The Ghosts of the Coronado Theatre: Rockford's Haunted Wonder Palace

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

There are buildings in Rockford that seem perfectly content to exist in the present, and there are buildings that appear to have brought the past along with them. The Coronado Theatre, standing at 314 North Main Street since 1927, belongs firmly in the second category. With its elaborate Spanish castles, Italian villas, artificial night sky, and mysterious corridors, the Coronado has always seemed like the sort of place where something extraordinary might happen. According to nearly a century of local folklore, some of those extraordinary things have continued happening long after the actors have left the stage and the audience has gone home.

For generations, employees, performers, and visitors have reported unusual experiences inside Rockford's magnificent old movie palace. There are stories of mysterious figures appearing in empty rooms, unexplained footsteps, the sudden smell of perfume or cigar smoke, and the unsettling sensation that someone is watching from a darkened corner of the building. Among the alleged inhabitants are a woman dressed in white, a man wearing a bowler hat, and several individuals associated with the theater's earliest years.

Whether these encounters represent supernatural activity, the suggestive atmosphere of an old building, or simply the human tendency to invent stories about places we love is another question entirely. But the stories themselves have become part of the Coronado's history, and they reveal something interesting about the relationship between Rockford and one of its most beloved landmarks.

To understand why the Coronado has accumulated so many ghosts, it helps to understand why the building exists in the first place.

In the 1920s, Rockford was a prosperous industrial city, producing furniture, machinery, hardware, and other manufactured goods that helped establish its reputation as an important center of American industry. Among its prominent businessmen was Willard Van Matre, a piano manufacturer who believed Rockford deserved an entertainment palace comparable to the spectacular theaters being constructed in Chicago and other major cities.

Van Matre commissioned architect Frederic J. Klein to design an extraordinary new theater in downtown Rockford. The resulting building cost approximately $1.5 million, an enormous investment at the time, and opened on October 9, 1927. It was quickly celebrated as Rockford's Wonder Theatre.

The Coronado was constructed in the atmospheric theater style, an architectural movement that sought to transform the experience of attending a movie into something resembling an evening spent outdoors in an exotic European courtyard. Instead of ordinary walls and a conventional ceiling, patrons encountered elaborate architectural fantasies beneath a simulated night sky. Electric stars twinkled overhead, artificial clouds drifted across the ceiling, and the surrounding walls suggested buildings from some romanticized Mediterranean city that existed primarily in the architect's imagination.

The effect must have been astonishing to audiences accustomed to more modest entertainment venues. A person could walk in from an ordinary Rockford street, purchase a ticket, and suddenly find themselves sitting beneath the stars in a Spanish courtyard, waiting for a motion picture to begin.

The building also contained an enormous Grande Barton pipe organ, designed to accompany silent films and provide musical entertainment. Its pipes, mechanical apparatus, and elaborate decorative features added another dimension to the theater's already extravagant personality.

And, perhaps inevitably, a building this elaborate began collecting stories.

One of the more intriguing details of the Coronado's original construction was the inclusion of a private apartment for Willard Van Matre and his wife, Irma. This wasn't simply a theater built by a wealthy businessman. It was a place in which the owner and his family maintained a personal presence. The apartment remains an important feature of the building's history, and it has become central to some of the supernatural legends associated with the property.

According to accounts collected by local historians and paranormal enthusiasts, some believe that Willard and Irma Van Matre never entirely departed their magnificent creation. Their spirits have been suggested as possible explanations for unusual occurrences reported in the building. Other stories identify former theater manager Louis St. Pierre and a former secretary as potential ghostly residents.

Of course, identifying the spirit responsible for a mysterious noise or an unexpected whiff of perfume is considerably more difficult than identifying the person who designed the theater. The names attached to these hauntings belong to the realm of folklore rather than established historical fact. Nevertheless, the stories have persisted.

Perhaps the best-known Coronado apparition is the Lady in White, a mysterious female figure reportedly encountered in the building. Another recurring character is a man wearing a bowler hat, whose appearance seems particularly appropriate for a theater that opened during the final years of the silent-film era. The stories also include unexplained scents of perfume and cigar smoke, the latter suggesting that at least one of the theater's alleged ghosts has not been informed of modern indoor smoking regulations.

These are familiar elements in the folklore of haunted theaters. Ghostly women in pale dresses, mysterious gentlemen in old-fashioned clothing, and unexplained sounds from empty auditoriums appear in stories associated with historic performance venues throughout the country. The Coronado's legends belong to this larger tradition, but their connection to actual people and places in Rockford gives them a distinctly local character.

