So I was just going to link my ages old posts on spooky stuff I have here on my blog from my livejournal days – but they’re so old that they’re hidden, so I decided to just rewrite them and share them with a decades-later perspective.
I grew up loving ghost stories – especially “true” ones, and admittedly had (have) an over-active imagination. I think because of that I tend to be more skeptical about things that happen, and try to look for a more logical explanation than ghosts. But there are some things that have happened to me over the years that I really can’t explain that well, and these are some of my favourite stories to tell when the subject roles around to ghosts.
The Ruffin Theater is probably the creepiest place I’ve ever been. For several summers straight, half of my family was involved with their summer play. As a result, myself and my cousins would spend every night playing around the theater waiting on practice to be over.
The history of the place, from their facebook page:
Originally built at the turn of the century as the Palace Theater, the structure was bought by William F. Ruffin in 1927 and renovated in 1934. In January 1936, the Palace Theater was destroyed by fire. Ruffin vowed to rebuild within the year and true to his word, he reopened the grand theater, which, was the most modern theater of its time, on July 27, 1936. He changed the theater’s name to the Ruffin Theater, a name he said worthy of the expense and love that went into its resurrection. It has undergone several renovations through the years, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places (#92000248) in 1992. Some of those facelifts modified it from its humble beginnings as a ‘Moving Picture House’ to a full-fledged 640-seat theater with a large stage. Elvis Presley is said to have played here on March 16, 1955.
The theater was a fantastic place for four kids to play in. We had a prop/costume room, the balconies, the old fashioned ticket booth, the concession stands to play in. But it was always creepy. Day or night.
To add to the creepiness of the theater, back then, right next door across the parking lot was a creepy old house that I’m pretty sure was abandoned. (It’s since been torn down.) Think of the quintessential haunted house, and that is the house that was next door to the theater. Directly behind it stood the playground of a nearby church, and if there was still daylight when we got there, we’d go play there (I think, perhaps, the house was owned by the church since they were so close). Personally, I always tried to never look at the back of the house. Once it started getting dark, we’d hightail it back over the theater because we didn’t want to be near the house in the dark. One time, we saw the back door hanging open – probably bums or kids messing around, but it scared us so bad we ran back to the theater and didn’t go back for a while.
There were, however, two odd occurrences involving the scary house. The first came one of our last summers doing plays out there, and the only time all of us kids ended up IN the play. During a break, Ash and I had walked out to the front steps of the theater and sat down to look over our scripts. We were looking out into the parking lot, facing the creepy house. It was late at night, and the town was dead, there was no traffic and no one around.
As I was sitting there I glanced up at the creepy house, and saw a black figure move between two of the trees. I didn’t say a word, I leapt up and ran inside as fast as I could. Once back in the lobby I realized Ash had jumped up and ran inside, too. She’d seen the exact same thing as me – only she’d seen a WHITE figure move between the trees.
Years and years later, we were all together reminiscing about the theater, which of course turned into ghost stories. I mentioned I’d had a creepy and out of the normal nightmare about the house next door. In the dream I’d been in that house, walking down a red hallway, looking for my aunt. There was something in the house that was terrifying. My cousin told me she’d had the exact same dream back then. Weird.
So – back to the actual theater. Lots of the cast and crew talked about their experiences – the worst was being backstage downstairs by yourself, or in the balcony running light/sound. Apparently the ghost liked to mess with the toilet that was up in the balcony. There was also a secret passage in the men’s bathroom that led under the street and into the basement of the building across the street.
Out of all the weird stuff, there are two incidents that stand out in my mind.
The first requires some explanation and set-up. The downstairs dressing room was creepy. One side of it was covered in huge pipes. The biggest of them was waist-high, and blocked off access to the rest of the pipes, and another room, which I think was some sort of boiler room. If you wanted to get into that room, you had to clamber over that huge pipe and edge down the hallway next to it, all the while possibly walking through roaches and who knows what else. So we never did it, but if you leaned over the pipe, you could just barely see into the boiler room. Here, I drew a map. It’s not very good, but it gives the idea:
So one night, we were messing around backstage during practice, walking through the little catwalk that connected one side of backstage to the other. We noticed on the floor a hole that we’d never noticed before, and the only reason we noticed it there in the dark backstage, was because below it was a room with a very, very bright light on, making the little hole look like a light-bulb on the floor. Where-ever that room was, it didn’t usually have a light on, because, like I said, we’d never seen that before, so we became determined to figure out what room this was. We figured it was either one of the changing rooms, or the near-impossible to get to boiler room.
