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Ghosts, unlike teenagers, almost never hang out in parking lots. I wonder why.

If you believe any of those ghost investigation shows on basic cable, the spirits of the dead choose to spend their eternities exclusively in old homes, hotels and bars – where they amuse themselves by flicking the lights on and off.

Something about that strikes me as weird.

A lot more ghosts should show their shadowy figures in parking lots. After all, cities reshape themselves over time. As much history was made in spaces that are now paved and striped as was made in the creepy old houses where Scooby and the gang hunted for the ghost of Mamba Wamba.

One particular parking lot haunts me.

It is the one just west of the Wells Fargo building on State Street in Salem. If you look at it today, you can still see the vague concrete outline of an arch that once was the stage of the Capitol Theater.

The theater was built in 1926 by Frank D. Bligh as part of a larger building. The entire structure covered a quarter of a block. When it was built, there were a dozen storefronts and 35 office spaces as well as what became known as the New Bligh Capitol Theater.

My father, visiting his maiden aunts in West Salem, saw his first horror movie at the Capitol in 1948. It gave him nightmares for more than a year. The embarrassing thing was that the movie was “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” Even more embarrassing is that he was 14 years old at the time.

“Superman” (in the form of Christopher Reeve anyway) and I both arrived at the Capitol in 1978. I saw the movie – several times – there. I later biked to the theater every Saturday morning during high school because next door was the Capitol News Stand and its weekly selection of newspapers from across the globe.

So it grieves me every time I go down State Street and see the old wall and realize that people who only remember Salem as the place where strip malls go to die have no idea of the grandeur that the Capitol Theater once was.

To be honest, I know of its grandeur only through research and other people’s recollections and artifacts. (A friend collected some the original molding and other bits of architectural salvage when the building was demolished in 2000.)

The Capitol’s glory days were long since over by the time I saw Molly Ringwald’s Oscar-snubbed performance in “Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone” there in 1983. The theater tried to be a second-run movie venue for a time, but eventually closed for good in 1990.

In the end, a kid (not me) tried to chain himself to the theater to protect it from the wrecking ball. You can guess how that bit of vaudeville ended. The building came down. There was no money to keep it open, and in the end, money talks. Protesters (even those who chain themselves to things) walk.

Not that I am complaining. I understand the ways of the world. The mirror reminds me daily that time marches on. You just have to forgive us weepy, old, nostalgic types the occasional backward glance.

The Capitol is worth remembering.

In the theater’s heyday, 12,000 people could fit inside. Bligh owned not only the Capitol, but several other theaters in town. One was the town’s original movie house, the Bligh Theater. It was built in 1912 and closed in 1927.

There were two Bligh Theaters, actually. A later one started as the Klinger Grand Theater. The Capitol, originally a vaudeville house, was unique because it was more of what used to be called a “movie palace.” Its brightly lit marquee was made out of stained glass and shaped like a capitol dome.

It was modeled after the dome of the second Oregon State Capitol Building, which was destroyed by a fire in 1935. The dome was removed from the marquee in 1952.

While the Capitol Theater is gone, the Elsinore Theater around the corner has found a second life as a performing arts venue. When both theaters were about to be demolished, volunteers raised at least enough money to spare and renovate the Elsinore.

The Capitol and the Elsinore grew together. The Elsinore also was built in 1926, on the site of an old livery stable. George Guthrie, a local entrepreneur with a penchant for Shakespeare, named his movie palace after Hamlet’s castle.

Accordingly, Guthrie had the Portland architecture firm of Lawrence and Holford create a Tudor Gothic structure. Ellis F. Lawrence, who later became the founding dean of the University of Oregon’s School of Architecture, was the project’s principal architect.

The theater has been beautifully restored, with its back exterior wall covered by a mural by James Mattingly (my old art professor from Western Oregon University) featuring movie stars W.C. Fields, Theda Bara, Marlene Dietrich and Charlie Chaplin.

The Elsinore gets a lot of attention these days and more than its share of stars. (Gregory Peck made one of his final public appearances at the Elsinore on Feb. 20, 2000 – three years before he died.)

However, the Capitol is the theater that tugs at my heart. The outline of the stage on the concrete wall also resembles a tombstone. It’s as fitting a memorial as one can hope for with an old theater.

If there are ghosts in the parking lot, I hope they are chasing Abbott and Costello.

“Building Curiosity” investigates intriguing, historical and obscure tidbits of the built environment. Tom Henderson is a reporter for the Daily Journal of Commerce. Contact him at 503-802-7226 or [email protected].