Episode 18: The Orpheum Theater

Today’s episode takes us once again to the home of the Delta Blues and a famous theater site haunted by no less than a reported seven spirits. The most mischievous one has her very own seat that is forever reserved as a place for her to watch performances despite becoming a ghost over 100 years ago. Welcome to Memphis’s Orpheum Theater.

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Welcome to the Tennessee Ghosts and Legends Podcast. My name is Lyle Russell. I am your host, and I love a good ghost story. Today’s episode takes us once again to the home of the Delta Blues and a famous theater site haunted by no less than a reported seven spirits. The most mischievous one has her very own seat that is forever reserved as a place for her to watch performances despite becoming a ghost over 100 years ago. Welcome to Memphis’s Orpheum Theater.

The Story:

Our tale begins on the corner of Main and Beale Streets in Memphis, Tennessee. It is on this corner, in 1890, where stood the Grand Opera House, known by locals as “The Grand”. At the time it was built, the opera house was considered the best performance venue stage outside of New York City for entertainment and theater amenities. It was the performing arts jewel of the south that would host countless stage performances and operas rivalling the playbills of the more established northern opera houses and theaters in New York and Chicago. 

The theater was sold in 1899 to a new owner who changed its name to Hopkins Grand Opera. This sale was a pivotal moment for the theater as the new owner immediately began conversion of the theater amenities to host a new type of theater that was sweeping the nation. As opera performances started losing favor with their more affluent patrons of the arts, theaters around the nation scrambled to keep their arts donors with a new type of show. Vaudeville acts and silent motion pictures began replacing those turn of the century stage productions such as opera and stage plays. The Hopkins Grand Opera underwent two major renovations during this time, adding more flair and elegance with gold and rose colored paints and accents, and upgrades from gas lighting to new sparkling electric lights. In an effort to add more variety to the theater’s entertainment offerings, the ownership tried to enter a sublease with a burlesque circuit, but Memphis was not ready for such debauchery and rebelled at the thought of hosting risqué entertainment in such a prestigious setting. Needing to add to the pantheon of performances for wider appeal, that rebuke led The Grand into a new era when they joined the Orpheum Circuit.

The Grand officially merged into the Orpheum Circuit in 1907 and would change names to what we know it as today, The Orpheum. For the next 16 years, the Orpheum would play host to some of the greatest names in early 20th century entertainment, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Mae West, Cary Grant, Foiles Bergere, and Harry Houdini to name just a few. The five-tiered theater held two thousand people and was filled to capacity for nearly every performance. Even with all the space available in the theater itself, other empty parts of the building were leased out to other industrial uses, one of which would change the theater forever.

On the night of October 16th, 1923, a bustling evening of top-tier Vaudeville entertainment ended with a rousing curtain-call performance by singer Blossom Seeley and her husband, Benny Fields. Thirty minutes after her number ended, the delighted patrons filed back out into Memphis night when a mysterious fire started on an upper floor that was rented out to a woman’s clothier called Tri State Manufacturing. The blaze quickly consumed the theater, ending Orpheum’s successful vaudeville circuit for the next five years. One injury to a firefighter and no deaths were reported from the fire, but the cause of the blaze was never determined. Thousands looked on as the massive building collapsed in flames. Many doubted the theater would ever be rebuilt. It would seem the Orpheum’s days of entertaining Memphis were over.

Before the fire, it is said there was a terrible accident on the road in front of the theater that occurred in 1921 when a little girl was hit and killed by a street trolley. She died on the front steps of the theater from her injuries, beginning the story of the Orpheum’s most famous ghost known today as Mary. 

The most widely accepted story of the tragic accident is that Mary and her family were theater regulars at the Orpheum, where Mary loved dancing in the aisles to the music of all the great shows they saw. On a Fall evening, Mary and her family were on the way to a show and were running late. While crossing to the theater doors across Main Street, Mary ran out in front of a streetcar that could not stop in time. Bystanders took her into the lobby where she died from her injuries while waiting for the ambulance. No reports of Mary’s ghost in the theater are known prior to the fire in 1923, and her full name seems to be forgotten to history. In any case, all of those earlier doubts after the 1923 fire ending the Orpheum were dashed a short five years later. The new Orpheum theater that stands today was built over the ashes of the old and opened in 1928, and Mary became the theater’s first spiritual patron the arts. An upgraded addition to the New Orpheum stage was the mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ. The many wondrous tunes the organ would play seemed to be something Mary enjoyed, and the mischievous little ghost loved to come out to hear it.

Mary is described as small and slender with dark hair in pigtails between 9 and 12 years old. She wears a white sailor-style dress from 1920s-era fashion with brown stockings and no shoes. Mary is a unique apparition in that she is seen, heard, and felt, and has been described identically by everyone who has ever seen, heard, or been touched by her. 

