In the late 1970s, a few stagehands walked into the decaying Landmark Theatre, intending to fix some of its structure. They left the theater as skeptics-turned-believers, likely the first witnesses of a ghost in the downtown Syracuse theater.

The men began working on the stage, which needed their primary attention. No one else came into work that day. As the men labored, someone spotted a woman in the balcony. She sat there in a seat, wearing a long, white evening dress.

‘Hey, lady, what’re you doing here?’ one man shouted.

The woman remained seated.

‘We’re closed,’ another yelled. ‘Can we help you?’

With enough heckling, the woman left her seat with the dress trailing behind her, walked up the steps and exited the balcony. In the years following, more people spotted the woman in white sitting in the balcony and the landing nearby. They called her Clare, which later switched to Clarissa.

Some spotted other ghosts, but those stagehands were the first to report a haunting in the theater, said Bill Knowlton, a Landmark trustee and the theater’s resident historian.

‘And those were big, burly men who didn’t necessarily believe in ghosts,’ Knowlton said. ‘But I know afterward that they would refuse to talk about it.’

The ghosts captured the attention of one local woman who had recently published a book about Landmark Theatre, filled with the ghostly tales and a photograph of Clarissa. The tales inspired local ghost hunters to troll the building. And with the ghosts come funds for the needy theater, bringing it the attention and curiosity of the more casual ghost hunters.

Clarissa remains the theater’s most famous spirit. As the story goes, Clarissa worked at Landmark. She wanted to become an actress but found success fleeting. She loved a man, though, an electrician at the theater. Then one day, standing in the second-floor balcony, she saw her lover fixing power lines on stage. He slipped up and electrocuted himself as Clarissa watched. She rushed to save him and somehow toppled over the balcony’s wooden banister, falling to her death.

That’s why Clarissa favors the upper left part of the balcony as her place to haunt.

Others sometimes spot a man, possibly the ghost of a tramp employed as a night watchman. Some report hearing the watchman’s old dog bark in the basement, even though a dog was never found.

Cathryn Lahm, a local photographer, believes she once encountered Clarissa on the balcony. In May 2008, Lahm and a group of friends went to Landmark to take photos. Past the Hindu murals and up the stairs to the landing near the second-floor balcony, the group set up its cameras. The leader put on a white dress and began to spin: Ghost hunters sometimes dress in costume to elicit a reaction from the spirits.

Set for a time-release exposure, Lahm’s camera took one picture that startled her. She used that photo in her book that came out this month, ‘Clarissa’s Ghostly Debut: Out of the Shadows and Into the Light.’ The picture features a clear shot of two women: the group’s leader and a woman with matted brown hair, in a long white dress and heels. The woman in the dress had to have been Clarissa, Lahm said.

‘I just think she couldn’t resist. She could not resist, and she had to come down and see what we were doing,’ said Lahm, holding the book with the page turned to the photo.

Lahm invites any skeptic to check out her photograph’s authenticity. Even professionals in the paranormal believe in Landmark’s ghosts.

The Central New York Ghost Hunters led frequent hunts into Landmark in the 2000s. When the group went the first time, it proved Clarissa fell off the balcony. The ghost hunters collected electronic voice phenomena that proved both her name and her death, said the group’s founder, Stacey Jones. A ghost hunter collects electronic voice phenomena by asking questions at the scene and then playing back the recording in hopes of hearing the spirits’ answers, she said.

Some at the theater have spotted the ghost of a man in the orchestra pit, which may be the spirit of the long-dead night watchman, Jones said. When the CNY Ghost Hunters investigated Landmark, one ghost hunter went down to the boiler room, where the watchman’s dog died. The electronic voice phenomena taken from the boiler features the ghost hunter speaking and then a loud dog bark, though a pup couldn’t be seen.

‘And now when we go down there, we go, ‘Hey, boy, come here,’ and we got the sound of nails running up to us,’ Jones said.

Thanks to the ghosts, Landmark receives extra cash and attention. Even today, similar to the days when the stagehands first saw Clarissa, the theater faces large bills and limited funding. The ghost hunts led by Jones raised more than $45,000 in a couple years.

‘We’ve never accepted a dime for what we’ve done there,’ Jones said. ‘Every dime that we’ve raised has gone to the Landmark Theatre.’

In the late 1980s, Clarissa inspired a play about her life and her haunting of the theater. She also inspired author Bruce Coville’s children’s novel, ‘The Ghost in the Third Row.’

So perhaps some creative person in the late 1970s, with the theater falling down, created the story of Clarissa with the hope of attracting attention to the place?

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Knowlton said. ‘We’re extremely happy with our ghost. It’s good luck for a theater to have a ghost anyway.’

Work continues on refurbishing Landmark Theatre in hopes of attracting larger shows. Hopefully Clarissa feels pleased with the work, Knowlton said.

‘We know she’s happy.’ He paused. ‘Well, we hope she’s happy, at any rate.’

[email protected]

Published on October 27, 2010 at 12:00 pm