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Reported phenomena, as catalogued
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1907 Kansas opera house said to be haunted by the builder's son, who died months after it opened.
310 W. 6th Street, Concordia, KS 66901
Research updated September 2026
Age
Minimum 13
Cost
$$
Haunted tours $25 per person; separate ticket prices for live performances. Historic building tours by appointment, call 785-243-2553.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Restored 1907 theater interior with balcony stairs
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1907 · National Register of Historic Places (1973) · Carl Boller-Designed Opera House · Restored 1907 Theater Interior
Colonel Napoleon Bonaparte Brown arrived in Concordia in 1876 and built a career as a local banker before deciding, in 1905, to give the north-central Kansas town its own opera house. Ground broke on April 3, 1906. Brown hired Carl Boller, a Kansas City architect who would go on to design theaters across the Midwest, and put his son Earl Van Dorn Brown in charge of overseeing the $40,000 project. Earl reportedly toured more than thirty existing opera houses around the country to gather ideas before construction began.
The finished building stood sixty feet high and ran a hundred twenty feet in length, built in a Renaissance style with seating for roughly 650. It opened on September 17, 1907, with a touring production of "The Vanderbilt Cup," a musical comedy that had already played New York and Chicago. Colonel Brown died in 1910, three years after the opening; Earl died about four months later.
The theater changed hands in 1925, when it was sold to the Concordia Amusement Company and converted for motion pictures — first silent, later sound. It operated as a movie house for nearly fifty years, closing in 1974 after its final screening. The Brown Grand had already been added to the National Register of Historic Places the previous year, in July 1973, and a two-phase restoration followed: exterior work in 1976, then interior plasterwork, seating, and a return to the original period color scheme completed by 1980.
Today the Brown Grand operates as a nonprofit performing arts center and community theater, staging its own productions and hosting touring acts in the restored 1907 house. The theater marked its hundredth anniversary in September 2007 with a restaging of "The Vanderbilt Cup," the same production that opened the building a century earlier.
Sources
The Brown Grand's haunting is tied, in local telling, to Earl Van Dorn Brown — the colonel's son who supervised the theater's construction and died only a few years after it opened. Ghost-tour material holds that his attachment to the building he helped build is what keeps him there, describing sightings of a figure in period dress along the balcony and reports, during the 1970s restoration, of nails being driven into walls with no one present to explain it.
A newspaper account describes an employee at a nearby business seeing what looked like an elderly couple in old-fashioned clothing — the man in a military-style uniform — pass through a door that should have been locked. The story has circulated among staff and downtown Concordia business owners for years, though it has not been independently corroborated beyond that telling.
In 2013, the Concordia Blade Empire reported on an organized investigation of the theater involving Terry Rowe of Catch A Ghost Tours of Kansas, Sherrie Curry of the Wichita Paranormal Research Society, and the Salina Paranormal Investigative Research Team. Curry reported seeing a shadowy figure move from the stage into a backstage room along the catwalk, and the Salina team recorded an EVP in which a voice reportedly says "It's me." The investigators characterized the theater as having genuine paranormal activity, though the specific identity of what they encountered was not established.
The theater now runs its own ticketed evening investigation nights, led by a guide who brings visitors through the building with equipment available to borrow. The events are explicitly framed as an open-ended search rather than a guaranteed encounter, and the theater asks guests not to provoke whatever they may find.
Notable Entities
Guided evening walk of the theater led by Tonya Merrill, with investigation equipment available to check out (ID required). Roughly 90 minutes; scheduled dates run through the fall season.
Daytime tour of the restored 1907 theater, covering its opera-house architecture and restoration history. By appointment only.
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