Fact and fiction mesh in a landscape once dominated by theaters. Theater critic Page Laws reviews a tour that’s part of a downtown series.
The Wells, built in 1912-13, started out as a vaudeville theater, shifted to film, and now is home to the Virginia Stage Company — and spirits. (Kendall Warner / The Virginian-Pilot).
A ghost light, as some perhaps learned in English class, is that single bare bulb on a stand left burning downstage center to deter ghoulish visitors in theaters. (Stodgy folks say it’s just there for onstage safety.) The custom is also interpreted as supporting (rather than discouraging) spectral stage performances after hours. If you can’t deter ’em, you may as well help them out with their ghostly (very) soft shoe numbers or taps.
The ghost light is one of those fascinating details of theater history, noted on a Saturday walking tour that’s part of a downtown Norfolk series. Many of the roughly 30 strollers in the group on this day seemed familiar with the custom. They came from as far as England (Linda Atkison with her Indiana-born husband, Lee ) and as near as Norfolk, with lots of the crowd (such as the Spires family plus Cheyenne Hayton), hailing from Norfolk’s sandy neighbor/rival Virginia Beach. This particular tour, an hourlong outing on June 7, was lucky to have inside access provided by Virginia Stage Company marketing director Sean Devereux.
March 2014, inside the Wells: Chris Hanna, left, artistic director, and Keith Stava, managing director, both of Virginia Stage Company, which had recently bought the Wells and given it to the city of Norfolk. (The' N. Pham / The Virginian-Pilot file).
Although nicely aided from time to time by Devereux, the man doing most of the talking was Josh Weinstein, founder, in 2018, of Norfolk Tour Co., which nowadays has 14 employees to conduct all manner of local outings (for example, Black history tours, Elizabeth River Trail tours), some of which, thanks to funding by the Downtown Norfolk Council, are now free to participants. Historic Theaters is among the freebies in the tourist season. Here’s a look at what one might expect.
While there used to be about a dozen downtown theaters — smaller vaudeville-designed houses to one actual “movie palace” (the Norva, with its 2,000-plus seats) — many are now, of course, defunct as theaters, except for the Wells, home of the Virginia Stage Company, and — if one stretches the definition of a theater — the Norva and the Granby (these two used for concerts, special events or both). Some of the dozen theaters, including the illustrious Wells, declined at one point into adults-only movie theaters, frequented by abashed-looking locals and U.S. Navy guests still clad in winter blues or summer whites way back then. These days of uniformed sailors all over downtown Norfolk, I well remember. Do the math to reckon my advanced age.
The Wells, in its grander vaudeville and then movie-house days, had the original Doumar’s Cones and Barbecue restaurant right next door, in the general area of what is now the Wells’ added-on lower Tazewell lobby. When it slid a bit down on the social totem pole to adults-only film house, the Wells gained The Jamaican Room, a nightclub the Wells says on its website was an infamous gin mill and brothel.
With old theaters come, apparently, ghosts. Some frequent the Wells, where in May 2024 Chesapeake ghost hunter William Abbitt set an electromagnetic frequency reader atop sandbags backstage. (Kendall Warner / Virginian-Pilot file).
The Wells, as many locals also know, was built in 1912-13 by Jake and Otto Wells, whom some historians (ODU-trained Weinstein among them) deem to have been brothers while others believe they were cousins. (According to Virginian-Pilot archives, they were cousins raised as brothers; Jake’s mother adopted Otto, her nephew. Previous Pilot stories called them half-brothers.) They built the largest theater syndicate (over 40 theaters) outside of New York, and apparently thrived. The Wells’ first incarnation hosted vaudeville entertainers such as Fred and Adele Astaire and Billie Burke (the Good Witch in “The Wizard of Oz”). The theater also used onstage treadmills for horses in a huge production of “Ben-Hur.”
The Wells also began, at some point, to host some ghosts, three of whom have known identities.
