Thursday, October 28, 2021
No One Is Alone: Theatre Ghost Stories, Vol. 6
AMERICAN THEATRE: As theatre workers continue to grapple with issues of racial injustice and concerns about unhealthy labor practices, as well as the challenges of putting on shows during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the industry has its share of real-life horrors to contend with. This piece, the latest installment of a Halloween series American Theatre has published each year since 2016, discusses frights of a different kind: ghost stories from across North America. As theatre districts begin to look less like ghost towns and the theatre field comes back to life, we hope these spooky tales can help raise your spirits.
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11 comments:
I love stories of ghosts that haunt theaters, I think they are one of the most classic and most fun theatrical traditions. In my community theater there was a ghost that was more the butt of the director’s jokes than a spectre of terror. Often when something went wrong, we’d blame it on the ghost so we could laugh it off. In my highschool’s theater program, there were rumors of a ghost, but it was more a series of practical jokes we played on the underclassmen. It all started when a friend was filming a video in the dressing rooms of the theater and the video glitched purple and made a strange noise. Everyone thought it was very spooky and that same night we all saw a figure in the mezzanine (It turned out to be our choreographer but who really cares?). After that, me and a few friends began leaving mysterious clues around the theater to scare the freshman, and we all had a lovely time.
Here's my theory:
everyone in theatre knows that almost every theater has a ghost in it. I don't remember where I heard it, but it was like the ghost light isn't just so people can walk onstage in the dark before the lights are on and not fall into a pit or hurt themselves BUT they're also used to catch all the ghosts in the theater so they don't disturb anyone. But it kinda makes sense when you think about it in the context that theatre is supposed to be a mirror of humanity and tell our stories authentically, so why wouldn't ghosts be engrained in our culture to be somewhere where the reflection of life is most abundant like where people sit in an audience or perform onstage. Maybe someday people can have actual factual evidence of ghosts existing, but until then, I'll stick to whistling in theaters and summoning ghosts to be my friends.
I myself am not a particularly paranormal person, but I do really enjoy reading and listening to ghost stories and things of the like. Especially when it comes to theatre or the entertainment world since that’s closest to what I am involved with. Back in high school, we would often joke about the “shadow people” in the dark corners of the balcony, or the spirit of an old director coming back to haunt the sound system. I don’t think we actually had a ghost story connected to that theatre, but it was still fun regardless. Sometimes freshman year here I would wonder late at night if I heard stranger voices coming from nowhere or felt odd cold spots in the hallways, but I’m almost positive it was because it was due to severe sleep deprivation from trying to finish Susan projects last minute! If I died and became a ghost, I’d almost definitely come back here and haunt the scene shop. Make the CNC cut some spooky things into the table or something.
When you work in the theatre, you’re bound to come across lots of superstition and belief in the supernatural. While I don’t believe in ghosts myself, I love that ours is an industry that takes things like this so seriously. One haunted painting, as the article describes, was built a special container for shipping that had lights on the inside so that the ghost wouldn’t be unhappy. What other kind of job can you get in America (other than a spirit medium) where that kind of thing goes on? Our job is the make-believe, so of course we believe in things slightly outside of the realm of reality. I’ve never encountered any ghosts in my time working in high school theatre, but we did joke about the ghost of our school’s founder living on the roof of the school. Whether ghosts in theater means a serious series of traditions or something lighthearted to joke about, it lends something special to the job we have.
One thing that resonated with me from this articles were these acts of greeting and talking to the ghosts or entities that were in these theatres. I remember times when that’s what I would do when I was younger and walking through my house to the kitchen at night, where this ct of my acknowledgement would prevent me from getting harmed, get them on my level and make us all bound by some social contract. In the stories we see this, where every story was not super negative, it was more a quirk unique to each theatre in how they manifested. Many of the ghosts just seemed to “want” attention or interaction and honestly I also saw a bit of bonding in the way the people who experienced these interactions together or similar interactions apart, a way to bond the people who had worked specifically at that theatre together forever, those events are likely not ones that you could forget.
