NEW ORLEANS – Do you have school spirit? What about school spirits?
I’m talking about the plural noun with an “s”.
At Loyola University, legends of ghosts surround one of the school’s oldest buildings, Marquette Hall.
In 1910, Marquette Hall was built on St. Charles Avenue and was constructed in a Tudor-Gothic style.
Two years later, Loyola was chartered as a university.
If the walls could talk, I think they might talk about the dental and medical classes that used human cadavers to teach with in the early 1900s.
In the late 60’s, Marquette Auditorium was transformed into a theatre.
It remains a theatre to this day.
Dr. Laura Hope, the department chair and Artistic Director of the Loyola Theatre, says she’s heard many ghost stories in her time here.
She says stories have swirled of apparitions that have been seen by both students and the former theatre chair.
“He [the former theatre chair] claims to have had an experience with something in the balcony in 1967 after a rehearsal one night. He and the stage manager were here and something caught his attention up in the right hand portion of the balcony. He looked up. It scared him and he left immediately,” says Hope.
“I had a student in the fall of 2015 who told me that she was in here doing some work on the stage and looked up and saw a woman in white in the balcony. I had another student who told me she was actually up in the booth working on finding some lighting equipment on a show we were about to produce. When she rounded the corner she saw a lady in white with black stringy hair that she says disappeared in front of her,” says Hope.
Dr. Hope may not believe in any ghosts, but she did point out the theatre “ghost light” on stage.
This is the single light stand that sits in center stage and stays lit at all times for safety purposes.
However, legend has it that a ghost light stays on so theatre ghosts can have light to perform when no one is around.
The Marquette Theatre believes the show must go on with or without the spirits.
So, their production of Pygmalion will debut on November 1st.
Click here for tickets.
