The Stairway to Heaven Caved In: Atlanta’s Masquerade Nightclub

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 15, 2026 · How we verify

Few venues in Atlanta have shaped a city’s music scene and its ghost talk at the same time, but the Masquerade Nightclub has managed both. For twenty-seven years it operated inside a century-old excelsior mill in Georgia’s Old Fourth Ward, a cavernous brick plant with three stages named for the afterlife, and in that building the rumors took root. The club has since moved underground, literally, and the stories have followed it.

Quick Orientation

• Opened: September 1989, at the historic DuPre Excelsior Mill, 695 North Avenue
• Now located: Kenny’s Alley, the lowest level of Underground Atlanta
• Stages: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell, joined in 2024 by a fourth room called Altar
• Music: indie rock, metal, punk, rockabilly and electronic, local acts through to internationally known names
• Status: open and operating as a ticketed concert venue

The DuPre Excelsior Mill and the Birth of the Masquerade

The building that made the Masquerade’s reputation was not built for music. The DuPre Excelsior Mill was a manufacturing plant dating back to the 1890s, turning out excelsior, the shredded wood packing material of the era. By the 1980s part of the space had become the Excelsior Pub and Cinema, a restaurant that occasionally hosted touring bands. That is the direct ancestor of the club: the Masquerade grew out of it, opening in September 1989 at 695 North Avenue in the Old Fourth Ward.

It became one of Atlanta’s premier alternative music spaces almost immediately, hosting everything from punk rock to electronic music. The three principal stages were originally spread across different levels of the mill. Heaven sat upstairs above Hell on the right, or west, side of the building. Purgatory was the bar area downstairs to the left. All three were reached from a central entryway behind the box office, with a stairway running up to Heaven.

Part of the venue’s identity came from how rough it was. The club was known for its grungy, cavernous feel and for sitting next to the grocery store locals called the Murder Kroger. A writer for Consequence compared the floorboards to a trampoline and called the original building scary as well as exciting. Ian MacKaye of Fugazi described it as clearly a unique space and said he was glad to have played there. Pitchfork later named the Masquerade one of America’s best independent music venues.

New Year’s Eve 2002: The Stairs to Heaven Gave Way

The floors in Heaven regularly shook and bent under the weight of a crowd, something regulars treated as part of the experience rather than a warning. On New Year’s Eve 2002, the stairs leading up to Heaven caved in, causing minor injuries. No deaths are recorded in connection with the collapse, and the club carried on.

That detail matters to the ghost stories only in the sense that the building earned its reputation honestly. It was genuinely old, genuinely unstable in places, and loud enough to make any strange noise plausible. The structure’s fragility was not folklore. When the original site was later redeveloped, the building partially collapsed during construction in 2019.

The Vampire of 695 North Avenue, and Other Stories

The best documented piece of Masquerade lore is also the strangest. Urban legends held that the old mill space was haunted by a vampire. That is a legend, not an event, and no source identifies a victim, a date, or a witness. It circulated among patrons and staff the way most venue ghost stories do, by repetition in a dark room at two in the morning.

Other names attach themselves to the club in haunted-Atlanta retellings, including a former mill worker called Jesse and a figure described as a Lady in White. Neither appears in the documented history of the building, and no records tie either name to a death at the mill. They should be read as club folklore rather than as history. Visitors have also described unexplained voices, sudden cold spots and movement glimpsed in the corner of the eye, the standard vocabulary of reported experience in a huge, dim, industrial building with several floors and bad sightlines.

Nothing about the Masquerade’s paranormal reputation has been verified. What is verifiable is that a hundred-year-old factory with sagging floors, three levels named Heaven, Purgatory and Hell, and a nightly crowd of several hundred people is close to ideal conditions for a ghost story to breed.

The Move to Kenny’s Alley

The original building was sold in 2006 after being folded into a mixed-use development called North + Line. The city designated the structure historic, and its original elements were slated to be preserved through adaptive reuse. The space eventually became the Mill, a mixed-use office complex.

The Masquerade had planned to relocate to a warehouse on the west side of Atlanta, but a lawsuit over noise concerns threatened the move. In October 2016 the club shifted instead to the former Kenny’s Alley space in Underground Atlanta. The transition was not seamless; Sean Keenan of Curbed Atlanta wrote that it took a while for the Masquerade to find its footing at the new location. The three stages made the journey intact, though they now sit on the same level with separate entrances rather than stacked through a mill. In 2024 the venue added a fourth and smaller room, Altar, with a capacity of 250.

Visiting the Masquerade in Underground Atlanta

The Masquerade is a working concert venue, not a tour stop, so access means buying a ticket to a show. It sits in Kenny’s Alley, the lowest level of Underground Atlanta, with the parking deck and entrance addressed at 75 Martin Luther King Jr Drive SW. Check which of the four rooms your show is in before you arrive, since Heaven, Purgatory, Hell and Altar have separate entrances and very different capacities.

Anyone making the trip hoping to stand where the old stories started should know that the ghost lore belongs to the North Avenue mill, not to Kenny’s Alley. The mill building survives in altered form as office space and is not open as a music venue. The Masquerade itself continues, with the same three names over the doors and a new one added.

See The Masquerade Nightclub for Yourself

Sources

• The Masquerade reveals plans for new home on Atlanta's westside
• Mill to Masquerade, New Club Unveiled
• Images: Legendary Masquerade building has rebounded after structural collapse
• The DuPre Excelsior Mill's Untold Musical History – Before The Masquerade
• Photos: Masquerade, Murder Kroger sites are rapidly transforming
• Wikipedia: The Masquerade (Atlanta)

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