(Original headline: Camera captures Plaza Theater 'ghost' )
Annabelle made an appearance last week.
At least that’s what some members of the cast and crew for Paris Community Theatre’s production of “Moon Over the Brewery” thought last week.
For years, the Plaza, home of Paris Community Theatre productions, has been rumored to be haunted. Last week, actors and technical crew members of the current production thought they might have proof to back up rumors about Annabelle.
During rehearsals for the show, which opened Friday night, crew members working on the stage lights connected a camera in the auditorium to a monitor in the light booth upstairs. To the wonder of the young men, Ryan and Joel Mueller, there was more to be seen on the screen than empty seats and a half-lit stage.
“Everyone in the cast had heard about the ghost,” said, Lisa Martin, who directs the play. “Just the week before one of the cast had said something about seeing a misty figure walk through the auditorium. So when the lighting guys told me to come upstairs and see the ghost, I thought they were playing with me.”
When Martin reached the light booth, she was directed to the monitor. There on the screen was a hazy, transparent image that appeared to be the head and shoulder of a person sitting in one of the seats in the auditorium.
“There it was, right there on the screen,” said Martin. “There was nothing to see with the naked eye, but there it was on the screen.”
The ghost of the Plaza Theater is a story well-known to PCT members. Legend has it that the young woman, never identified, was accosted and strangled as she sat in the balcony during a showing of a Rudolph Valentino film, not long after the then-movie house opened its doors. The tale goes that the killer was never brought to justice and the spirit of the doomed young woman is said to inhabit the place in which she died.
After PCT bought the building in the early 1980s, stories of ghostly happenings became more frequent, with increasing numbers of reports from casts and crews of missing or moved items and spectral screams heard echoing through the building. Claims of visual sightings of Annabelle were nearly non-existent.
In 1985 the theater was renovated, and after that the number of ghostly incidents dropped in frequency — but never stopped completely. The ghost was accepted as part of the glamour of the theater, and Annabelle, as she then came to be known by PCT members, became just another unseen player in the theater’s workings.
Two days after the misty figure appeared on the monitor in the light booth, a reporter and photographer from The Paris News, on hand to chronicle the opening of the show, were made privy to the “proof” of the ghost.
“The image was still there on the screen,” said Martin. “The photographer went down to the house and took a picture of the seat, but nothing showed up in his camera, but we all saw it. One of the other actors even went down and sat in the seat next to it and put his arm on the back of that seat. On the monitor it looked just like he had his arm around the shoulders of the figure.”
Word of Annabelle’s “appearance” spread quickly.
“The very next night and every night since then, we’ve had people showing up early for the show and asking if they could go upstairs to the light booth to ‘see the ghost,’” Martin said.
Intent on solving the mystery, Martin inspected the equipment while the theater was empty this weekend.
“Turns out it’s a smudge or something on the lens of the camera,” she said, after the inspection. “We moved the camera and the figure moved with it.”
The image is not Annabelle.
“It’s not a ghost,” Martin said. “It’s still there, you can still see it, but we know now it’s nothing spectral.”
However, disproving the “proof” hasn’t dimmed Martin’s belief that Annabelle still hangs around the theater.
“I came up here a few days into the rehearsal and had a little talk with Annabelle,” she said. “I thanked her for letting us use her theater. Then, a week or so later, after one of the pictures on the wall of the set was moved when I know there was no one in the theater to move it, I had to have another talk with her and ask her to please leave my set alone. Didn’t have any more problems after that.”
