The Waco Hippodrome Theatre in Waco, Texas has a ghost on video. Its own security camera caught a figure in black trailing the facility manager down a hallway one spring night, then walking into a wall. He is not even the busiest spirit there.
The Waco Hippodrome Theatre caught its ghost on its own security system. Facility manager Nathan Yost was closing up this downtown Waco theater one spring night around 1 a.m. when he found a side door unlocked. The spot was unusually cold. It smelled like cigarette smoke. He walked the building, found nobody, and went to check the surveillance video.
On the footage, a dark shape is coming down the hallway behind him. It follows him for a stretch, turns toward the wall, and is gone. "A black clear silhouette following me," is how Yost put it. In the retellings that spread out from there, the figure picked up detail: spurs, a cigarette, a cowboy dressed head to foot in black. "He saw himself walking down the hallway," the paranormal tour operator Cindy Little told KWTX. "Walking right behind him was a cowboy all dressed in black."
The cowboy is not the one most people meet. That would be the little girl, described walking the aisles laughing and singing, and blamed for whatever happens near the concession stand. In October 2023, KWBU reporter Autumn Jones was on a ghost tour inside the building when something took hold of her shoulder. "It felt firm, and slightly electric," she said, "like someone had laid a hand on me and lightly shocked me." A moment later something light fell down the back of her shirt, almost like a piece of popcorn. She caught it, dropped it, and looked down. There was nothing on the floor.
Performers get a different visitor. In the green room under the stage, which staff call the most active spot in the building, a woman is said to appear, sing a few bars, and vanish. Upstairs, bartender Jennifer Ponce stepped away from her bar and came back to broken glass. "The champagne glass ended up on the floor, broken. I came back, stepping on the glass." KXXV, which aired the clip, describes the glass leaving the counter with no one near it.
Most of this gets pinned on the fire. The Hippodrome opened February 7, 1914 with a live seal act, a magic show and a 5-piece orchestra, 10 cents to get in. In 1928 a fire started in the projection booth and took out the front of the building. Ghost tours sell a shadowy projectionist who burned, and a crowd trampled trying to get out. The 1981 state marker on the side wall calls it "a minor fire."
KXXV's 2017 report has Mike and Cindy Jacobus of McLennan County Paranormal Investigations working the theater five times, including after Yost's night: hits in the hallway, activity across the building, and never a voice on tape. Wacoan interns took a spirit box into the low green basement and got static. The only things that ever answered at the Hippodrome were the building's own cameras.
