Lucas Theatre for the Arts

This theatre nearly became a parking garage. Stand inside it tonight, and be glad it didn't.

The Lucas Theatre opened on December 26th, 1921, built in a lavish Spanish Baroque style and named for Arthur Lucas, a Savannah native who by then controlled dozens of theaters across the region. This one, though, was his crown jewel... the most luxurious movie house in the city, and the very first public building in Savannah with air conditioning. On opening night, Savannah's politicians and public figures filled these seats to watch the show, cooled by a comfort almost nobody else in the city could offer them yet.

For over fifty years, the Lucas thrived. Then, in 1976, like so many grand old theaters across the country, it simply closed. The building sat dark for a decade, until 1986, when its owners pulled a demolition permit and made plans to tear it down for a parking garage.

That news was enough to mobilize a group of Savannah citizens who refused to let it happen. They bought the building themselves and spent the next fourteen years and fourteen million dollars bringing it back to life.

In December of the year 2000, the Lucas reopened its doors with a screening of Gone with the Wind, and has hosted Broadway shows and touring performers ever since.

It's a story with a genuinely happy ending.

But during those years of dust, scaffolding, and restoration... something strange kept showing up in the reports of the crew working to save this place.

One worker, alone in the building during renovation, described hearing the unmistakable whir and flicker of a film projector running... coming from the old projection booth, at a time when no projector had even been installed yet.

In the final days before that grand reopening in 2000, crews dealing with a leaking air conditioner above the balcony had rigged a hose running down into a bucket to catch the drip. They left it for the night.

The next morning, that hose had been moved... repositioned in a way that couldn't have happened on its own, as though someone had adjusted it by hand while the building sat locked and empty.

Since reopening, staff and performers have described the sound of applause rising from a completely empty house, as though a phantom audience is still watching from the dark.

Others describe the sense of being watched from the balcony, or catch a shadow moving along the walls where no one should be standing.

And there's a darker story too, passed quietly among longtime staff... of a former box office worker, said to have been shot in the lobby decades ago.

It's a story without a confirmed record behind it, the kind Savannah tells and retells until nobody's quite sure anymore where the truth ends and the legend begins.

But some staff say they've seen him still, stumbling into the lobby late at night, exactly where the story says it happened.

This theatre was saved because people refused to let its story end.

Perhaps that's exactly why some of its former audience... and even a few of its former staff... have refused to leave along with it.