Shepherdstown Opera House

A historic performance venue in Shepherdstown, established in the 19th century. The building has served multiple purposes over its long history in one of West Virginia's most haunted towns.

The Shepherdstown Opera House stands in the heart of what has been called the most haunted town in America, a community where the paranormal is so pervasive that even the local police department called in ghost hunters. Built in 1909 by Upton Scott Martin, who purchased the property in December of that year and had a small wooden house torn down to make way for the new theater, the Opera House was ready for shows by the summer of 1910. It was constructed without plumbing or electricity, relying on gas lights and the natural acoustics of its auditorium.

The early years saw a rotating cast of vaudeville performers typical of the era. Several of the town's police officers purchased a hand-cranked projector to show motion pictures in the family theater, and local organizations held chaperoned dances for youth on the upper floor. In 1914, Clifford S. Musser became the first permanent tenant, operating The Independent newspaper on the third floor. The Musser family eventually purchased the building in 1926 and ran it for five decades, upgrading it with a ramped auditorium floor, enclosed projection booth, exterior canopy, and electrical wiring. In 1928, the Shepherdstown Opera House became the first motion picture theater in West Virginia equipped for sound, enabling it to show the newfangled talkies. Movies played four nights a week into the 1950s.

The building's paranormal reputation is inseparable from Shepherdstown's broader haunted history. The town, established in 1734 as the oldest settlement in West Virginia, served as a massive field hospital after the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862. Approximately 8,000 wounded soldiers were brought to Shepherdstown in the days following the bloodiest single day in American history. Every building in town -- churches, homes, public halls -- was pressed into service as a makeshift hospital where surgeons performed amputations and tended the dying. The ground on which the Opera House was later built absorbed that history.

The Destination America television series Ghosts of Shepherdstown, which aired in 2016 and 2017, brought national attention to the town's paranormal activity. Investigators Nick Groff, Bill Hartley, and Elizabeth Saint documented encounters across the town so compelling that the show boosted Shepherdstown tourism by 311 percent by November 2016. The Opera House is a featured stop on the town's ghost tours, where guides share accounts of unexplained sounds, cold spots, and the sensation of being watched in the darkened auditorium -- a space that has hosted performers and audiences for over a century, and where some of the audience may have been there far longer than anyone realizes.

After decades of changing hands, the Opera House was purchased by Jack Skuce in 1984, and Rusty and Pam became the next owners in 1987, undertaking a comprehensive renovation. The building reopened as a cinema on Valentine's Day 1992 and has since expanded to include live performances alongside film screenings, continuing a tradition of entertainment in a building that sits at the crossroads of history and the unexplained.