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Famous Stories & the Record

Famous Stories & the Record

The Embassy Theatre's ghost is stage manager Bud Berger.

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Embassy Theatre interior, 121 West Jefferson Street, Fort Wayne, Indiana, showing light fixtures and decorative painting
Embassy Theatre interior, 121 West Jefferson Street, Fort Wayne, Indiana, showing light fixtures and decorative painting Indiana Landmarks · CC BY 4.0 · source file
GHOSTS
The man. Berger was the Embassy's stage manager from 1936 until his death in 1965, and lived at the theatre (125 W. Jefferson, opened 1928), per the Embassy's executive director.
The ghost. Folding seats during organ practice, dream-warnings before burst pipes, all staff anecdotes retailed from the 1970s onward, no contemporaneous record, and the theatre “will neither confirm nor deny.” Watch the decay in retelling: one listicle moves his death to “the 1950s” and renames him “Bud Burger.”

Source: Visit Fort Wayne, with the Embassy's executive director, visitfortwayne.com

The theatre Berger is said to haunt opened on 14 May 1928 as the Emboyd, with the Indiana Hotel attached. His thirty years as stage manager, 1936 to his death in 1965, spanned the building's movie-palace maturity, and he lived on the premises — the arrangement that powers every version of the haunting. The stories told of him are kindly ones, seats folding for an organist and warnings before pipes burst, and they belong to the theatre's oral tradition from the 1970s onward; the Embassy retails them itself while, as the file above notes, neither confirming nor denying. The theatre's real and fully recorded rescue — the foundation, the organ concerts, the Festival of Trees founded in the 1980s — is in the Events record.

Added source: Embassy Theatre Foundation history, via CICATOS

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Source: The Embassy Theatre's ghost is stage manager Bud Berger., Moosed History by Project Moosed, https://history.projectmoosed.com/usa/midwest/indiana/fort-wayne/stories-told/file-08-embassy-theatre-s-ghost-is-stage/