Sterling Opera House

Beneath the stage of this 1889 opera house designed by Carnegie Hall's architect, Derby ran a working jail. A child ghost named Andy plays with balls left by investigators, and Ghost Hunters captured EVPs of a child's voice in the balcony during their 2011 investigation.

Beneath the stage where Houdini performed, there's a row of jail cells. The sliding iron doors still slam shut on their own, and the sound echoes through three floors of empty theater. Derby ran its police station and lockup out of the opera house basement from 1945 until about 1965. Audiences watched vaudeville upstairs while prisoners sat in cells directly below.

Charles A. Sterling, founder of the Sterling Piano Company, funded the building but died around 1887, two years before it opened on April 2, 1889. He never saw a single show. The architect was H. Edwards Ficken, who also co-designed Carnegie Hall and Coney Island's steel pier. Ficken delivered something remarkable for a small Connecticut factory town: a 1,200-seat theater with acoustics that rivaled the Met, modeled on Richard Wagner's triangular seating layout from the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in Bavaria. Every seat had an unobstructed view. The balconies were steep, the terra cotta exterior was elaborate, and a stained glass cupola towered over Derby's town green.

Houdini, Red Skelton, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Amelia Earhart all performed here. In 1901, AFL president Samuel Gompers announced the settlement of a 54-day Paugussett Mills strike to a packed audience. The Sterling was the first building in Connecticut added to the National Register of Historic Places, on November 8, 1968.

The theater closed in 1945. The lower floors kept operating as City Hall. Eventually everything shut down and the building sat empty.

The most active presence is a child called Andy. Nobody knows who he was. Paranormal investigators leave toys and balls throughout the opera house for him, balanced on empty cardboard tubes in the back of the main hall. The balls move. One ghost hunter told a reporter, "They said it would roll for no reason." Child-sized handprints appear in various spots around the building, which is the kind of detail that sticks with you long after you leave.

Ghost Hunters investigated in Season 7, Episode 9 ("A Soldier's Story," April 2011). Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson recorded an EVP of a child's voice in the balcony while their K2 meter lit up. In the dressing room, they captured a moan. Amy and Adam recorded a separate groan during their EVP session. The TAPS team concluded there was enough unusual activity to warrant a return visit.

Other teams have captured photographs showing what appears to be a woman in Victorian-era dress standing near a child. Some people think the woman is Mrs. Sterling, the widow of the man who paid for the building but never saw it finished. That's unverified, but it has a certain logic to it.

The opera house sits across from the Derby Green on Elizabeth Street, deteriorating but not demolished. Plans to restore it have circulated for years without much progress. The building's combination of world-class architecture, real historical weight, and a basement full of jail cells makes it one of the more unusual haunted places in New England. Upstairs, the curved balconies and wrought iron are still beautiful. Downstairs, jail doors slam in empty cells. And somewhere in between, a kid named Andy is playing with a ball, waiting for someone to play back.