So we split up. Two of us stayed upstairs, and found a broom that we could poke the handle through the hole. The other two ran downstairs to see if they could see the broom handle anywhere. Well, they found it – they leaned over the pipe, and just inside the boiler room they could see the broom handle coming out of the ceiling, moving around because we were shaking it back and forth for attention.
But – the thing is – the light in the boiler room was OFF. They could only just make out the broom stick from the residual light coming from the main area of the dressing room.
They ran upstairs and told us they figured out where it was, but the light was off now. We said, “No it’s not,” and showed them – the light had been on the whole time. Refusing to believe them, my other cousin and I told them to take over broom-stick duties, and WE’D go look for ourselves. So the two of us headed downstairs, leaned over the pipe – and sure enough, you could just make out the broomstick in the dark. And yes, the light was off. There was no way that much light could be coming through that hole.
Sadly we never figured this out, because just then one of the cast SLAMMED the door to the dressing room and scared the CRAP out of the two of us downstairs, and we spent the rest of the night sitting in the audience and not venturing out anywhere else.
The second story is probably my personal scariest thing that happened, ever. The prop room was upstairs. If you were heading up the balcony, when you got the landing halfway up, you could either turn right and keep going to the balcony, or turn left, go up another small, dark flight of stairs, and end up in the prop room. It was always creepy going up there, so once we were up there we stayed, or grabbed things and ran back downstairs with them. The rest part was having to run past this really dark closet that had no door to get in there. As the oldest, I was almost always the one who had to do this first, so I could get into the prop room and turn the light on for the rest of them to be able to walk by the scary closet.
The prop room had originally been an office. It was actually a really pretty room, very 30s in the colour and style. There was a window looking out over the marquee down to the street, and a tiny, creepy (very “Being John Malkovich”) door in one corner. Inside here was another room, separated by a wall with a door, which created a separate office. It was one of those half-walls, with the upper half being frosted glass, both on the wall and the door. This room was pretty much always blocked off by boxes of stuff, and generally there was literally no way in without moving several boxes first.
That was the way we found it one night. On the other side of the frosted glass, there was a mannequin leaning up against the wall. It had been there for ages and we thought nothing of it. That room was completely blocked off by stacks of boxes, with only sections of the frosted glass visible, including the segment with the mannequin leaning against it. We came in and flipped the lights on – and promptly flipped our shit, because that mannequin was MOVING.
And I don’t mean like it shifted over from our movement when we came in the room, it was moving around like a person. We could see it’s silhouette clearly through the frosted glass, and could see there was no way another person could be in that room. We booked it, ran screaming back downstairs, interrupting practice and getting a talking-to.
It still gives me the heebie-jeebies to think about.
There are a lot of other stories from other family members about the place – if I dig some more up I’ll come back and add them.
So, after all that fun, where did I end up going to middle/high school? A turn-of-the-century building with a ghost, of course.
Honestly, nothing ever really happened to me personally here that I can remember, outside of creepy vibes. But a ton of stuff happened to my uncle, who taught there for years, and other teachers – typically on Halloween day, we didn’t have much in the way of classes because inevitably our teachers would just tell us creepy stories about the school instead.
The rumor was, a kid had sat on one of the old radiators in one of the bathrooms and leaned against the window, which broke and he fell and broke his neck. This was supposed to be the ghost.
My uncle was the theater teacher and as such was often up at the school late night, and sometimes by himself. He said he’d be in the teacher’s lounge and the phone lines would light up like someone was picking up the phone in another room, while no one was there. One night, he was walking down the long, dark hallway to his classroom. He flipped the light switch to the hallway and was about halfway down when the lights turned off. He ran back down to the light switch, to find the switch completely flipped down like someone had just come behind him and turned the lights off.
