Balcony Ghost and Acoustic Guitar: Colonial Theatre Laconia

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 14, 2026 · How we verify

Colonial Theatre Laconia sits in the downtown of a New Hampshire city built on water and railroads, wedged between Lake Winnipesaukee and Lake Winnisquam in Belknap County, and it has spent more of its life shut than open. That matters to the ghost stories. A building that goes dark for decades and then comes back gets talked about differently from one that never stopped selling tickets, and the accounts people repeat here, footsteps on empty stairs, voices with nobody attached to them, an ill-tempered presence up in the balcony, all belong to the long quiet years as much as to the shows.

Quick Facts on the Colonial

• Built in 1914 for Benjamin Piscopo, an Italian immigrant with ambitions for a grand cultural venue in Laconia
• Programmed live theatre, opera and vaudeville through the first half of the twentieth century
• Converted its focus to film in 1945 as live entertainment declined nationally
• Briefly revived for live performance under new owners in 1984
• Rescued from 1992 onward by a non-profit that raised $2.5 million; reopened in 2021
• One of three theatres in the city, alongside the CAKE Theatre and the Lakeport Opera House

Benjamin Piscopo’s 1914 Ambition

Laconia in 1914 was not a sleepy place. It had been incorporated as a city in 1893, its downtown had already been rebuilt once after the Great Fire of 1860 tore through most of Main Street between Mill and Water streets, the Laconia Car Company was turning out rail, trolley and subway cars as the city’s largest employer, and the railroad had been hauling summer tourists toward Weirs Beach since 1849. A working industrial city with a steady seasonal crowd was exactly the market for a proper theatre.

Piscopo built one. The Colonial was designed to be a piece of cultural magnificence rather than a shed with a stage, and for roughly three decades it delivered on that: live drama, opera and the full noisy machinery of vaudeville. The city’s other cultural landmarks from the same era have mostly become museums, the 1823 Belknap Mill among them, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the oldest unaltered brick textile mill in the country. The Colonial went a different way, and stayed in the entertainment business.

Screen, Silence, and a $2.5 Million Comeback

By 1945 the economics had shifted and the theatre reoriented itself around films. Television finished what changing tastes had started, and the Colonial slid into a long decline. New owners tried to bring live performance back in 1984 without lasting success. The rescue that stuck began in 1992, when a non-profit organisation took up the cause and mounted the fundraising campaign that eventually gathered $2.5 million for restoration. The doors opened again in 2021.

The gap between 1945 and 2021 is the important part of the timeline for anyone chasing the folklore. Most of the reported encounters come from a building that was underused, half-lit and inhabited mainly by staff, caretakers and volunteers. Empty theatres are extraordinarily good at generating sounds: sprung wooden seats settling, heat moving through old ductwork, a stairwell that carries a footstep from one floor to another. None of that disproves anything. It does mean the setting was doing some of the work.

The Balcony, the Footsteps and the Acoustic Guitar

What follows is reported experience and local legend, not documented history. No death, injury or named individual in the Colonial’s record has ever been offered as the source of these stories, and the accounts circulate without verifiable origin.

The most commonly repeated phenomena are auditory: creaking stairs when nobody is on them, heavy footsteps crossing empty parts of the building, and disembodied voices, described by staff and visitors alike over the years.

The balcony carries the strongest reputation. People who go up there frequently describe unease rather than a sighting, a sense of being unwelcome. The story attached to that feeling is that an angry male spirit occupies the balcony and that he is calmed by the sound of an acoustic guitar. It is an unusually specific detail for a ghost story, and an unusually gentle one, which is probably why it has stuck. Where it came from, and who first noticed the guitar working, nobody can say.

Seeing the Colonial for Yourself

Since 2021 this has been a functioning performance venue in downtown Laconia, which is the honest answer to how to visit: buy a ticket to something. The interior is the point, and a show gets you into the restored auditorium legitimately, balcony included if the seating is open. Check the theatre’s own listings before travelling, since access outside performance times depends on what the staff have scheduled.

Time your trip with some care. Laconia hosts Motorcycle Week for nine days each June, one of the largest motorcycle rallies in the world, with attendance in the hundreds of thousands at its peak, so accommodation and parking near downtown get scarce. Off-season, the city is quieter and easier, and the theatre sits within walking distance of the Winnipesaukee River and the rest of the historic downtown. There is a small piece of trivia that fits the building’s line of work: the actor Claude Rains died in Laconia in 1967. He has nothing to do with the ghost stories, but he is the kind of footnote a theatre town collects.

See Colonial Theatre Laconia for Yourself

Sources

• ArcGIS REST Services Directory (Census (official))
• Laconia city, Belknap County, New Hampshire: 2020 DEC Redistricting Data (PL 94-171) (Census (official))
• Find a County
• laconia NH – Community Profile (Nh (official))
• The Illustrated Laconian: History and Industries of Laconia, N. H. (Descriptive of the City and Its Manufacturing and Business Interests)
• Wikipedia: Laconia, New Hampshire

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