Saenger Theatre

A magnificent 1927 atmospheric theatre designed to resemble an Italian Baroque courtyard under a starlit sky. The 4,000-seat venue took three years to build and cost $2.5 million. After Hurricane Katrina flooding, it was restored and reopened in 2013.

The Saenger Theatre opened on February 4, 1927, to a parade of thousands along Canal Street in New Orleans. Built by the Saenger Amusement Company at a cost of 2.5 million dollars, roughly thirty-four million in today's currency, the venue was designed by noted New Orleans architect Emile Weil to evoke an Italian Baroque courtyard. Its 4,000-seat auditorium featured Greek and Roman statuary, crystal lighting fixtures, oil paintings, and a ceiling that displayed twinkling stars and drifting clouds, an atmospheric masterpiece that transported audiences to an open-air Mediterranean evening. The theatre originally showed silent films accompanied by a massive Robert Morton theatre organ, one of the largest ever built by the Van Nuys, California company, before transitioning to talking pictures in the 1930s.

The haunting of the Saenger is rooted in tragedy from its earliest days. According to longstanding accounts among theatre staff, a worker fell to his death from the rafters during the building's construction or early operations. His spirit is said to linger above the stage, where crew members and performers have reported glimpsing an unexplained figure in the catwalks and rigging high overhead. The sighting is always brief, a shape that vanishes when anyone looks directly at it, but it has been reported consistently enough across decades that theatre workers accept it as part of the building's character.

Staff working late nights in the cavernous venue have described hearing footsteps in empty sections of the theatre, whispered voices on the balcony when no one else is present, and the unsettling sensation of being watched from the darkened upper tiers. One former house manager recalled that in 2014, she clearly heard her name shouted twice across the theatre, the voice echoing through the ornate auditorium. When she investigated, she found no one. The experience was vivid and unnerving enough that she reported it to colleagues, several of whom shared similar stories of disembodied voices calling out to them by name.

The theatre itself has endured its own near-death experiences. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 sent fourteen feet of water surging into the building, submerging the stage, basement, and entire orchestra level. The organ, a centerpiece of the original theatre, was destroyed. The Saenger sat dark and damaged for eight years before a fifty-three-million-dollar restoration project meticulously returned it to its 1927 grandeur, recreating original color schemes, carpeting, and lighting fixtures from historical photographs. The theatre reopened on September 27, 2013, with sold-out performances by comedian Jerry Seinfeld, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation named it one of ten historic sites saved that year. Some staff have speculated that the extensive renovation may have stirred up more than dust, noting an increase in unexplained activity since the reopening. Whether the spirits are original inhabitants of the 1927 building or were disturbed by the reconstruction, the Saenger Theatre remains a place where the boundary between performance and the paranormal feels remarkably thin.