In Brief
At the Tarrytown Music Hall in Tarrytown, New York, staff lock up an empty theater and then hear someone backstage start to sing. Vocal scales, clear and methodical, drifting from the wings after hours. It's the oldest theater in Westchester, and it shares its town with Sleepy Hollow.
The Full Story
The last crew member at the Tarrytown Music Hall in Tarrytown, New York locks the doors, shuts off the lights, and goes home to an empty building. And then someone backstage starts to sing. Staff describe it the same way each time: an unknown singer running vocal scales in the wings, clear and methodical, warming up for a show that nobody is there to perform. They've heard it more than once.
It's the signature haunting in a theater old enough to have a long memory. The Music Hall opened on December 12, 1885 with selections from Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Mikado," built by a local candy manufacturer named William L. Wallace. It's the oldest theater in Westchester County and older than Carnegie Hall, one of maybe 6% of standing American theaters built before 1900. It opened during the town's Millionaire's Colony years, when the Rockefellers, Goulds, and Vanderbilts gathered there for balls and concerts.
The singer isn't the only one. High-profile performers have refused to use one particular dressing room, saying they sensed a presence in it. After lockup, the lights switch themselves back on. The theater has never assigned a name to any of them. There's no recorded fire, no death, no founding tragedy buried in the building to explain who they are. No newspaper account of anyone dying inside. The ghosts here are just theater people doing theater things, and the records are quiet about why.
The building nearly didn't survive to keep them. By 1976 the deteriorated theater was slated for demolition to make room for a parking lot. It was rescued on Valentine's Day 1980, weeks before the wrecking crews, when a nonprofit bought it. Helen and Berthold Ringeisen secured the financing by mortgaging their home, their business, and their life savings, then ran the place with volunteers for 23 years.
What's unusual is how the theater feels about its residents. In 2019 the Music Hall invited the Gotham Paranormal Research Society in to investigate the activity its staff and crew kept reporting. The team came back with EVP recordings and EMF readings the theater has kept private. The Music Hall now runs ghost tours of its own, balcony to backstage, led by storyteller Jonathan Kruk, who is famous for performing "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" in the town next door.
Most haunted theaters would rather you didn't ask. This one put it in writing: "We have great respect and reverence for our spirits."
