public

Heavily Investigated

Judy never really left. Her house — or boarding room; accounts differ — was bulldozed in 1926 to make way for the grand new theatre, and she apparently decided to stay anyway. Staff swear she haunts the corridor between the balcony and mezzanine, drifting toward anyone young and male who wanders up alone: whispers, deliberate touches, a presence that feels personal. She's not alone, either — a man in a pin-striped tuxedo drifts the aisles, and a phantom cat reportedly stalks the basement until someone looks directly at it and it simply isn't there.

Opened April 29, 1927, the Mount Baker Theatre was built as part of William Fox's national movie-palace chain. Architect Robert C. Reamer — the same hand behind Yellowstone's Old Faithful Inn — dressed it in Moorish-Spanish flourishes that feel slightly too opulent for a mid-sized Washington city. Historical records confirm two homes and a church were leveled to build it. Now city-owned and nearly unaltered after sixty-plus years of continuous operation. The record is tidy; what got demolished to make room for it, apparently, is less resolved.