Ryman Auditorium

The Mother Church of Country Music. This Victorian gospel tabernacle in downtown Nashville is still a working concert hall, and its ghost stories come from the museum’s own staff.

Riverboat captain Thomas Ryman built it in 1892 as the Union Gospel Tabernacle. It joined the National Register in 1971 and was named a National Historic Landmark in 2001.

The balcony went up in 1897 as the “Confederate Gallery,” built to seat veterans’ reunions during the Tennessee Centennial. The Grand Ole Opry broadcast from this stage from 1943 to 1974.

Staff and performers report a grey figure seated in balcony section 11 during rehearsals and empty-house rounds. Museum curator Joshua Bronnenberg, a self-described skeptic, calls the “Grey Man” the building’s most-seen spirit.

The story goes that Thomas Ryman himself still stomps the aisles when a show offends his revival-era morals. Tour lore’s favorite telling has him disrupting a staging of the opera “Carmen.”

Staff closing the building late describe a woman’s voice singing from the empty stage. Tour guides call her “The Lady” and most often name her as Patsy Cline.

Employees also describe hearing Hank Williams’s voice and songs playing from the stage with no source they can find, and the account has his spirit walking the aisles after dark.

Self-guided tours run daily, about 9am to 4pm, and shows fill most nights. Each fall the venue sells its own 45-minute haunted-history tours; balcony section 11 is reachable on tours and at shows.