The first official report of Mary came from long-time Orpheum employee Vincent Astor. Vincent has served in many roles for the theater, though one of his early jobs was to play the mighty Wurlitzer. He described his first encounter with Mary as a feeling that came over him when closing the theater one night after a show. Mr. Astor invited some friends to the theater after-hours to play the organ for them. One friend asked him before he started playing about who the little girl was in the lobby. He did not know any little girls to be on the premises, stating the theater was closed for the night. Upon investigating, they did not find anyone in the lobby. He says this same type of situation occurred repeatedly for years, where visitors would ask staff who the little girl in the white dress was. Other times, he claims that while playing or practicing on the organ, lights will randomly dim and flicker, doors will open and close, and strong cold spots will envelop the room, all signs of the presence of a spirit.

A group of paranormal psychology students from Memphis State University, led by Dr. Lee Sutter, performed a lengthy investigation using a Ouija board to contact Mary in 1979 while Vincent Astor played the organ. It is said during that investigation is when they learned the story of the little girl’s accident and that her name was Mary. They also discovered that there were six other different ghosts living in the theater, which we will talk about later in the episode. For now, let’s continue with Mary. 

Reports of the little girl continued whenever Astor would play the Wurlitzer, especially during somber songs or children’s music. He says she especially seems to like the song “Never, Never Land” from Peter Pan, and any of the themes from the musical, “Annie.” During the first performance of “Annie” at the Orpheum, the young actress who played Annie, named Roseanne Sorentino, stated that while performing a scene where Annie escapes the orphanage in a laundry basket, someone spoke to her in the basket in a little girl’s voice. After learning about the spirit known as Mary, she was convinced that Mary had been in the laundry basket with her, though she never stated what Mary said. In another report during that same production, a stage prop went missing and was later found in a strange place. In another scene, Annie is gifted a large toy dollhouse from Daddy Warbucks. During the production, the dollhouse took three stagehands to move on and off set because of the size and weight. Towards the end of the production, the stage crew arrived to begin for the night’s performance and could not find the dollhouse. After two hours of searching, the dollhouse was found in the balcony. There was no evidence of who moved it, how it was moved, or why it was there. The only explanation they could arrive at is that Mary must have moved it to play with it before the show. They assumed it was her because it was near her favorite seat in the theater.

When Gaston Leroux wrote The Phantom of the Opera, the Phantom always requested that box five always be left open for his use to enjoy the performances. In a strange twist,   Mary also has her favorite seat at the Orpheum. Seat C5 in the mezzanine section is where Mary is seen the most. One of her most famous sightings occurred when the Orpheum hosted a performance of “The King and I” starring Russian actor Yul Brynner in 1982. During every rehearsal, Brynner stated he saw a little girl watching them practice from the balcony. He said she sat still and quiet, and each time she appeared, he was strangely drawn to look at her until rehearsal was over or she disappeared. It is said he also requested a séance to commune with Mary, but I found no accounts stating that was true or if he did hold one, did Mary communicate? In another parallel with the Phantom of the Opera story, the owners of the Orpheum through the years tried to keep her presence a secret, thinking that a haunting would be bad for business. On the contrary, in 2021, Bloomberg news reported that haunted sites across the US generated over $300 million dollars in paranormal tourism. From my show research in season one on my episode about Pink Lizzie and the Mystery Jar, Memphis caught a serious case of “ghost fever” during the 1920s Vaudeville era, and many businesses prospered from the mania around paranormal occurrences. Strange that the theater owners did not feel the same way.

Other employees of the theater have reported numerous encounters with Mary. Two such experiences were printed in the Memphis Press-Scimitar in 1982 by a staff member named Teresa. The first time Teresa met Mary was on her first visit to the Orpheum in 1978. Teresa says, “I was working on a production for Circuit Playhouse at the time, and Vincent Astor was the stage manager. In that role, he had access to the theater and decided to hold an impromptu Christmas get-together with friends and the stagehands, but I was the only girl in the crowd. We were up in the peanut gallery, and I was tired of listening to the guys talk about football. It was about 3 in the morning, so I walked downstairs to get ready to leave. The guys yelled down to me to stop singing, but I was not singing. I wasn’t making a sound. I continued down to the Grand Balcony foyer and saw a little girl in the lobby. I said hi, but realized that the theater was closed and no one else was in the building except us. I turned back around to ask what she was doing in here, but she had vanished without a trace, and the room became very, very cold.”

Cold spots are usually associated with being in close quarters with a spirit and are reported at many haunted places. Though Vincent Astor says he has never seen Mary in all his years at the Orpheum, many times he knew she was there. He says he would feel cold spots regularly when playing the organ and would get intense feelings of being watched.

