Theater and the Haunted Dressing Room

Since we all need to celebrate...something, I thought I'd become one of those people who go all in on Halloween this year.

That's why this month, all the fiction I post on my blog will be Halloween-themed ( www.thekevinbroccoliblog.blogspot.com). All my "Man About Town" column pieces in Motif Magazine will be scary and spooky and ooky dooky. And if you drive by my house, I'll throw plain M&M's at you from six feet away, but not the Peanut ones, because those are miiiiiiiine.

And I've spent the past few months acquiring some of the wildest scary theater stories I could find from all over the country.

First up, a story about a spirit who just loves to disrupt a performance.

Submitted for the approval of all four people reading this, I call this interview--

"The Tale of the Haunted Dressing Room"

ME:  How big was the dressing room?

THEM:  It was a good size. It was, uh, it was wide and it had two alcoves, and that was where we put the costume racks.

ME:  And this was your first time working at the theater?

THEM:  Yes.

ME:  What kind of show was it?

THEM:  We were doing a musical.

ME:  Had anything happened in the dressing room before?

THEM:  Interestingly enough, this was a big building where different theaters would work and this was the first time this theater was working in the building.

ME:  Did anybody say anything to them about any kind of paranormal behavior?

THEM:  Not that I know of.

ME:  Just setting the stage.

THEM:  It was dark and stormy.

ME:  Was it?

THEM:  No, this all took place in the summer.

ME:  (Laughs.)  Hot and balmy.

THEM:  Hot and balmy.

ME:  What was the first thing that happened?

THEM:  The mirrors in the dressing room would fog up. The way the mirrors in bathrooms do when you're running a hot shower. Nobody knew how it was happening.

ME:  What was the temperature like in the room?

THEM:  Cold. Freezing, most of the time. We brought space heaters in. The heat in the building didn't work, so we blamed it on that at first, but then there were three space heaters in there and it was still chilly even with them cranked all the way up.

ME:  That must have seemed strange.

THEM:  It was, but it was an old building, and we attributed a lot of the cold to that. That it's just an old cold building.

ME:  And then things escalated?

THEM:  At first things went missing, but again, theater. Things go missing. We had a big meeting about it. Things keep going missing. Is someone misplacing them? Are people getting in the building when we're not here and stealing things?

ME:  What kinds of things?

THEM:  Anything metal. Nothing that valuable, but if it was metal--

ME:  Like what?

THEM:  There was a metal tray with silverware on it that we used as a prop. That went missing. All of it. It wasn't nice. We couldn't figure out who would want it. We replaced it. It disappeared again. The props person started taking it home every night. It was annoying, for sure. One of the actors had a metal compact with her make-up in it and that went missing.

ME:  So it was props and personal items?

THEM:  Yes.

ME:  Then what?

THEM:  The costumes started getting ripped.

ME:  Oh that's serious s***.

THEM:  Very.

ME:  What did the rips look like?

THEM:  We would come in and--The costumes were locked up every night in the dressing room closet, but we would open the closet, and sleeves would be torn off. Buttons would be ripped off. Pieces of fabric would be on the floor.

ME:  Your costumer must have--

THEM:  Oh, she flipped. We didn't know who was doing it though.

ME:  It happened more than once.

THEM:  Every night.

ME:  Every night?

THEM:  We demanded that the building's owner put in security cameras. He said there was nobody using the building that time but us, and nobody had a key to that closet but us.

ME:  Did anybody start to suspect something otherworldly?

THEM:  Do you believe in ghosts?

ME:  I...not really?

THEM:  But you're doing this whole series?

ME:  I'm open to the idea of energies and all that, but some ghost just screwing your costumes is like--Like, if you're dead, and you can do anything, why do that?

THEM:  We found out that the building had been a school. A boarding school.

ME:  Had anybody died there?

THEM:  That we couldn't find out, but my thoughts were--Could it be a child?

ME:  A child ghost?

THEM:  Yes.

ME:  Creepy.

THEM:  Yes.

ME:  So you thought right away that it might be a ghost?

