Tldr long rambling anecdotes of a single haunted theater
One of the theaters I've performed in is over 200 years old, and the alley it sits against was used to store corpses during the Civil War before they were carted off.
Supposedly if you walk down the alley on a particularly hot night you can still smell the mettalic coppery smell of large amounts of blood.
Also, after the show is over, and most people have gone home, sometimes you can see a couple ghosts walking through the air straight toward the stage. This is because the theater used to be flat, but in the early 1900s they redid the foundation and sloped the audience downward. The ghosts don't care and continue using the floor they always used. I guess the floor is a ghost too.
I never actually looked into the real events, but apparently someone hung themselves from the pulley system 100ft above the stage in the 60s. And now nobody can use one of the tie-off points for the whole system because it has a steel plate bolted over it because "it kept coming undone".
The basement contains the dressing rooms and makeup room, and the access points to the sub-basement areas that contain the air circulation systems. One is just a gas line busted through the wall going to a large boiler. Another room contains the actual air pump, which is the size of a school bus.
There are pipes that go some distance under the theater to keep the circulating water cool. That's the original AC system, although they have since added modern ones to the main hall. So once the hall is cooling, they turn on the big one and the whole building gets cooler for a few hours. Just long enough for a play or musical.
The problem is that sometimes, and for reasons we can't figure out (probably just a factor of how humid it gets) the main motor will stick, and you have to crawl down to the housing and kick on its side. I think it gets a little rusty and the kicks are enough to dislodge it from the thin surface level stuff.
I have spent countless hours alone in the building just checking out the rooms and nooks and crannies they like to keep people out of during normal operation.
What most people don't know is there are open areas under some of the dressing rooms. It's not just a wooden floor and supporting lattice, it's a couple of half-sized rooms, possibly intended for storage. There's a lot of rusty blades in one corner, an insane amount of what appears to be dried blood splashed on the walls and floor of one. Legit looks like someone used the areas as their Dexter style murder hole, without the plastic to keep things clean. I placed a single cheese it cracker in the middle of the floor in 2007. It's still there as of 2023. Which really makes me wonder if anyone else even knows the rooms are there anymore.
And the local police have been called multiple times over someone breaking in and using the ballroom, blasting Orchestra music. Apparently nobody is ever found, nothing is broken into, and the security system says nobody has been inside since it's last performance, or maintainence.
So yeah. Haunted theaters are neat.