The second time Teresa saw Mary, others saw her too. Teresa says, “There was another party in the theater and the guests were all on the stage. Two others and I noticed odd lights coming and going at the back of the main floor. At first, we thought they might be reflections of headlights outside, but the theater at that end was dark and closed off. She and her two friends, Mike and Debbie, sprinted to the lobby to find Mary standing next to the refreshment stand looking just as she had the first time Teresa saw her. Mike and Debbie corroborated the story and Mary’s description. They started to approach her, and she disappeared. When they investigated closer to where she was standing, a loud clattering came from a nearby closet, though none of them were brave enough to open it.

Another staff story collected by the Tennessee State Museum on YouTube speaks of an unnamed staff member who brought her 10-year-old daughter with her to work one Saturday at the Orpheum. While mom was going about her work in the offices, the young girl stayed in the lobby area to play and pass the time waiting for her mother. At the end of the day in the car on their way home, the mother asked her daughter if she was able to enjoy her day even though she had to wait all that time for her mother to finish her work. The young girl replied that she loved it and had a great time playing with the other little girl in the lobby. The mother, knowing no one else was in the theater that day, dug deeper and asked her daughter to describe the little girl. Her daughter said she had on a pretty white dress with long, dark pigtails, and long stockings but did not have on any shoes. 

In the many stories that staffers share about experiences with Mary and any of the other six ghosts, none of them are reported to be dangerous or menacing. In fact, many are quite comical. In the early 60s, the theater foreman was named Harlan Judkin and has relayed several stories about Mary from times when he has worked on the organ. In one case, there was a period that the organ stopped working. The Harlan and two of his assistants struggled for hours on the right-hand organ chamber that held the large organ pipes. They tried everything that they knew to do to fix it, yet the Mighty Wurlitzer would not play. To keep himself from becoming too frustrated with the organ, he decided to walk away from it for a while and take a break, thinking through any tricks he could try later when he came back to work on it. They walked down the block to an all-night coffee shop discussing where they went wrong. After jotting down a few new ideas, they came back to find everything in the right-hand organ chamber worked fine. While the befuddled men packed up their tools for the night, they all state that the room turned very cold, it was after their experience that anyone ever told them about the ghost of Mary and her love of the Wurlitzer. The only explanation he could offer was that Mary must have been more frustrated with it than they were, and that she wanted her organ working. The crew thinks she must have repaired whatever part was broken while they were gone, but they don’t know how she did it. 

In another instance, another maintenance man named Buddy Kirtland was once again at work on the organ, running a new set of wiring from the keyboard to the relays that made the pipes work. He was alone in the organ chamber and running the wires was a long reach. There were times that he claims when he would reach for a tool that was too far away, it would suddenly be right next to him, and in some cases the tools were not where he left them, and some of the tools he didn’t need were found in the toilet of a nearby restroom. Not just in the room, but actually in the toilet. His only explanation was that Mary was trying to help get her organ fixed faster by helping with some tools, and being mischievous with the others. He claimed that though he was alone in the organ chamber that day, he felt like he was being watched.

Mary also played matchmaker once. On a slow day at the theater, a decision was made not to open any upper levels for that day’s showings and to keep everyone on the main floor to reduce cleaning and maintenance needs after closing. An usher was making his rounds on the main floor when he saw a little girl running up the aisle in the mezzanine section. The usher went upstairs to run off the little girl from the closed area yet instead found a young woman who walked up there to eat her lunch and watch the rest of the movie on her break. That introduction led to a romance and the two were later married, all because Mary decided to show herself that afternoon. 

Stories about how Mary got there have large variances in the sequence of events. In another version of her tale, it is said that she perished somewhere near the theater, not in the trolley accident that is widely accepted as her origin, and that because she died unexpectedly, her spirit didn’t know what to do with itself, so it was drawn to the Orpheum by the music. Mary’s spirit liked it and has simply never left. Part of that legend brings in a second ghost that is commonly called David. 

David has been seen by visitors and staff but is elusive. He is described as a glowing or luminous white apparition and is always seen across the theater or across rooms in the distance. A paranormal investigation team claims they determined that David is a spirit sent to collect Mary from the theater and cross her over to the next world, yet Mary does not want to leave. They state she is wary of David and will disappear when he is nearby. Though interesting, I had a difficult time finding any evidence or citation of this claim about David. However, Vincent Astor mentions him prominently in Mary’s story arc, so I give some credit to the idea that this could be true. The burning question I have about David is, if he was sent to bring Mary across, who sent him?

