Est. 1934 · New Deal / Fort Peck Dam Construction Era · National Register of Historic Places, 1983 · Pseudo-Swiss-Chalet Architecture
The federal government built the Fort Peck Theatre in 1934 as entertainment for the roughly 50,000 workers and family members who had moved to the remote northeastern Montana prairie to build Fort Peck Dam. The Army Corps of Engineers put the building up in about nine months; it opened November 16, 1934, with a screening of "The Richest Girl in the World," starring Miriam Hopkins and Joel McCrea.
Engineer Eugene Frank Gilstrap and the C.F. Haglin Co. designed and built the theater in a pseudo-Swiss-chalet style, later compared to Oregon's Timberline Lodge. Corps of Engineers workshops hand-crafted the light fixtures from metal and blown glass, and the auditorium roof rests on hand-hewn beams nearly two feet thick and 74 feet long. The building held 1,209 seats, a stage, a lounge, and four dressing rooms on 1.2 acres.
During what locals called "Dam Days," films ran around the clock, seven days a week, at 40 cents for the main floor, 30 cents for the balcony, and 10 cents for children; ticket lines reportedly stretched seven blocks. An arc 35mm carbon-rod projector from that era still sits in the lobby.
When the dam was finished and the workforce moved on, the theater's future was uncertain. A group of Fort Peck residents organized to keep the building from being torn down, and it joined the National Register of Historic Places on June 27, 1983. The Fort Peck Fine Arts Council has owned and run it since 1987, and today it hosts an annual professional summer-stock company, Fort Peck Summer Theatre, from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Peck_Theatre
- https://www.fortpecktheatre.org/theatre-history
- https://www.fortpecktheatre.org/about-us
- https://visitmt.com/listing/fort-peck-summer-theatre-8787
- https://livingnewdeal.org/sites/fort-peck-theatre-fort-peck-mt/
- https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/83001077_text
- https://www.glasgowcourier.com/story/2018/10/31/lifestyle/floyd-the-friendly-ghost-of-the-fort-peck-summer-theatre/6852.html
Footsteps in an empty theaterDoors and lights operating on their ownSense of being watchedObjects moved backstage overnight
Staff and volunteers at the Fort Peck Theatre tell two different stories about who haunts the building, and the two don't fully agree. A 2018 feature in the Glasgow Courier, the area's local paper, names the presence "Floyd" and describes staff and volunteer encounters inside the theater. National haunted-places roundups, including a 60-state gallery on Inside Edition's website, instead use the name "Red," describing him as a former projectionist or worker from the building's movie-house years.
Both versions describe similar activity: footsteps in an empty theater, doors and lights that seem to operate on their own, and a sense of being watched that concentrates in the projection booth and the balcony — the two spots tied most closely to the building's original movie-house layout. Objects backstage are sometimes found moved overnight. Volunteers describe the presence as benign rather than threatening, and say the activity tends to pick up when rehearsals or performances are underway, as though the spirit prefers an audience.
No formal paranormal investigation of the building is on record. The Floyd and Red accounts read as two branches of the same local tradition — a theater ghost tied to the building's decades as a movie house — rather than documentation of two separate spirits.
