Ghostly footsteps. Spooky, unexplained shadows. Inside this haunted Kentucky theater

The old Art Deco theater was built to carry sound, but sometimes it does it when no one else is there.

Often you can hear echoes from The Capitol’s lobby all the way up in the upper balcony, and from the stage downstairs into the green room. Occasionally, it sounds like doors are slamming and the heavy soles of men’s dress shoes are clomping across the lobby floor.

This column started with that spooky bit of lore about the sound of men's dress shoes in the historic theater on Bowling Green’s town square. It ends with me dumbfounded and wondering if I might have crossed paths with the dapper spirit wearing those loafers.

But before we get to the part where I discuss whether or not I saw a ghost, let's dive into the history of this haunted place.

Why do theaters, old performance spaces often attract ghosts?

The old theater has operated as part of the Warren County Public Library system since 2021, but its history goes much deeper than that. The iconic building is a community staple, and the theater's manager, Magnolia Gramling, says most people in the area have memories with it. Just about everyone who comes through the doors has stories about performing on its stage, touring it on field trips, or going to see a movie there with their grandparents back when it operated as a film house.

Overall, the history of the theater is a little fuzzy, but it first opened as a vaudeville house in the late 1890s and it was remodeled in the 1930s as a movie house. The theater underwent a massive renovation in the early 1980s and it reopened to the public as the Capitol Arts Center. Now that it's part of the library system, much of the programming there is free to the public, and Gramling says the library is in the early stages of launching a community-driven history project about the theater. They're eager to collect old ticket stubs, memorabilia, and oral stories to help preserve its legacy in Bowling Green.

Some of the stories just happen to brush with the paranormal, too.

Ghost stories and theaters go hand-in-hand. They’re like museums, hospitals, and churches in that way. So when Gramling welcomed me to the theater in late September for a tour, we invited Tamela Smith, a paranormal researcher in the area, to join us.

Candidly, Smith says she's hard-pressed to think of a theater that doesn’t have a ghost story tied to it, and there are plenty of superstitions linked to the performing arts. Often directors will leave a seat empty or flowers for the resident ghost on opening nights, and most stages have a “ghost light” that they leave on when the theater is closed.

Since the vaudeville house first opened nearly 130 years ago, countless characters have died or fallen in love on its stage. Audiences have laughed and cried. Theaters are hotbeds for nerves, passion and suspense, and the iconic building on Bowling Green’s town square is no exception.

“I really think all theater spaces are a little bit haunted,” Gramling told me, noting that every night before she locks up the last thing she does, is turn the ghost light on for The Capitol's spirits. “People that are (performers) in theater have these big personalities. So, it doesn't surprise me that folks who perform their whole lives would not stop.”

That made sense to me.

“If I was going to pick somewhere to haunt for the rest of my life, gosh, I'd want it to be a theater,” I mused, standing in the empty theater. “An afterlife full of entertainment.”

“For better or for worse,” Gramling said.

I paused.

“Imagine hearing that same song during rehearsal over and over and over again,” I said, reconsidering it. “You know, one that's an earworm that never really leaves.”

“That’s a totally different kind of haunted,” Gramling said.

We laughed at that moment, but later, when I caught a glimpse of what appeared to be the theater's ghost, I wasn’t laughing at all.

More than one spirit haunts The Capitol theater building in Kentucky

Smith's primary project at the moment is finishing up a book on the ghosts of Western Kentucky University, but she had done a paranormal investigation at The Capitol a few years back with a group of students. During that time, they'd detected spikes in energy using an EMF reader, which measures ambient electromagnetic fields, specifically when they asked direct questions to the spirits.

Think along the lines of “Is there anyone here?” or “Do you have anything you’d like to say?”

Most of Smith's knowledge about The Capitol’s haunted activities stems from doing interviews with people who have first-hand experience with the unexplainable. Once Smith heard a story about an apparition that happened after a group of children practiced songs in a second-floor conference room. As one of the adults was ushering the singers back to the theater, she turned around and saw three young girls standing in the space. They weren’t part of her group.

When she turned back to look at them again, they were gone.

Smith had another story, too, about a worker, who was lingering after hours in an upstairs office. When that woman turned off her computer, she saw a shadow flash on her screen as though someone was moving behind her. No one else was in the building.

Over the years there have been plenty of stories about people, who are up in the balcony, spotting figures in the seats below when no one else is in the building, Gramling said. Lights flickering and the sound of doors opening and closing are common. Sometimes, chairs will flap up or down when no one is sitting in them.

Between the three girls and the sound of men’s dress shoes, Smith says, it’s clear there is more than one spirit at The Capitol, but there’s no way to know what their tie to the space might be. That afterlife link could be to the modern theater, the old vaudeville house, or even the land. Over the years there may have been props or costumes that led paranormal activity into The Capitol.

Whatever it is, there’s a lot of it.

Is that wispy figure with a handlebar mustache a ghost?

Before we said our goodbyes, I pulled out my phone and took a few photos of the stage from the balcony so I could remember the eerie details such as the dated exposed brick, the worn chairs, and the ominous lighting for this column. I thanked whatever ghosts might be in the building for letting us come, and I asked whoever they were not to follow me home. (This is an important thing I learned in 2021 on another haunted Halloween assignment for The Courier Journal.)

Then about four days later, I sat down to write this.

When I pulled up those pictures, I almost dropped my phone.

There in the left corner of the picture near the front of the stage was a wispy, blurred figure. As I zoomed in further, I saw the outline of a man’s face and a long, pronounced handlebar mustache.

Could this be the face of the man walking around in the dress shoes in the lobby?

I called Gramling, immediately.

“I think there’s a ghost in one of my photos,” I told her, with shaking hands as I texted the image to her.

“I totally see it,” she said. “Isn’t that right where Tamela said she was sitting when the EMF reader was going off?”

It was.

I sent the images off to Smith, who was so intrigued and excited, that she made an appointment to go back to the theater the next day. She wanted to see if she could find a light pattern that might explain this figure. Part of being a paranormal researcher is ruling out the obvious, and she wanted to do her due diligence. Essentially she was checking to see if there was a way to explain this unexplainable image on my phone.

Turns out, what we all suspected might be an apparition was most likely an unusual phenomenon of the carpet pattern and the ghost light that Gramling had placed on the stage.

It was spooky, but Smith said, it was almost certainly not a ghost.

But the two of them did decide, however, they were interested in doing another paranormal investigation at The Capitol to see what else they could learn. They told me I’m welcome to come along.

I laughed, nervously, at the invitation.

If I can’t handle a fluke with a carpet pattern, I certainly can’t stomach meeting three ghostly little girls.

Features columnist Maggie Menderski writes about what makes Louisville, Southern Indiana and Kentucky unique, wonderful, and occasionally, a little weird. If you've got something in your family, your town or even your closet that fits that description — she wants to hear from you. Say hello at mmenderski@courier-journal.com or 502-582-4053. Follow along on Instagram and Twitter @MaggieMenderski.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: The Capitol Theater in Bowling Green, Kentucky is haunted