The theater's physical environment certainly contributes to the atmosphere. A building designed to imitate an outdoor courtyard at night is already engaged in a kind of elaborate deception. Its stars are electrical fixtures. Its buildings are theatrical scenery. Its sky is a ceiling. The Coronado was designed from the beginning to persuade visitors that they were somewhere other than where they actually stood.

In a place where illusion is part of the architecture, perhaps it isn't surprising that the imagination occasionally supplies a few additional inhabitants.

The Coronado's history also contains enough genuine drama to make supernatural embellishment almost unnecessary.

Over the decades, the theater hosted an extraordinary collection of performers. Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin, the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, Tommy Dorsey, Sammy Davis Jr., and Gypsy Rose Lee are among the entertainment legends associated with its stage. The building also served as a movie theater, a venue for school graduations, political gatherings, and countless community events.

For generations of Rockford residents, the Coronado wasn't an architectural landmark so much as a place where important moments happened. People went there on first dates, attended concerts, watched movies, and participated in the ceremonies that mark the passage from one stage of life to another. Thousands of personal histories became attached to the building.

By the 1990s, however, the Wonder Theatre was in serious trouble.

Its once-magnificent interior had deteriorated, and the building suffered from water leaks, outdated mechanical systems, and other problems that threatened its future. Mary Ann Smith, a longtime advocate for the theater, recognized the danger and helped organize the movement that eventually became the Friends of the Coronado in 1997.

The effort to save the theater became one of Rockford's most remarkable historic preservation projects. More than 5,000 donors contributed to an $18.5 million restoration, while hundreds of volunteers provided labor and support. The restored Coronado reopened in January 2001, its architectural splendor renewed and its facilities adapted for modern performances.

There is something almost supernatural about that achievement itself. A building that might easily have become another casualty of downtown decline was brought back to life through the determination of people who refused to let it disappear.

And the ghost stories survived the renovation.

In October 2025, Rock River Current reporter Kevin Haas documented the Coronado's supernatural reputation in an article about a new event called Spirits & Spirits. The gathering combined tastings of alcoholic beverages with stories of the theater's alleged hauntings. Tour guides associated with the Land of Lincoln Theatre Organ Society were enlisted to share tales of apparitions, mysterious smells, and other unexplained occurrences.

The event represented an interesting development in the theater's relationship with its own folklore. Rather than treating the ghost stories as embarrassing superstitions to be ignored, the Coronado was embracing them as another part of the building's personality.

After all, a theater exists to tell stories. Why shouldn't some of those stories concern the theater itself?

The Coronado has also attracted attention from paranormal enthusiasts who have investigated or discussed its reputation over the years. Online collections of haunted locations contain accounts from visitors who claim to have witnessed unusual events, including unexplained figures and strange sensations. Other visitors report experiencing nothing unusual whatsoever.

That is generally how ghost stories work. The evidence is inconsistent, the witnesses are sincere or at least enthusiastic, and the ghosts remain stubbornly unwilling to make themselves available for a properly documented interview.

But perhaps the question of whether the Coronado is actually haunted is less interesting than the question of why Rockford wants it to be.

Historic theaters occupy a peculiar place in the American imagination. Unlike factories, office buildings, or warehouses, they were constructed specifically to manufacture emotional experiences. People entered them to laugh, cry, fall in love, become frightened, and temporarily escape the circumstances of their ordinary lives. The buildings themselves became repositories of those experiences.

When we enter an old theater, we are surrounded by the accumulated memories of people who occupied the same seats decades before us. Their clothes were different, their music was different, and the world outside the doors was different, but they came to the same place for essentially the same reasons.

The Coronado makes that continuity unusually visible. Its elaborate decorations remain, its stars still shine overhead, and its auditorium continues to welcome audiences nearly a century after the first patrons walked through its doors.

There is also a deeper irony in the Coronado's reputation as a haunted building. The theater was created during an era when motion pictures themselves were still regarded as something approaching magic. Human beings who had been photographed years earlier could appear on a screen, moving and speaking long after the original moment had passed. Silent-film stars who had died could continue performing before audiences who had never known them in life.

Cinema, in other words, was already a technology for summoning ghosts.

The Coronado was built to house those apparitions. Its artificial stars and theatrical architecture provided an elaborate setting in which images of absent people could come temporarily back to life.

Perhaps the building was haunted from the beginning, just not in the way paranormal investigators imagine.

Today, the Coronado remains one of Rockford's most recognizable cultural landmarks. Its survival represents a rare victory for historic preservation in a city that has lost more than its share of remarkable old buildings. The theater continues to host concerts, theatrical productions, and community gatherings, while its history attracts visitors interested in architecture, entertainment, and the strange stories that accumulate around old places.

