In Brief
The Victoria Theatre in Dayton, Ohio keeps a ghost the staff call Vicky, a touring actress who walked offstage one night in the early 1900s and was never seen again. She leaves rose perfume in the halls. The orchestra pit below holds something far worse.
The Full Story
The Victoria Theatre in Dayton, Ohio keeps a ghost the staff call Vicky. She was a touring actress, the story goes — sometime in the early 1900s she walked off the stage mid-performance, headed back to her dressing room, and was never seen again.
What people report of her is small and specific. Rose perfume drifting through the halls. The rustle of a petticoat crossing an empty stage. Her face surfacing in the mirror that once hung in her dressing room. Up on the third floor, patrons and staff describe a full-bodied woman in the ladies' restroom and the reception room, there and then gone. No name survives in any record, no missing-persons report, no newspaper line fixing her to a real night. Just a woman who vanished into the building and, staff say, never finished leaving.
The theater is old enough to have collected its ghosts honestly. It opened on New Year's Day in 1866 as the Turner Opera House, one of the oldest continually operated theaters on the continent. Across a century and a half it has burned twice, flooded once in the Great Dayton Flood of 1913, and been rebuilt every time. Mark Twain played its stage. So did Houdini.
The worst of the building is down front, in the orchestra pit. A man is said to have killed himself in the theater — he wedged a knife into one of the seats and threw himself onto the blade, by some accounts in the 1950s, by others as far back as the 1880s. His blood, the story goes, ran down beneath the seats and into the pit.
That is the spot investigators keep coming back to, and not because they want to. One night in December 2012, a paranormal team spent hours in the building, and the pit was the place that undid them. Around 3 in the morning, one of them, Shelly Moore, felt her knees start to shake. "It takes a lot to scare me to the point of my knees shaking," she wrote afterward, "but it happened in that Orchestra Pit that night." The medium working beside her asked the others to wait for her as they left, certain something down there meant to push her off the platform. When they tried to come back in through the equipment doors, the doors would not open. Three people leaned on them, including a staff member holding the master key, and the doors held shut against all of them.
"It was like she could almost feel whatever it was on the opposite side of the door," Moore wrote of her, "holding it shut."
