Calumet Theatre

A historic theater built in 1900 in Michigan's Upper Peninsula copper country. The theater was used as a temporary morgue and for the inquest after the tragic Italian Hall Disaster of 1913, which killed 73 people on Christmas Eve.

The Calumet Theatre opened on March 20, 1900, as one of the first municipally owned theaters in the United States, a testament to the extraordinary wealth flowing through Michigan's Upper Peninsula at the height of the copper boom. The village of Calumet owed its prosperity to the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, which was extracting copper in such quantities that the tiny town could afford a theater with a magnificent stage, elegant interior decorations, and an electrified copper chandelier. Throughout the 1900s and 1910s, the Calumet Theatre hosted some of the biggest names in American entertainment, including Sarah Bernhardt, John Philip Sousa, Lon Chaney Sr., Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Lillian Russell, and Frank Morgan.

Among these luminaries was Madame Helena Modjeska, a Polish-born actress celebrated as one of the greatest Shakespearean performers of the nineteenth century. Modjeska performed at the Calumet Theatre during its golden years and died in 1909 at the age of sixty-eight. Nearly fifty years later, in 1958, her spirit made its first documented appearance. Actress Adysse Lane was performing on the Calumet stage when she suddenly forgot her lines. Looking up into the balcony in desperation, Lane saw the unmistakable figure of Madame Helena Modjeska mouthing the correct words to her from the seats above. Lane was able to finish the performance, thanks to the ghostly prompter. Since that night, patrons and employees have reported seeing Modjeska's apparition roaming the theater, accompanied by cold spots and unexplained music that seems to come from nowhere.

But Modjeska is not the only spirit in the Calumet Theatre. In 1903, a man was murdered inside the building under circumstances that remain poorly documented. His ghost is reportedly seen from time to time and is heard screaming in the dead of night. A young girl named Elanda Rowe also died mysteriously at the theater, and her spirit is said to produce audible screams within the building.

The theater's most tragic connection came on Christmas Eve of 1913, during the Italian Hall disaster, one of the deadliest events in Michigan history. During a holiday party for striking copper miners and their families at the nearby Italian Hall, someone falsely shouted "Fire!" The resulting stampede killed seventy-three people, most of them children between the ages of six and ten. The bodies of the dead were brought to the Calumet Theatre, which served as a temporary morgue. Witnesses and visitors have since reported hearing the spirits of the deceased children inside the theater: laughing, playing, and screaming. The sounds are most commonly heard near the stage and in the balcony areas where the small bodies were laid.

The Calumet Theatre continues to operate as a performing arts venue at 340 Sixth Street and remains one of the Upper Peninsula's most historically significant and most haunted buildings. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places and stands as a monument to both the copper boom wealth that built it and the accumulated tragedies that seem to have never left its walls.