As the Coronado approaches its hundredth anniversary in 2027, the building carries nearly a century of Rockford's cultural memory within its walls. Some of that history is documented in photographs, newspaper accounts, architectural records, and the recollections of people who attended performances there. Other parts survive as stories whispered about empty balconies and mysterious figures in old-fashioned clothing.

The distinction matters, but both kinds of stories tell us something about the place.

Maybe the Lady in White is real. Maybe the man in the bowler hat is still wandering through the theater, looking for a performance that ended sometime during the Hoover administration. Maybe Willard Van Matre occasionally returns to inspect the magnificent building he gave his hometown.

Or maybe the Coronado is simply so beautiful, so theatrical, and so saturated with memory that we find it difficult to imagine everyone who ever loved the place has truly gone away.

Either way, the ghosts have chosen an excellent theater.

And if they happen to be sitting somewhere in the balcony when the lights go down and the stars come out, I hope they're enjoying the show.

Uncle Don's Terror Theater: When Rockford Had Its Own Horror Host

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

There was a time when staying up late on a Saturday night in Rockford, Illinois, meant you might encounter something considerably stranger than anything happening downtown. If you turned your television to Channel 39 at 10:30 p.m. during the 1980s, you could find yourself in the company of a peculiar fellow named Uncle Don, a wisecracking shark named Sharky, and whatever assortment of vampires, giant monsters, mad scientists, and rubber-suited creatures the station had managed to dig out of its film library that week.

This was Uncle Don's Terror Theater, one of the more wonderfully eccentric chapters in Rockford television history. Long before streaming services made virtually every horror movie available on demand, local television stations provided their own peculiar gateways into the world of cinematic monstrosities. The movies were frequently terrible, the special effects were often worse, and the hosts sometimes seemed to have escaped from the institutions depicted in the films themselves. It was glorious.

Rockford's Uncle Don was actually Matt Swan, a television personality who presided over the festivities on WQRF-TV, Channel 39. His program followed in the grand American tradition of locally produced horror movie shows, a television phenomenon that flourished from the 1950s through the 1980s. Nearly every major television market had its own resident ghoul, vampire, mad scientist, or other questionable character introducing old horror movies and performing comedy routines between commercial breaks. Chicago viewers had Svengoolie. Los Angeles had Vampira and later Elvira. Rockford had Uncle Don.

And Uncle Don was a litlevision phenomenon that flourished from the 1950s through the 1980s. Nearly every major television market had its own resident ghoul, vampire, mad scientist, or other questionable character introducing old horror movies and performing comedy routines between commercial breaks. Chicago viewers had Svengoolie. Los Angeles had Vampira and later Elvira. Rockford had Uncle Don.

And Uncle Don was a little different.

Rather than dressing as a conventional monster, Swan played a strange, comical relative who seemed entirely comfortable inhabiting the low-rent universe of late-night horror television. One viewer, recalling the program years later on a classic horror film discussion board, described Uncle Don as resembling a weird relative living in a shabby basement with chicken wire over the windows. It's difficult to imagine a more appropriate setting for a man whose job involved introducing movies about radioactive monsters and reanimated corpses.

Uncle Don didn't work alone. His principal companion was Sharky, a sometimes whiny, wisecracking shark who served as a comic foil for the host's jokes and routines. Another recurring character was Uncle Don's nephew Ramsey, also portrayed by Matt Swan, who appeared to deliver viewer mail. The resulting atmosphere was something between a children's television program that had gone horribly wrong and a community theater production being staged in someone's basement.

The movies themselves represented a marvelous education in the history of cinematic horror. Viewers could encounter Universal's classic monsters in Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man, and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Other evenings might bring Roger Corman's A Bucket of Blood, The Dunwich Horror, Count Yorga, The Food of the Gods, or one of the numerous Godzilla movies that introduced generations of American children to the pleasures of watching miniature cities get demolished by enormous rubber monsters.

There were also appearances by King Kong, Mighty Joe Young, The War of the Worlds, and adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories. The selection wasn't necessarily governed by critical reputation. In fact, some of the worst movies provided the best opportunities for Uncle Don to entertain his audience.

That was the secret of the local horror host. The movies were only part of the attraction. Sometimes the host was the main event.

In a 2013 reminiscence published on the blog My Decade, writer Chad Thorson recalled watching Uncle Don's Terror Theater with his brothers while growing up in DeKalb between 1985 and 1989. They would make microwave popcorn, tune in to Channel 39, and settle in for the evening's entertainment. What he remembered most fondly wasn't necessarily the films themselves but Uncle Don's comedy routines, Sharky's wisecracks, and the ridiculous interruptions that made even the least promising horror movie worth watching.

This is an important distinction. A movie that might have been nearly unbearable on its own could become an enjoyable communal experience when accompanied by a funny host who understood exactly how ridiculous the whole enterprise was. The audience wasn't simply watching a bad movie. It was participating in a shared joke.

