Haunted Theatres of Broadway

Each night after the applause dies, the curtain falls, the audience vanishes, the cleaners dust and the lights are killed, great theaters become dark and silent places.

But not always quite empty. 

That’s when the theater ghosts make their entrance and strut and fret their hour upon the shadowed stage, illuminated only by the ghost light, the solitary lamp that is required to burn through the night on every Broadway stage. Many of the busiest theaters continue to be just as busily haunted by spirits, some with well-known names and histories.

Some of the most entertaining spirits of this world—or the next—can be found in Robert Viagas’ entertaining talk, The Haunted Theatres of Broadway, about the real-life (and real death) stories of the ghosts who haunt theatres around the world.

Meet womanizing ghost David Belasco, the laughing ghost of the St. James Theatre, the phantom audience that died in a fire at the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago, the "Black Goon" of Disney's New Amsterdam Theatre, the ghost cat who haunts the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and Olive Thomas, the flirtatious spirit of a Ziegfeld showgirl, who appears only to men and who greeted the author by shaking scenery backstage at the Broadway theatre she still haunts to this day.

His new book about the ghosts, “Good Morning Olive: The Haunted Theatres of Broadway and Beyond,” is scheduled to be published October 1, 2022 by Applause Books.

Viagas, a longtime editor at the iconic theatre program company Playbill,  and current editor in chief of Encore Monthly magazine, has been collecting these stories firsthand from actors and backstage workers for more than a decade. Among his twenty other published books, he was chosen by the original cast of A Chorus Line to tell their story in “On the Line: The Creation of A Chorus Line,” the original cast of The Fantasticks to tell their story in “The Amazing Story of The Fantasticks,” and he was picked by Playbill to launch and edit their annual “Playbill Broadway Yearbook” series, which he managed for a decade. A lecturer at Harvard, Hofstra and other universities, Viagas was featured on the TV series “The Secrets of New York,” sharing secrets about the haunted theatres of Broadway.