​No matter where you’re from, you’ve probably heard of the Bird Cage Theater. Opened in Tombstone, Arizona, in December 1881, the theater is as much a part of Old West lore as Billy the Kid, the California Gold Rush, and the OK Corral (located three blocks away). 

Having grown up in Tucson, The Bird Cage was the most famous haunted theater I knew of — and one that, twenty years ago, I visited overnight as part of a parapsychology program sponsored by Pima Community College.

Although very different from my fictional location of the Osiris Theater in my upcoming book, The Osiris Circle: The Trap Room Ghost, The Bird Cage tour undoubtedly colored some of my writing, so I thought I’d share more about the place along with some historic image and photos I took at the time.

Although closely associated with the more checkered parts of Tombstone's past, The Bird Cage was originally established to provide a family-friendly theater for the growing population of southern Arizona. Early acts included comedy duos, an opera singer, and a woman who billed herself as having an “iron jaw" and would pick up heavy objects with her teeth. How she made that into a stage show boggles the mind, but it's a fascinating talent nonetheless. 

When the original owners sold the establishment a few years after it opened, the entertainment became much more “adult” — and certainly more lucrative. While the stage shows continued to be very diverse, a gambling den was established in the basement, and the balcony was separated by curtains into fourteen semi-private “bird cages,” where patrons could watch the stage show but were more likely to avail themselves of the resident sex workers (known at the time as “soiled doves”). It’s likely that few families came to The Bird Cage after this, and the clientele shifted mostly to cattlemen and workers from the numerous silver mines around the area.

​But then the mining industry bottomed out, and The Bird Cage (then called the Elite Theater) closed in 1892, leaving most of its fixtures and belongings in situ. For the next forty years, the building served as the City of Tombstone's storage facility, but most of its original contents remained untouched. It was finally purchased in the 1930s and turned into a museum and tourist attraction — and it remains so to this day. 

In 2005, my group arrived at the theater at sundown. Although I had been to Tombstone many times before, I had never paid the fee to tour The Bird Cage and initially found it very unimpressive. Like many frontier-era buildings, it will win no architectural awards. It is essentially a box with a flat roof and three identical arched doorways looking out onto Allen Street. However, its brick-and-adobe construction — which was unusual and expensive in the 1800s — helped it survive for over a century, even through several large-scale fires in 1881 and 1882 that destroyed many of the structures around it. Famously, the exterior’s most notorious feature is the 100-plus bullet holes that riddle it. 

The sun was down when our group entered, but even during the day, the theater is poorly lit. Most of the lamps, chandeliers, and stage footlights are said to be original to the 19th century, and although now powered by electricity rather than oil or gas, the low-wattage bulbs necessitated us carrying flashlights at all times. I could see immediately why so many think the place is haunted. The dim atmosphere certainly lent itself to shadows that seemed to move on their own or to glimpses of vapory figures caught from the corner of your eye. Yet these “apparitions” quickly vanished when I turned on my flashlight. 

Dozens of apparitions are said to call The Bird Cage home. Some are to be expected — the stagehand to tragically died performing his duties, the card players, the prostitute who was murdered by a client. Other phenomenon were said to be more vague. Disembodied voices. Music that seemed to emanate from empty space. The smell of cigar smoke. Our group's leader hoped to document some of this, and we had brought a variety of cameras and other recording equipment with us. 

But we started with a tour. 

The main floor of The Bird Cage is tiny by modern theater standards, measuring about 15 feet (4.5 m) square. It was not hard to imagine the place packed wall-to-wall with cattlemen, gamblers and miners. Nor was it hard to imagine the smell — a thought as terrifying as anything else about the place. 

Looking down on the stage and the main floor are the notorious “bird cages.” We were allowed to peek inside but not enter these rooms, and I remember that the most striking thing about them, other than their small size, barely big enough for two, was the fact that they still retained much of the original wallpaper and velvet curtains. 

When I started writing The Trap Room Ghost, I wondered if a theater's interior furnishings could survive when abandoned but otherwise untouched for over three decades. Memories of just how well The Bird Cage had held up after twelve decades helped me solve this conundrum.

During the next few hours of investigating, I spent a lot of time in the basement gambling rooms, which were cold, damp, and smelled faintly of wet wood and earth. According to our hosts, this was one of the most haunted areas of the building, as fatal, drunken brawls would frequently erupt over a disputed poker hand. A basement (trap room) also features prominently in my book, so memories of The Bird Cage’s subterranean vibe helped me shape my characters' reactions to being underground in an old theater. 

​While I did not see anything in the theater that I could ascribe to the paranormal, the Bird Cage's age, its moldering furniture and fixtures, its tight hallways and blind turns, and, most of all, its reputation certainly contributed to its spooky vibe. I can't say the place is haunted. I can, however, guarantee at least a few cold shivers up your spine should you choose to visit.

RELATED FEATURES: Haunted by the Ghost of Dibble Hollow | A Ghost in a River of Sand | Something Like A Ghost Light | How Cemeteries Can Inspire Stories | A Tale of a Desert Phantom​

Whenever it was lunch recess in elementary school, I and my best friend would head off to a remote corner of the playground, to a single mesquite tree, which according from Google Earth, still stands today (see the photo above). And every day we'd play around its base and among its limbs. All these years later, I can’t really tell you what imaginative worlds we were creating there — but most likely they were inspired by our favorite Saturday morning television adventures or recent movies. 

No one was troubled by what we were doing except one particularly imperious yard monitor. One day she marched up to us and announced that it “wasn’t normal” for third graders to be off by ourselves, creating pretend games, instead of playing dodge ball or basketball like most of the other kids. 

We were polite in rejecting her unenlightened opinion, because we really did not care what she thought. Despite our age, we were quite practiced in not caring what others thought but it always astounded me how many teachers, parents and peers often mistook creativity and imagination for something abnormal.

As I was completing the Quinton’s Curious Mind Series, I wanted my next writing project to celebrate these kinds of kids — kids who saw the world differently, created their own safe spaces and problem-solved creatively. I also wanted to dip my toe in the mystery game — being a huge fan of true crime, cold cases and classic whodunits. As a kid, I gobbled up the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and Three Investigators mysteries. Some of my favorite standalone titles featured clever kids solving mysteries tinged with the paranormal and supernatural. Harriet the Spy, The Egypt Game, Nate the Great and Encyclopedia Brown were all favorites. As I got older, I added the works of Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith. 

And yes, I’ll throw Scooby-Doo in there for good measure. 

Aside from trying my hand at a mystery, I also wanted to  infuse more illustration into my books and as I read more graphic novels, I became very interested in using art as part of the narrative process.

All of this eventually culminated in The Osiris Circle, a book series which will revolve around a group of young teens who solve cold case mysteries out of a historic theater located in a fictional town. 

I’ll provide more details about all this in the posts ahead so check back for further updates, or follow my socials for alerts.