Turning the Fremont Opera House into a haunted house
When Fremont Opera House board member Rodney Mottl was giving a tour of the building in October 2023, he noticed something odd. He spotted what appeared to be a series of footprints in the thick dust that coated the floor of the main auditorium, which seemed preposterous.
Why would someone walk barefoot through the dust and debris that covered the floor?
What was even more strange is that the footprints, which began in a small room at the back of the theater that at one time had been used by wealthy patrons as a sitting room before a performance, stopped right in the middle of the auditorium with no indication where whomever left the footprints had gone.
All of a sudden the opera house had a ghost and Mottl had an idea.
"I tell people that story and I say, 'look right where you're standing, those footprints just appeared,'" Mottl said. "And before we cleaned it, they were still there. I could actually show people those footprints and they'd be like, 'oh my goodness, you should do something with that.'"
Mottl ruminated over what he could accomplish with a few dusty footprints in a more than 125 years old opera house that had long ago fallen into disuse and disrepair.
"I had a dream about what we could do if we turned it into something," Mottl said. "And so then I wrote it down, what my pitch was, and then I actually met with a movie director here that's from Fremont, Ehren Parks is his name, and I gave him the pitch and I said, 'what if someday we would do a haunted house?' He said, 'love it,' and I was like, 'great, so you can write me the script for that,' and he goes, 'no, that's going to be you.'"
Mottl took on the task of writing what would become the Fremont Opera House Haunted Historical Tour, an approximately 30 minute tour through the building's history, with some supernatural shenanigans sprinkled throughout.
With the help of his wife Lisa and daughter Camryn, Mottl presented his pitch to the opera house board in August "and they were like, 'we love it, let's do it,'" Mottl said.
"I was like, 'great, in 2025, right?'" Mottl said. "And they're like, 'no, let's do it now.'"
So, for the past two-plus months, Mottl has been working nearly around the clock to get the script and the opera house ready for the show.
"There was probably one week I didn't sleep at all, because I was running out of time," he said.
"We had to get actors, I had to start getting all these props and stuff," Mottl said. "I had to buy a crystal ball. I just don't have that on hand."
The opera house was built in 1888 and for the first 30 years it hosted performers from around the country, who would travel by train.
Coming west from New York City, a symphony or troupe of actors would stop in Omaha, then in Fremont before heading on to Denver, Mottl said.
Then, with World War I, followed by the Depression, the opera house fell into disuse. Parts of it were turned into apartments at one point, and the main auditorium became a grocery store.
For the past 40 years, the building has stood mostly vacant, a ward of the Friends of the Fremont Opera House nonprofit organization, which hopes to one day restore the building to its former stature.
"We want to bring it back to its glory, you know, when it was at its as at its peak," Mottl said. "And we have to make some changes, like there's no bathrooms up here (on the balcony level), we have to make an elevator, we've got to do stuff like that. That's the goal, but of course that takes money."
Hence, a historical haunted opera house tour.
"The only way for us to raise that money is to have people come here and see it," Mottl said.
The show runs for two nights, Friday, Oct. 25 and Saturday, Oct. 26, with the first tour at 7 p.m., and then another tour every 30 minutes or so until 9 p.m., when the final tour of the evening begins.
Tickets for the 30 minute tour are $10, with a maximum group size of about 12 people. All proceeds will go toward the Friends of the Fremont Opera House's mission, to restore the building.
Now, with about two weeks before the first tour, Mottl is feeling pretty good about the show and has even started thinking about how it could be made even better next year.
"We've even talked about maybe next year, while (a tour) is going on, as soon as the groups are done, they end up out in the parking lot," Mottl said. "Maybe we could have a costume party or something that's going on along with it."
One of the main reasons Mottl wants the tour to be successful is that putting it together has brought life back into the theater for the first time in decades.
"Whether you believe in ghosts or not, when I used to come up here on tours before we decided to do this, this place seemed like it was a very, very sad place," Mottl said. "Very dirty, all of this stuff all over the place, and now we come up here and it's almost like the building can feel that there's hope, saying, you know, 'thank you for using me for something.'"
