Granbury Opera House

The core legend of the Granbury Opera House turns on a man named John St. Helen, who arrived in Granbury in the early 1870s and worked as a bartender and occasional actor. In 1877, St. Helen fell gravely ill and confessed to a local lawyer named Finis L. Bates that his real name was John Wilkes Booth, the man history records as having been shot and killed by federal troops at the Garrett farm in Virginia in 1865, twelve days after the Lincoln assassination. St. Helen recovered, fled Granbury, and eventually died in Enid, Oklahoma in 1903 under the name David George. His mummified remains, displayed at a carnival for decades, were among the basis for Bates's later book The Capture and Death of John Wilkes Booth.

The claim has been extensively examined by historians. The scholarly consensus is that the man shot at Garrett's farm was indeed John Wilkes Booth, and that both John St. Helen and J. Frank Dalton — a separate Granbury figure who made similar claims — were impostors. Nevertheless, the local tradition has been enthusiastically maintained.

At the opera house itself, a seat high in the balcony is known to fold down on its own, with no one seated nearby. Theater workers, managing directors, and audience members have reported footsteps pacing back and forth along the balcony when no one is up there, and at least one visitor has described seeing an emaciated figure that disappeared when she looked directly at it.

In 2009, the Discovery Channel's Ghost Lab team investigated the opera house and reported capturing an EVP — an audio recording of an unknown voice — that said 'Yes, I am John Wikes Booth.' The claim of Booth's presence at Granbury has also been covered by ABC's 20/20 and Unsolved Mysteries.