There was something especially appealing about the local nature of these programs. Uncle Don wasn't a distant Hollywood celebrity appearing through some national broadcasting network. He was a character created and performed by someone working in the same northern Illinois television market as his viewers. The program belonged to Rockford and the surrounding communities in a way that nationally syndicated entertainment never quite could.

For children and teenagers growing up in the region, that connection mattered. There was a peculiar intimacy to watching someone from your own part of the world introducing movies that had already been circulating through American television for decades. The station might not have had much money, but it had imagination, and imagination was frequently more entertaining than expensive production values.

Rockford had an earlier tradition of horror programming as well. During the early 1970s, WREX Channel 13 broadcast Creatures from Dimension 13, a program remembered by local horror enthusiasts for its frightening movie selections and introductory narration. Unlike Uncle Don's show, Creatures from Dimension 13 apparently did not feature a regular on-camera horror host. Its atmosphere relied more heavily on the films and the eerie presentation surrounding them.

Uncle Don represented a different approach. He made the host himself an essential part of the entertainment.

As the years passed, the program evolved. The title was eventually shortened from Uncle Don's Terror Theater to Uncle Don's Theater, reflecting an expansion beyond strictly horror-oriented programming. Thorson remembered the show moving to Saturday afternoons during its final period and even presenting the television miniseries Shōgun. A program that had begun as a showcase for monsters and mayhem had developed into something broader, though its peculiar personality remained the attraction.

One remarkable artifact of this period survives in the form of a postcard featuring Uncle Don and Sharky, dated July 18, 1989. A collector posted an image of the card on Flickr in 2018, preserving a small piece of Rockford broadcasting history that might otherwise have disappeared. The accompanying description includes links to surviving video clips, allowing viewers to revisit a television personality who once entertained audiences across northern Illinois.

Unfortunately, much of the original material may be lost. In a 2010 account published on the World of the Weird Monster Blog, a fellow horror-show producer described discussions with Channel 39 about potentially bringing another horror program to the station. According to that account, flooding had destroyed much of the station's old movie library, including recordings of Uncle Don's Terror Theater. The claim deserves further archival investigation, but if accurate, it represents a substantial loss of regional television history.

The disappearance of local programming is one of the sad realities of television's earlier decades. Shows that occupied a regular place in thousands of people's lives were not always considered historically important enough to preserve. Videotapes were reused, archives were discarded, and productions that had entertained entire communities sometimes vanished almost completely.

Fortunately, not everything disappeared. Video recordings of Uncle Don's comedy segments have surfaced online, and the memories of viewers continue to circulate through blogs, social media, and discussions among horror movie enthusiasts. In 2015, Rockford radio station Q98.5 published a retrospective celebrating the program and identifying Matt Swan as the man behind the character. At that time, Swan was working as a communications instructor at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, a rather appropriate occupation for someone who had spent years teaching northern Illinois audiences how much fun could be extracted from a terrible horror movie.

The larger story of Uncle Don's Terror Theater is also the story of a disappearing form of regional entertainment. Local television once had room for unusual personalities and strange little programs that reflected the eccentricities of their communities. Not everything had to appeal to millions of viewers. Sometimes entertaining a few thousand people in Rockford, Belvidere, DeKalb, and the surrounding countryside was enough.

Today, we can summon practically any horror movie ever made with a few clicks. We can watch them at any hour, pause them whenever we please, and skip the commercials entirely. In many respects, this is a tremendous improvement. But something has been lost along the way.

There was a particular pleasure in waiting until Saturday night, turning on the television, and discovering what strange cinematic offering Uncle Don had prepared for his audience. You didn't choose from ten thousand titles. You watched whatever was on. If the movie was terrible, you laughed at it. If it was frightening, you enjoyed being frightened. And if Uncle Don and Sharky interrupted the proceedings to perform some ridiculous comedy routine, that was simply part of the evening's entertainment.

The imperfections were part of the charm. The cheap sets, the corny jokes, the grainy movies, and the unmistakable feeling that everyone involved was having a pretty good time created something that polished modern entertainment often struggles to reproduce.

A sense of place.

For a generation of northern Illinois horror fans, Uncle Don wasn't simply another television character. He was their horror host, broadcasting from their own corner of the world, inviting them into a strange little universe where bad movies were good entertainment and Saturday nights belonged to monsters.

Somewhere in the collective memory of Rockford, it's still 10:30 on a Saturday night. The popcorn is ready. Channel 39 is coming into focus. Sharky has something sarcastic to say.

And Uncle Don is about to introduce another terrible movie.

We wouldn't have it any other way.