At the beginning of the year he’d have students bring packs of paper in, for use in exam essays. One class he opened a brand new pack of paper and started handing sheets out, when one of his students said, “This paper is already written on.”
Paper out of the middle of the pack, and it had writing on it. It said, “Help Me the Lonely one who wants only love but finds only hate.”
One night during play practice, two desks (heavy metal desks, the old kind) came FLYING out of the storage room and fell down the bleachers. Nobody was up there.
One teacher told us one night she’d gone into the empty gym for something. All of the balls were kept in a pad-locked storage area alongside the basketball court. As she was leaving she heard a dribbling noise – she turned around and the door (which had been closed a moment before) was now sitting open with the balls bouncing all over the gym.
My favourite story, though, is this one. After school, my uncle had needed to run an errand, and one of the cast of the play asked to stay on and keep painting scenery during the time between classes and practice starting. She was in the gym/theater alone, with the curtains to the stage closed. No one else was on campus, and the only doors into the back of the gym were pad-locked (they always were). Suddenly she heard footsteps coming across from the back of the gym, towards the stage. She looked out through the curtains and no one was there. She went back to painting and the footsteps started again. She called out to see if it was my uncle who’d come back, and the footsteps stopped – no answer. She went back to painting, and then saw the curtain rustling around, like someone trying to find the opening. She took off out the back of the stage and waited outside for my uncle to return.
And finally, my last story involves neither place, but one weird, random incident at my grandmother’s.
If you’ve read my blog for any length of time you know I love to go stay at my grandmother’s and always have. My cousins and I would routinely spend Spring Breaks, half of our summer vacation and any other holiday vacations there. This didn’t happen all that long ago – I’m going to guess around 1999-ish.
We were all up for Christmas vacation, and all watching a movie in the big room, everybody split off to go to sleep. Here’s the layout of the upstairs where we were:
Rachel and I kept watching tv for a while, then shut it off, turned the lights off, and started going to sleep.
I’ve been laying there for several minutes and I can hear this rustling noise. It sounds like someone walking around in the living room directly beneath us. I don’t pay any attention at first – my grandparents were long asleep, but they may have gotten up for something.
But the noises goes on and on. Finally I roll over towards Rachel and say, “Hey, do you hear that?”
She’s wide awake already and says, “I was about to ask you if you heard it.”
Even if it was our grandparents, they’d have no reason to be in the room directly below us – it was a living room where they stored all the christmas presents and had the dining room table. They had a second den where they kept everything. It was strange.
We decide it must be the fan in our room, because by this point it’s going on far too long to be one of my grandparents up. So I get up, turn my lamp on and turn the fan off – noise is gone. Well, that must have been it. I lay down and turn my lamp back off – and the noise continues. It sounds like someone walking around and rustling papers, like someone looking for something.
I mean it just kept on. By this point it must have been going on for an hour. Rustling, footsteps, occasional knocks. Finally we decide it must be my youngest cousin, David, across the hall. As usual I get pegged to be the one to run past the dark staircase/foyer to get to his room. We get to his room and peek in – his lights are off, his tv is off – he’s obviously not making these noises. But when we open his door he sits right up.
“David, are you making noises??” I hiss.
“No,” he says.
“Do you hear something downstairs?”
“yesssssssss!” he howls, and as Rachel and I turn to go back to our own room, thoroughly freaked out, he leaps out of bed, runs after us, and slams into our bedroom door HARD, making a loud BANG. All 3 of us fly into the bed in the big room, and huddle under the covers – after that, we’re not worried about an intruder, ghostly or otherwise – but of our grandmother getting onto us for making so much noise.
After a while we realized we didn’t hear the noise anymore. David slunk back to his room, and Rachel and I got back to sleep.
The next morning, I asked my grandparents if they’d been up in the middle of the night. No, not at all, they said. I asked if they’d heard the bang of the door – nope. (And my grandmother could usually hear Rachel and I quietly playing with ponies upstairs at 1 in the morning and tell us to knock it off). Even Catherine, who was on the same floor with us, didn’t hear the bang, or the noises.
We never hard the rustling noises again and never figured out what we were hearing.
Like I said I hope to come back and add some more to this later on, so next year I can just link this on Halloween instead of re-writing it. 🙂