Ryman Auditorium

A Confederate soldier sits in the Ryman's upper balcony during rehearsals. Grant Turner's voice has come through the intercom with nothing routed.

The most-seen ghost at the Ryman Auditorium isn't Hank Williams or Captain Tom Ryman. It's a man in Confederate gray who sits in the Confederate Gallery of the upper balcony during rehearsals and watches whoever's playing on the stage below. Tour guides and Ryman staff tie him to the Confederate veterans' reunions the auditorium hosted in the 1890s. Performers walking out for a 4 a.m. soundcheck have looked up and seen him there, then watched him not be there.

The building was never supposed to be a music venue. Tom Ryman built it in 1892 as the Union Gospel Tabernacle after a revival sermon by Sam Jones convinced the riverboat captain to give up his rougher pursuits. Ryman died in 1904, and Sam Jones, eulogizing him from the same stage, asked the audience to rename the building in his honor. The crowd voted yes by acclamation. The Grand Ole Opry didn't move in until 1943. By then the bones of the place were already 50 years old, and the ghost stories were already rolling.

Ryman himself is another frequent presence. Stagehands have heard heavy footsteps crossing the wooden floor of the dressing room area when the building is empty. A few performers have described hearing his voice from the wings. Ryman's portrait hangs in the lobby, and several visitors have described the eyes following them across the room, which is a generic ghost-tour beat, but in a building this old, you take what you get.

Hank Williams gets the third slot, and his story is the one tourists ask about. Williams was banned from the Opry in August 1952 for chronic drunkenness and missed shows. He died on January 1, 1953, in the back of a Cadillac on his way to a gig in Canton, Ohio. He was 29. Marty Stuart described a 2003 late-night session at the Ryman where the temperature dropped sharply while he was running through Williams songs on the empty stage and he became certain Williams was somewhere in the building, listening. One of the building's weirder recurring reports is longtime Opry announcer Grant Turner's voice coming through the house intercom between sets, faint but unmistakable, when nothing was routed to the speakers.

A handful of stories don't fit any of the named ghosts. Cleaning staff describe the second balcony lights cycling on and off after lockup. Tour guides have noted the smell of cigarette smoke in the upper rows, where the building has been smoke-free since the renovation. Several touring artists have refused to use one specific dressing room, the one closest to the stage left wing, after experiencing the feeling of being watched while changing. Hank Williams's old Opry dressing room is the one that comes up again and again.

The Ryman closed for restoration in 1974 when the Opry moved to the suburbs and sat almost empty for 20 years. It reopened in 1994. Several staff have said the haunting picked back up the moment the building came back to life, as if whoever was in there had been waiting through the dead years. The Confederate soldier in the upper balcony was seen within the first month after reopening.

Hundreds of touring musicians have a story about this building. The one that gets repeated most often is the Confederate soldier scene, a man in gray watching empty soundchecks from the same upper-balcony pew where the 1890s reunions sat, in the tabernacle a steamboat captain built in 1892 after a single sermon changed his life.