Show Notes
For nearly fifty years, Seattle's Harvard Exit Theatre carried a reputation for being haunted. Employees reported lights turning on by themselves, doors fighting back, strange voices, falling objects, and a mysterious woman appearing beside the lobby fireplace. Some believed she was Bertha Knight Landes, Seattle's first female mayor and a former president of the women's club that originally occupied the building. There was just one problem: Landes died two thousand miles away. And when people began digging deeper into the theater's other ghost stories, some surprisingly human explanations emerged.
Tonight, we explore the history and haunting of the Harvard Exit Theatre—and how a workplace prank can become a ghost story that lasts for generations.
More from Haunted American History
In 1967, the RMS Queen Mary arrived in Long Beach, California, after more than three decades crossing the Atlantic.
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On November 13, 1974, a young man ran into a bar in Amityville, New York, shouting that his parents had been shot.
In 1907, a wealthy Boston businessman named Thomas Lawson published a novel called Friday, the Thirteenth.
In 1891, a jeweler in Salem, Massachusetts, began selling a silver souvenir spoon decorated with a witch on a broomstick.