One Wells ghost is the Man in Black, who periodically appears to gaze at the face of his long-deceased daughter, the rumored model for one of the female faces on the exteriors of the box seats.
Ghost No. 2 is reportedly a part-time sailor/harbor worker, part-time stagehand who had the bad habit of spying on scantily clad female performers. Ogling the ladies, the story goes, he slipped from aloft and accidentally hanged himself on the way down. (The Wells until just a few years ago had an elaborate old-fashioned rope system for manipulating everything onstage.) When this second ghost grows unruly, a female Wells actor or employee is supposedly encouraged to go aloft in order to raise her shirt and temporarily gratify and dismiss the lascivious hanging victim.
The third Wells ghost is a Black child about 5 years old who was accidentally knocked off of the balcony during the 1930s and died when he hit a chair on the orchestra (ground) level. Theater lore has it that the sound of a child’s light footsteps has sometimes been heard above the old sound booth. Vintage toys have been spotted, and knobs found inexplicably turned. One theater worker even claimed to have seen a Black child appear and then walk through a wall. Weinstein, though, attributed the tales to folklore.
Black patrons at the Wells, as some locals might (and all should) know, were once relegated to segregated balcony seating, accessed by a decidedly inferior stair entrance from an outside alleyway. Weinstein noted that more details of the Wells’ practices during the era of segregation can be heard in his company’s Black history tours. Ideally, they would be mentioned to some extent in any tour that covers the Wells and similar long-segregated downtown theaters. (Segregation was, in part, the reason the Black community built its own Attucks Theatre.)
The Norva, Nov. 21, 1956: A line of people, stretching almost a block, waited to get in to see “Love Me Tender,” starring Elvis Presley. (Jim Mays / The Virginian-Pilot file).
Because this day’s tour had rare access to the interior and even the backstage and aloft sections of the Wells, it did not cover as many other downtown theaters as usual. The Loew’s, now the Jeanne and George Roper Performing Arts Center at Tidewater Community College, had to be skipped, as did the Granby Theater (also purportedly haunted), a bit farther down the street.
When the group moved on from the Wells, we did discuss at length the 1922-built, still-in-use Norva theater shell (the former Granby Street entrance is now Chicho’s Backstage). The Norva, with its current marquee entrance on Monticello, used to be and still is a huge facility that includes a basketball court and a sauna. Weinstein had particularly good tales about Bela Lugosi’s live appearance there in 1951— as Count Dracula he rose, as was his renown, from a coffin onstage.
July 22, 1941: the view looking north on Norfolk’s Granby Street from its intersection with College Place. The Loew’s theater, at 340 Granby, and The Norva, at 324, were mainstays. Also, from left, were Hotel Lee (309), Elite Lunch Room (313 1/2), Carr Mears & Dawson Clothes (315), the Milner Hotel (323), Hofheimer's Shoes (at 325; previously the Victoria Theater and the Strand) and the Southland Hotel (345). (Sargeant Memorial Collection).
The tour group also stood outside and discussed the Victoria Theater, which opened in 1911 and was renamed the Strand in 1915. Like the Wells, it started as a vaudeville theater and later moved on to movies. Its biggest vaudeville star was The Mayor of Happyland. It had interesting further incarnations as Hofheimer’s shoe store and, most recently, Todd Rosenlieb’s dance studio, now closed.
It’s not easy to guarantee accuracy on such a tour. The conversations can get confusing. It’s also frustrating not to be able to enter every building on the tour. It might also help to make the tours a bit longer.
Still, the per-hour price of so much history is so very right (gratis!), and someone needs to visit and appease all those ghosts. Bravo, Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Devereux. Bravo, Downtown Norfolk Council for underwriting these tours.
Source: Page Laws, a theater critic, is dean emerita of the Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University. prlaws@aya.yale.edu; https://www.pilotonline.com/2025/06/28/walk-back-in-time-norfolk/