Haunted Theaters comprises more than two dozen suspenseful stories of spooky happenings and ghostly tales in historic theaters, opera houses, and other stages in the United States (Broadway and beyond), Canada, and England.

You find yourself alone in an empty theater. The curtain has fallen, and it’s eerily quiet. Suddenly, you hear footsteps. You follow the sound toward the stage. Then, the heavy red curtain swings open. Yet the stage is empty. What unearthly being is performing tonight? Get ready to read four spine-tingling stories about ghostly theaters. This 24-page book features controlled, narrative nonfiction text with age-appropriate vocabulary and simple sentence construction. The colorful design and spooky art will engage and terrify emergent readers.

Theaters are fun places to visit—most of the time. These beautiful buildings are usually filled with funny comedies, dramatic tragedies, and exciting musicals. Yet what happens when the most exciting and dramatic events aren’t happening on the stage? Many theaters have been the scenes of unusual deaths, tragic events, and are even said to be home to ghosts and spirits. Within the 11 tragic theaters in this book, children will discover the ghost of the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, and the spirit of a beautiful showgirl who keeps reappearing on the stage where she became famous 100 years ago. The haunting photographs and chilling nonfiction text will keep children turning the pages to discover more spooky stories.

Theatre and Ghosts brings theatre and performance history into dialogue with the flourishing field of spectrality studies. Essays examine the histories and economies of the material operations of theatre, and the spectrality of performance and performer.

Pizzato focuses on the staging of Self and Other as phantom characters inside the brain (in the 'mind's eye', as Hamlet says). He explores the brain's anatomical evolution from animal drives to human consciousness to divine aspirations, through distinctive cultural expressions in stage and screen technologies.

Nina had just missed her one chance to be on the hottest TV talent show around—Singing Superstar! But then fate intervened and provided another stage for her to show off her talent, a stage far from the TV cameras. Some say that fame comes at a price. Nina was about to find out just how high that price can be!

Making spirits visible has been a part of the theatrical experience since at least the sixteenth century. Instead of illusions, however, ghostly doubles in theatre are materially real and pervasive. In Ghosts, Alice Rayner examines theatre as a memorial practice that is haunted by the presence of loss, looking at how aspects of stagecraft turn familiar elements into something uncanny. Citing examples from the works of Shakespeare, Beckett, and Suzan-Lori Parks as well as the films Vertigo, Gaslight, and The Sixth Sense, she begins by describing time as it is employed by theatre with multiple aspects of presence, duration, and passage. Suggesting that objects connect past to present through the sense of touch, she explores how props are suspended backstage between motion and meaning. Her final chapters consider the curtain as theatre's means for attempting to divide real and imaginary worlds. If ghosts hover where secrets--secrets of the past, secrets from oneself, secrets of life and death--are kept, then, according to Rayner, "theatre is where ghosts best make their appearances and let communities and individuals know that we live amid secrets hiding in plain sight." Alice Rayner is associate professor of drama at Stanford University and author of, most recently, To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action.