The Bird Cage Theatre: Tombstone's Haunted Playhouse

You step out of the Arizona glare into a long, dim room that smells faintly of dust and, someone in your group swears, cigar smoke, though nobody is smoking and nobody has for a very long time. Bullet holes freckle the walls and ceiling. A guide points at the little curtained boxes overhead and lets you work out for yourself what they were for.

The Bird Cage Theatre opened in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881, at the height of the silver boom that also gave the town the gunfight near the O.K. Corral. It was never only a theatre. Under one roof it ran as a variety hall, saloon, gambling den and brothel, operating around the clock, and it earned a reputation as one of the wildest establishments in the American West. The New York Times of the day reportedly called it one of the roughest spots between the coasts, which the management would have taken as advertising.

Bullet holes and bird cages

The name comes from the fourteen small compartments, curtained cribs suspended along the upper walls, where prostitutes entertained clients above the crowd, boxes that a contemporary song is said to have likened to a bird in a gilded cage. Below them the tables ran faro and poker, one game reputedly continuing almost without pause for years. Violence came with the territory. By tradition some twenty-six people died within the walls during its heyday, and the building still carries around a hundred and forty bullet holes, physical evidence that the mayhem was not entirely exaggerated.

Sealed, then reopened

When Tombstone's silver mines flooded and the boom collapsed in the late 1880s, the Bird Cage closed, and it was reportedly boarded up around 1889 with much of its contents left inside. That accidental time capsule is part of why it draws visitors: the fixtures, faded and period-authentic, survived because nobody bothered to strip them. Reopened as a tourist attraction in the twentieth century, it became a fixture of every list of America's most haunted buildings, which is a lucrative reputation for a town that trades on the frontier dead.

What people report, and what it might be

The accounts run to a familiar menu. Figures in nineteenth-century dress are said to cross the stage or move along the aisles; disembodied voices, laughter and snatches of music are reported in the empty hall; and above all there is the smell, sudden wafts of cigar smoke in a no-smoking building. Read soberly, an old timber-and-plaster structure full of period objects, low light, and a heavily marketed backstory is primed to generate exactly these impressions, and the human nose is easily fooled into supplying a phantom smell that memory associates with a saloon. Suggestion and atmosphere do heavy work in Tombstone, a town that sells its ghosts on purpose.

What the marketing does not fully account for is how specific and repeated the cigar-smoke reports are, arriving to visitors who were told to watch for figures, not scents. A residual impression of a place that ran flat-out for a decade is exactly the kind of claim that cannot be proven and will not quite go away.

Below, readers have filed their own encounters with costumed figures, voices in empty rooms, and smoke with no fire, voting each True, Fake or Not sure. Walk the aisle beneath the cages and decide.