Valerie Theatre

Pearl G. Maddox built this theater in 1927 and named it after her daughter; the first film shown was The Only Woman. It survived a 1939 fire and was later the site where Elvis Presley watched daily filming clips from 1961's Follow That Dream, shot partly at the nearby Citrus County Courthouse. The theater closed in 1987 and sat vacant until the city bought it in 2009, reopening it as the Valerie Theatre Cultural Center in 2015. Local account holds that, in the theater's earlier years, well-behaved prisoners held in the jail across from the old courthouse were sometimes escorted to the balcony to watch a film, and that the theater has carried a haunted reputation ever since its 1980s closure.