THEM:  I thought so once the costumes started getting torn up.

ME:  And this was all only happening in the dressing room?

THEM:  Yes.

ME:  Why do you think that is?

THEM:  Something must have happened in that exact location.

ME:  Did anything happen in the room during shows?

THEM:  Believe it or not, typical horror movie things--the lights would go out. There was one night they couldn't get them back on. One of the tech crew guys was an electrician, and he couldn't tell what was wrong. As he's working on them, they come back on and he's almost electrocuted.

ME:  Wow.

THEM:  He had turned everything off so that wouldn't happen.

ME:  Did anybody else have anything happen directly to them?

THEM:  I got a terrible rash. All over my stomach. Any time I was in the dressing room, it would pop out. More like a birthmark.

ME:  Could you have been allergic to something in the room?

THEM:  I'm not allergic to anything that I know of.

ME:  Did anybody else have a rash like that?

THEM:  No, but one man would get terrible migraines. He'd never had them before, and whenever he was in the dressing room, he would get them. He had to set up a separate station for himself outside.

ME:  Wow.

THEM:  One night we were doing the show, and the dressing room door wouldn't open.

ME:  It locked?

THEM:  It didn't lock. There was no lock. We used to leave the door open. The door slammed shut and wouldn't open. We were banging on it. Nobody could hear.

ME:  You were banging during a performance?

THEM:  We didn't care. That door slammed and we wanted out. The show was going to be stopped anyway if we couldn't get onstage. One of the actors offstage heard us, came running, and could not open the door. He was pulling on it, and he couldn't get it open. After about two minutes, the door gives. It gives and opens like nothing was wrong with it.

ME:  Did that happen again?

THEM:  Four or five more times. I was by myself one time when it happened. The door slammed and the lights went out at the same time.

ME:  I would have died.

THEM:  I screamed. Only time in my life I can remember screaming like that. I screamed and screamed. It was after the show and the stage manager was the last person left besides me, and I thought she was going to bust that door down, because it wouldn't open.

ME:  How long were you in there?

THEM:  It felt like forever. It was three or four minutes.

ME:  That's a long time.

THEM:  For something like that.

ME:  Did you feel anything while you were in the dark in that room?

THEM:  I grabbed my phone, and I turned on the flashlight, and I'm running it around the room. I don't know why. I just had to know nobody else was in the room with me. I don't know why I wanted to know that, but I did. I don't remember seeing anything in the room.

ME:  Nobody was in there.

THEM:  No, I mean, nothing was in the room the way it should have been. All I kept hitting were walls. The light never hit the mirror. The door. Nothing. Just walls.

ME:  Oh my god.

THEM:  I don't get scared easily and I was--I've never been that scared.

ME:  Did you all eventually just stop going in the dressing room?

THEM:  There was nowhere else to put all of us, but we took the door off the hinges. We didn't even ask the building owner, we just did it. The lights kept going out. Things kept going missing. Costumes had to be brought home every night along with the props. The last thing that happened was--We came in one day and the floor was soaking wet.

ME:  How?

THEM:  We don't know. It wasn't wet with water either. 

ME:  What was it?

THEM:  So it wasn't sewage--

ME:  Oh I was so scared.

THEM:  But it was dirty. It was this dirty water that--

ME:  Ewwwww.

THEM:  It smelled. It smelled like dirt and dead--like something dead.

ME:  Did a pipe burst or--

THEM:  No. Nobody could tell what it was. The next day we come in?  Dry as a bone.

ME:  That's horrible.

THEM:  We only did the one show there. We moved into a hall on the other side of the city after that.

ME:  Can we go back to that building and do a seance?

THEM:  You have a death wish, don't you?

ME:  I want to talk to the ghost kid.

THEM:  Theater and the Ghost Kid is your next story.

ME:  That's the next interview I'm going to do. I want to talk to the Ghost Kid.

THEM:  Looking forward to reading that.

ME:  You won't come with me?

THEM:  No, I will not. All the best though.

ME:  (Laughs.)  I'm on my own.

THEM:  No way am I going back there.

Them is an actor and art teacher.