The Vaudevillian in the Balcony: Riverton’s Acme Theater

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

Riverton’s Acme Theater is the rare small-town cinema that never got carved into a multiplex, and it is also the address most often named when people in this part of Wyoming start trading ghost stories. The building sits on Main Street behind a brick front and an old marquee, still running one film at a time, still drawing the sort of crowd that used to be the whole point of going to the pictures. What visitors and staff say they have seen in the balcony is a separate matter from the documented history, and worth keeping separate.

What the Acme Is, at a Glance

• Where: Main Street, Riverton, Wyoming
• Opened: the 1920s
• Built by: Belle Mote, a local businesswoman and philanthropist
• Screens: one
• Still operating: yes, showing first-run films
• Reported phenomena: a figure in vaudeville-era dress, seen in the balcony

Belle Mote Built It, and Then Gave the Town a Library

The Acme owes its existence to Belle Mote, who was both a prominent businesswoman in Riverton and a philanthropist with a habit of giving things to the town. She contributed her own home to serve as Riverton’s library, which tells you something about how she saw the relationship between a person’s property and a community’s needs. The theater was built in the same spirit: a place where the whole town could gather under one roof.

The building itself is unremarkable in the best way. Brick, modest in scale, fitted with a marquee that lights the sidewalk after dark. It is the kind of frontage that reads instantly as a movie house even to someone who has never been to Riverton, and that familiarity is part of why the Acme keeps turning up in the town’s photographic record. It appears in nearly every historical photograph of Main Street, which makes it an accidental measuring stick for more than a century of local change.

From Penny Shows to First-Run Films

The Acme did not begin life as a cinema. In its early years it hosted live entertainment: penny shows and vaudeville acts, the touring circuit that kept small western towns supplied with music, comedy and melodrama before film took over. That period matters, because it is the era the theater’s ghost story is attached to.

As the decades passed the Acme converted to motion pictures and stayed with them. It still runs a single screen, which means a night at the Acme is closer to the original arrangement than anything a modern chain offers: one film, one auditorium, everybody watching the same thing at the same time. The vintage details survived the transition rather than being renovated away.

The Man in the Balcony

The story most often repeated about the Acme concerns the balcony, where patrons and staff have reported seeing a figure dressed in what is usually described as vaudevillian attire. The clothing is the whole of the identification: no name attaches to the figure, and no one has produced a plausible candidate.

That is where the legend runs into a wall. There are no records of any fatal incident at the Acme during its years of live performance, which removes the tidy explanation most theater hauntings rely on. Nobody died in a fall, nobody died backstage, nobody died on the boards. What remains is a recurring sighting with no documented death behind it, which makes the Acme’s ghost story unusual: it is a costume without a biography. Whether the figure is a genuine anomaly, a trick of a dim balcony in an old building, or the kind of tale that accretes around any single-screen house with a vaudeville past, the reports are consistent enough that staff know exactly which part of the room you mean when you bring it up.

Catching a Show at the Acme

The straightforward way to visit is to buy a ticket. The Acme remains a working cinema screening first-run films, so anyone can walk in, and the interior is the attraction as much as whatever is playing. Expect a small auditorium, period detail, and a balcony that people will happily talk about if you ask. Treat it as an operating business rather than a paranormal site: the staff are there to run a movie house, and the audience around you is there for the film. If you want the full effect, come at dusk, when the marquee does the work it has been doing on Main Street since the 1920s.

Sources

• Orson Welles: Director, Magician and Pedagogue
• Orson Welles is Dead at 70; Innovator of Film and Stage (The New York Times)
• Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illness and Social Delusion
• List-o-Mania, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love American Movies
• Great Movie: Chimes at Midnight
• Wikipedia: Orson Welles

Address: 312 East Main Street

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