Grandstreet Theatre

Grandstreet Theatre is a granite Romanesque building in downtown Helena that opened in 1901 as a Unitarian church, later served as the public library, and has been home to a community theater since 1976. Its ghost is traditionally Clara Bicknell Hodgin, a former kindergarten teacher who arrived in Helena in 1903 with her minister husband and quickly became beloved by her Sunday School students. She died of cancer in 1905, and friends commissioned a Louis Comfort Tiffany memorial window in her honor. When the building became a theater the window was rediscovered. Staff, actors and patrons describe an electric energy in the building and lights and equipment turning on without help, and some say her name appears smudged across the bottom of the window as if by a child's hand. The theater is listed in Haunted Places: The National Directory.