Short Ghost Stories

Radio Ghost

I used to manage a popular second-run movie theater. It was located in a old building that was orginally a church and had a beautiful balcony that sat about one hundred people. At the time the owners of our company bought it to make it a theater, the building was in very poor shape but was on the historical registry.

When I began to work there, I had heard a couple stories concerning voices having been heard and doors closing by themselves. No one still working there had witnessed anything, but the building was kind of spooky after closing.

One day I came in at noon to do the books and start getting the place open. My routine was always the same: I'd open up, turn off the alarm, go upstairs to the projection booth (which was always locked, no matter what hour of the day) and turn on the receiver to listen to the music that was listened to before the first show and in-between features. The theater was a pub-theater and there wasn't really a lobby. I did the books at the bar, which was in the back of the main floor of the theater.

This was in the days before CD players and we just used a certain radio station for music. I believe it was 105 FM. Anyway, the needle on the reciever was always almost all the way on the left when looking at the reciever.

At first, everything was fine. I unlocked the projection room, turned on the reciever and the speakers, locked the projection room back up (I was very anal), and went down to do the books. There I am, at the bar inside the theater doing the books, listening to the same radio station I do everyday when I am interupted by a phone call. I stepped into the next room to take the phone call and return to my books just about 2 or 3 minutes later. As I'm finishing up, I notice that the music has stopped. We had been having all sorts of trouble with the equipment upstairs and my first thought was that something was wrong with the speakers. "Oh great!" I thought. Just one more thing for me to fix before opening.

I dashed upstairs, unlocked the projection room door and started looking for the problem. Everything looked alright: power was still on, speaker amp looked fine, the reciever was still on. But the needle on the reciever was all the way to the right!! It was all the way off the dial. It wasn't even on a station. I turned the dial controlling the needle back to the left as you could hear all the stations as they were being passed on the way to 105 FM. I have to admit that after I turned the receiver back, I just stood there for a couple of minutes to think about what could have happened. But the simple truth was that no one else would be in building for a couple of hours and the door was locked.

I never had any other experiences in the building, but in the months that followed, I paid a little more attention to the creaks the stairs gave off in the quiet afternoon hours.

Still in the same company but at different location a couple years later, I did hear about some odd happenings in that same projection room. During the week of Halloween, the theater was playing Rosemary's Baby for the late show. Everything up there completely turned off during the same scene of the movie three nights in a row! Someone had to go up there and restart the projector, the platter system, the amps...everything. Whatever it was, it wasn't a fuse or breaker.