedo and the woman in a white dress, has been seen in the auditorium more than once and has always vanished before anyone could reach them.

Whoever rented the apartment above the theater in later years kept complaining that their pantry goods and cookware kept migrating on their own, and that they saw ghosts in the living room.

The Rivoli opened on September 15, 1927 as a Universal Pictures venture. The architects were Henry Ziegler Dietz and D.R. Lederman, and they gave it the full Spanish Mission Revival treatment: 1,500 seats, iron brackets, faux second-floor balconies, a red clay tile roof, Indiana limestone, leaded glass windows, brass fittings, and a black marble terrazzo floor. The opening film was Glenn Tryon in Painting the Town, and a Robert-Morton organ played along. At the time, the Rivoli had the largest stage in Indianapolis.

Universal sold off most of its theater holdings in 1937. The Rivoli changed hands a few times. Charles Richard Chulchian bought it in 1976, tried running it through the tail end of its life as a working theater, and closed it in 1992. The building got onto the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, and Chulchian donated it to the Rivoli Center for the Performing Arts in 2007. The Lilly Endowment later put up millions to help restore it as part of a broader revival of the East 10th Street District.

Chulchian, trying to figure out why his theater felt the way it felt, claimed he found reports of supernatural activity on the site that predated the theater's construction. This usually gets folded into the older American story that the Rivoli was built on a Native American burial ground, a line that gets recycled for most Midwestern haunted theaters. Take it for what it's worth. The specific things that happen in the women's restroom, though, happen whether or not the burial-ground story is true. A long list of employees has described the same phenomena across decades. That's as close to corroboration as a haunting story gets.

Restoration is ongoing. The ghosts, from the sound of it, don't mind.