Another spirit at the Orpheum is known as Eleanor, and she is generally described as unhappy and can sometimes be heard openly weeping. She is said to have died in the 1930s and now haunts the balcony foyer area. Her unpleasant demeanor gives those who encounter her chills, uneasiness, and a general feeling of not wanting to be there. Vincent Astor describes her presence as feeling like putting your hand into a tub of raw liver and very unpleasant. Many haunted places lend to the thought that some spirits cannot cross over to the other life that awaits us after death. For some reason, they become stuck in our plane of existence in sporadic bursts of presence and absence, essentially creating a haunting. There are several theories why a spirit cannot make the journey to the other side, such as attachment to a particular place they loved, fear of the afterlife, and some may not realize they are dead. Typically, these kinds of hauntings happen when life is taken unexpectedly or in some terrible traumatic fashion. Such could be the case with Eleanor and might explain why those around her feel bad and have notions of not wanting to be there. 

After hours of reading and research, I was unable to find much on Eleanor or encounters with her. However, Mr. Astor states in his YouTube video that there have been multiple interactions with visitors. I also could not find much on David other than a few mentions of general sightings, but nothing specific. In 2004, a show from the Travel Channel called “Weird Travels” filmed an episode at the Orpheum. Season one, episode seven is titled “Phantoms of the Opera” and covers stories of haunted theaters around the US, though no new information was unearthed in the episode other than what is easily found with an internet search. The only other passing mention of the fourth apparition is unconfirmed reports of a strange hooded or masked ghost that haunts the air ducts and is said to be seen crawling past the vents and waving through them at audiences. Despite several deep dives into the stories I could find, I was unable to find descriptions or sightings of the other three Orpheum ghosts. I was unable to find the record from the University of Memphis on the paranormal psychology investigation, though it may exist somewhere in their archive. Almost everything I could find about the Orpheum hauntings, like the movie title suggests, was about Mary.

I searched an archive of Memphis newspapers between the years 1920 to 1929 for reports of a little girl killed near the Orpheum. I was surprised to find just how many people had lost their lives in that decade near there from little girls to old men to younger women to middle-ages in both men and women. An ABC channel 24 report on the Orpheum states that records were found of a little girl killed near the Orpheum in 1928 and her body being brought into the theater lobby where she later passed away, but her body was unidentified, and no one claimed her. They also state that the entire theater staff attended her funeral, though I cannot find any written record of it. However, there were several news stories through that decade in Memphis that any one of them could have been Mary. In an interesting twist, that same ABC24 story showed an interview with Orpheum President and CEO Brett Batterson. He gave the interview while sitting in seat C5 on the mezzanine, Mary’s seat. While the cameras rolled, an unexplained yellow orb could be seen on the footage that moved all around Mr. Batterson’s person as he spoke. The reporter claims that no lighting changes or camera lights were on or changed during that segment. When the channel showed the footage to Mr. Batterson and the Orpheum staff, they were convinced that it was Mary trying to reclaim her seat. This story is consistent with another time Mr. Batterson encountered Mary. He and his wife were attending a performance at the Orpheum and sat in seats C4 and C5. His wife complained that throughout the performance, she felt a tapping on her shoulder of someone trying to get her attention, but each time she turned to look, no one was there. Perhaps Mary just doesn’t want anyone in her seat.

Perhaps the most convincing proof of Mary’s tenure at the Orpheum is a photo that appears to have captured her on film. A young man visiting the theater in the late 90s was on the stage and felt and eerie sensation like he was being watched. He took out his camera and snapped several photos of the backstage area. Later when he took the film to be processed, it is said that only one photo on the roll of film could be developed. In that photo, at the bottom center, there is a misty silhouette that appears to be a young girl in a white dress dancing on the stage.

Mary has reportedly haunted the Orpheum now for a century. However she got there, be it by dying in the lobby or dying elsewhere and her spirit wandered in, she seems to like it there and isn’t interested in leaving. Imagine being 12 years old forever and living in a theater where you could be endlessly entertained by the many fantastical productions that travel through or get the odd chance to play with the children of the theater employees. Would you want to leave? And think of the poor spirit of David, chasing this little girl around the theater that you have come to help crossover, tied to her whims, and finding she doesn’t want to leave. Maybe the other spirits are content to remain hidden from our view and enjoy the shows, both on stage and through the halls as Mary continues to play and dance through them. 

END

Thank you for listening to today’s Tennessee Ghosts and Legends Podcast episode. I invite you visit my website at www.lylerussell.net if you’d like to learn more about this and other stories I’m working on. Have you been to the Orpheum and encountered Mary? Or any of the other spirits in the theater? If you have, I would love to hear about it. Send me a message through my website and tell me about your brushes with the spirit world. I am your host, Lyle Russell, and remember, the dead may seem scary, but it’s the living you should be wary of. Until next time.