The Majestic opened in 1903 as a lavish Beaux-Arts house in Boston’s Theater District (architect John Galen Howard). It ran legitimate stage, vaudeville, and later film; mid-century decline left it in poor shape. Emerson College acquired it in the 1980s and spent years restoring the interior for college and ArtsEmerson use. It remains an active ~1,200-seat landmark.

Haunt lore clusters upstairs and in the boxes. Emerson artistic staff have repeated to press a former worker’s sighting of a woman in a dark blue turn-of-the-century dress with lace cuffs and hat, seated in a box and gone when checked. Another stock figure is “the Mayor” — a well-dressed early-1900s man in the house; tour/campus tellings add that a Boston mayor died during a show or at the opening. No solid civic record confirming that death-in-performance story turned up in standard secondary checks.

A young couple in period clothes (lobby, seats, brief talk with patrons, then vanish) is often paired with an unverified car-crash-after-the-show death. Children’s laughter or crying in an empty house, and a balcony-fall origin for a child ghost, likewise lack confirming accident records in the sources usually cited.

Stronger as a specific claim: Greg Crafts (Emerson ’03) told the Berkeley Beacon that while on a lighting call for Follies in the Cutler Majestic he felt a hand in the center of his back shove him toward the edge of the top balcony with no one there. Campus lore also notes spring-loaded balcony seats remaining depressed when empty, footsteps, doors, phantom applause, and a watched feeling on the top balcony. Emerson spokespeople have discussed several of these motifs on WBZ/CBS Boston segments.