Ghosts of the theater

There is something about a building that just won’t go down…

Over the years the Sixth Street Melodrama Theater has been a home for laughter, drama, mystery, and much more for the residents of Wallace as well as the rest of the Silver Valley.

But that may not be the only thing that resides within the halls of Wallace’s oldest standing building.

The building, in its many iterations, not only survived the great fire of 1890, but then also withstood Wallace’s 1910 fire.

Serving as a hardware and wallpaper store, and also a brothel, the building has maintained a certain mystique to it that is both welcoming, and charming, and sometimes a little spooky.

According to one of the Melodrama’s more frequent actors, Ed Warren, the building seems to have some spectral tenants.

“I had been working here alone one day and needed to take some stuff upstairs to one of our prop rooms,” Warren said. “I set down a box on one of the shelves and then went to grab another and while I was downstairs I heard a loud crash. I went back up and found that the box I had just set squarely on a shelf had been knocked off the shelf.”

Warren isn’t the only actor to have felt as though there is something supernatural going on within the theater’s historic walls, other actors have told tales of props being taken, moved, or hidden without anyone being around to actually do the heavy lifting.

Fortunately, it seems like whatever lurks within the theater aires more on the mischievous side and not on the side of anything more sinister, but the original pressed tin ceilings seem to allude to a history that could be less than pleasant.

“This place was like the wild west back in the day,” Warren said. “With the rooms upstairs, there were definitely some things that went on around here that could’ve led to tragedy in some form. The original pressed tin ceilings are still here and from what we can see there looks to be bullet holes in a few spots.”

Rumors that the ghost within the theater is one of the ladies that worked within the brothel have been quite prevalent, but nothing is for sure.

Most instances of any hauntings have occurred in the upstairs areas that were occupied by the prostitutes.

As you round the corner following the long flight of stairs behind the stage, you come face to face with a ghost story hallmark; a long dark hallway.

At the end of the hallway are two rooms, one is off to the left side, where Warren experienced the box being pushed from the shelf, and then the room at the direct end of the hall which belonged to the house’s madam.

That room has a more recent story, but one that comes secondhand and seems to deviate from mischief and more on the flat out scary side.

“We had some girls who were part of our summer melodrama, working up here,” Warren said. “All of the sudden the girls claimed to hear a voice telling them over and over to get out. I’m not sure how true it is, but who am I to say what they did or didn’t hear.”

That brings us to now.

Over the past weekend, I attempted to make contact with any apparitions by taking a private tour of the theater with my brother Caleb, and had Warren as our guide.

Over the years I have always intended on going to the theater to take in one of their performances, but the timing has never panned out.

As with most places in Wallace, I was amazed by how easy it was to step back in time as I walked through the theater.

We looked at the ceilings, where Warren pointed out where the assumed bullet holes put sizable punctures in the beautiful pressed tin.

We saw the small enclosure where the piano is housed beneath the stage.

One amazing thing after the other, as the building came to life with Warren’s fun narration, but as we made the trek up the stairs, the tour turned more serious.

“You could feel the air chill in some places and then be warm just a foot forward or backwards,” Caleb said. “It definitely felt different up there.”

Caleb and I used to be fairly skeptical about situations like this, but after our experiences inside the Jameson Hotel and the Wallace Elks over the years, we have learned to trust our gut.

After looking inside very room, checking behind doors, and even admiring the different wallpapers within the many rooms, we decided that may have finally found a building that wasn’t going to give us what we wanted.

But we were wrong.

As we prepared to leave the theater we heard a soft cooing in the lobby that grew stronger and stronger as we moved toward the southeast corner.

We listened to it for nearly five minutes, speculating about it being the highway, ventilation ducts, or even the wind blowing against the old wooden building, but after further inspection we couldn’t validate any of those possibilities.

The cooing became almost rhythmic, which prompted us to return back upstairs to the madam’s room and see if we would come face to face with the apparition.

It is quite the trek to get from the front of main floor to the front of the upstairs floor, and after regaining our wind, we set to investigating the room to see if we could find the source of the cooing.

Literally, we searched top to bottom, including me asking Caleb to put his ear to the ground to see if he could hear anything.

His ear on the ground of a room that used to be a brothel.

That is dedication.

We never found the source of the sound and as we returned to the main floor we couldn’t find it again down there either.

The Sixth Street Melodrama Theater is one of our Valley’s treasures, who knows, maybe the ghost likes to watch the actors perform, maybe it wants to be part of the play, maybe one day it will make an appearance during a play.

That would be melodramatic!