The Bird Cage Theatre

In 1882, the New York Times reportedly called it the wildest, wickedest night spot between Basin Street and the Barbary Coast.

The Bird Cage Theatre in Tombstone, Arizona, opened its doors in late December 1881, just two months after the most famous gunfight in Western history took place a short walk away, at a vacant lot near the O.K. Corral. Tombstone was a silver mining boomtown then, full of miners with money in their pockets, gamblers, cowboys, lawmen, outlaws and prostitutes. The Bird Cage gave them all a place to spend it.

It ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for eight years. It was a saloon, a gambling hall, a dance hall, a theater and a brothel all at once. And according to the stories, it saw more killings than any other building in the West.

The Birds in the Cages

The building itself is long and narrow, made of adobe brick. At one end is a small stage, where performers sang, danced, juggled and told jokes for the miners. On either side of the main hall, raised above the floor, are a series of small curtained booths — fourteen of them, seven on each side — that look out over the room.

These were the “cages.” Prostitutes worked in them, drawing the curtains closed when they had customers. The story goes that a popular song of the era, “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage,” gave the theater its name — though the song was actually written years after the theater closed, so the name may have come from somewhere else.

In the basement, below the stage, was a poker room and a bordello. And according to Tombstone legend, a poker game was played in that basement continuously for eight years, five months and three days, with players coming and going but the game itself never stopping, with a buy-in of a thousand dollars. Some of the most famous names in Western history are said to have played there: Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and others. The story may well be exaggerated. But the poker table is still in the basement.

The Bullet Holes

Look up at the ceiling and walls of the Bird Cage today, and you’ll see bullet holes. Lots of them. The theater’s owners say there are around 140, though counts vary.

According to legend, twenty-six people died in gunfights and knife fights inside the Bird Cage during its eight years of operation. It’s impossible to verify that number. Tombstone’s records from the era are incomplete, and the Bird Cage’s own reputation, then and now, depended partly on how wild people thought it was. But Tombstone really was a violent town, and the Bird Cage really was at the center of its nightlife.

One of the most famous stories involves a prostitute named Margarita who worked at the Bird Cage. In 1882, according to the tale, she was sitting on the lap of a gambler when a rival named Gold Dollar, jealous over the man’s attentions, attacked her with a knife and killed her. The knife was supposedly found decades later, buried in the dirt. Like many Tombstone stories, it has grown with the telling.

Sealed

In 1889, the silver mines of Tombstone flooded, and the boom went bust almost overnight. The Bird Cage Theatre closed its doors. The owners boarded it up, leaving almost everything inside — the furniture, the stage sets, the piano, the gambling tables, the bar.

For decades it sat sealed. When it was finally reopened as a tourist attraction in the 1930s, much of its original contents were still there, untouched since the 1880s. Today it’s one of the best-preserved buildings from the Old West, and much of what you see inside is original.

That may be one reason so many people say it’s haunted.

The Ghosts

Staff and visitors at the Bird Cage report an astonishing range of strange experiences.

They hear music when no music is playing: a piano, a woman singing, laughter, the sound of a crowd. They hear the clinking of glasses and the shuffling of cards. Some report hearing gunshots. They smell cigar smoke and whiskey in the empty building. They describe figures in old-fashioned clothes walking across the stage, or sitting in the cages, or standing in the shadows near the bar.

Tour guides tell of a woman in white who walks the length of the theater. Of a man in a striped shirt, wearing a visor, carrying a clipboard, who crosses the stage and vanishes — perhaps a stage manager or dealer from the 1880s. Of a cowboy who appears near the basement stairs. Visitors say they’ve been touched, or had their hair pulled, or felt someone brush past them.

The Bird Cage is a regular stop for paranormal investigators, and has appeared on many ghost-hunting television shows. Many visitors take photographs that seem to show strange lights and shapes in the dim interior.

The West That Wasn’t

I’ve always found the Bird Cage a fascinating place, partly because it sits right at the intersection of history and myth.

Tombstone has been mythologized more than almost any town in America — in dime novels, films, TV shows and tourist attractions. Every year, actors reenact the gunfight at the O.K. Corral for tourists. Some of the Bird Cage’s legends are surely part of that mythmaking: the eight-year poker game, the twenty-six deaths, the exact count of bullet holes.

But the building is real. The bullet holes are real. The cages are real. And the people who worked in them were real: young women, many of them very young, who came to a mining town in the desert and sold the only thing they had to sell, in tiny curtained booths above a crowded, smoky room. Many of them died young, of disease, violence, drugs or despair, and are buried in Boothill Cemetery or in unmarked graves.

If there are voices in the Bird Cage at night, I suspect some of them are theirs.