An article fit for this evening! Or maybe tomorrow evening? I set up my house for trick-or-treaters tonight thinking it was actually Halloween. Oh well. Time for ghost stories! Right off the bat, I wish they had not started the article off the way they did. It feels performative and they probably should not have compared real life injustice to,,,, entertaining ghost stories? Not sure who thought that was a good idea. The stories themselves were very cool. I am a firm believer that one should not intentionally antagonize any spirits that still walk the Earth, so I like that in the story from the Huntington Theatre in Boston the theatre’s employees made explicit efforts to keep their spirits comfortable and informed. This story was overall my favorite, because it seems their ghosts have a lot of personality and love to share it with those who visit. Personally, I would probably freak out and leave, but it’s cool that some people are chill with it.
I love hearing stories about theatres and their resident ghosts. While I have not personally seen any ghosts in my time, I have had one experience with one, and one of my directors from high school has had several encounters and sightings. Back in high school, I would often find myself in the spot booth either alone or with one or two other people. When I am alone, I often find myself having conversations with no one in particular, and wonder if I am subconsciously conversing with someone I cannot see. Whether I am or not, the encounter I did have occurred when I was not alone. In our spot booth, there were doors on both sides of the room. On one side, there was the staircase going down to ground level, and on the other, a room with the air handlers. During the performances, we turn the air handler off as it is very loud and can be quite distracting. For this show, I was the stage manager, and I had an underclassman shadowing me to take over the role in the future. During the performance, despite the air handler being off, the door kept blowing in and out, rattling the bolt. Assuming it was the some sort of draft, I kindly asked “whoever is behind the door” to stop, but it did not. The person shadowing me said they didn’t think the ghost had listened, so I joking went over to the door and as I got closer, the door began to rattle more rapidly. I stood in front of the door and it stopped rattling, and asked aloud again if whoever was behind the door would stop rattling it, at least as long as the performance was going, but then they were welcome to rattle it as much as they’d like. After a brief pause, the door rattled out, then back inward, and did not move for the rest of the show. While I did not meet this person face to face, it was still an encounter that sticks with me to this day.
I absolutely love reading the Halloween Series from American Theatre magazine and glad that it made it onto the blog! I am a very superstitious person, have always loved Halloween, and love ghost stories. I make it a point in whatever theatre I work in to ask about their ghost history because I do believe that it's possible to anger the resident ghosts so that they cast mischief during your performance. I started doing this when I learned that the theatre that my community theatre group preformed in back home was haunted by a man who died in in during a rigging accident. He was dragged up to the grid by a line set and killed. Though the line set has been replaced, to this day we do not use the line set because of the history of it and the bad luck that surrounds it now. I think it's a personal choice to believe or not believe in superstitions and I don't think that anyone should be shamed by their belief or disbelief in these things happening.
I read this article right in time for Halloween; I don’t consider myself to be a very superstitious person, but I found the ghost stories detailed here to be all very entertaining and very much embodied the spirit of Halloween in a theatre space. I remember that back at my high school, there was always a lot of debate on whether or not our theatre was actually haunted by a ghost or not. My technical director would always swear that he had seen a figure in our catwalks while alone late at night on multiple occasions, but honestly I’ll believe it when I see it myself. I will mention that the seemingly throwaway introduction at the beginning of the article that touched on the topic of racial and labor injustice was very strange. It had no relevance to the rest of the article and can be perceived as insensitive and disrespectful in its brevity.
I have been a fan of theatre ghost stories for as long as I can remember. Every time I work at a new theater I get excited to hear from people who have worked there before all the legends and lore of the spaces. My undergraduate theater was supposedly really haunted. The number one story to support this claim was that a stage manager had locked up the dressing rooms for the night and they were the only people to have a key for them. They came back the next morning to find the rooms still locked, but all of the buttons for every single costume had been placed in a circle on the floor in each dressing room. I had an experience myself up in our stage management booth when our hand-crank pencil sharpener started cranking by itself mid-show. I wonder why theaters get the rep to being extremely haunted places?
I understand that many theatres supposedly have ghosts, however I think it is a bit ridiculous. It honestly seems like just a very effective way to get more business. All these stories seem a bit out there, and it is crazy to me that people would put in so much time and money, specifically with the portrait that always had to be lit, into something that seems highly unlikely. I think maybe to some degree it must be a way to comfort one self when alone in an old dark theatre, however in some ways making up ghosts actually seems more terrifying to me. It seems like it is just a way to bring about more community, as everyone can then bond over there potentially being a ghost. I also think its somewhat crazy how people go and speak to the ghosts, that also seems like more of a self comfort thing than actually doing anything.
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