Haunted Drama Department

My high school is fairly dated, since it opened before the 1924. Of course it'd pick up a few ghost stories along the way. Most of them seem to be centered around our drama department, which I was a member of for the four years I was in high school.

In 2010, my sophomore year, I was painting the stage for Alice in Wonderland with two other students. The stage was like a big set of stairs about six feet wide and about a foot tall, with the highest level about eight feet off the ground. You could walk under the stage easily, until you reached about the middle, then you had to crouch. The first two "steps" were unreachable underneath, because there was no way a human could squeeze through not even a foot tall gap.

The three of us were the only ones in the theater and we know we were the only ones because we had the big fire doors on either side of the stage and the entrance to the theater locked in a way you would only be able to get out, not in. We were sharing a bucket of black paint and shooting the breeze as we inched across the skirt of the stage. I was actually telling a story that I had heard from a senior about a boy who supposedly hung himself backstage and haunted the theater.

Halfway through a retelling of the story, my friend Shannon reached back to dip her paintbrush back into the bucket and completely missed. We all groaned about the black streak on the nice wooden edge of the stage that we'd have to clean up and pulled the bucket closer to us. I finished up the story and we moved forward a few feet. The other student, a girl I didn't know very well named Sara, started telling another ghost story, determined to one-up me. This time, when I reached back to dip my paint brush, I missed, even though I knew I pulled the bucket forward to rest near my knee. It looked like it had been pulled away from us, leaving drag marks in the fresh paint. We set the can in front of us, and painted over the marks.

As Shannon started to tell her story, we started to hear a tapping sound from under the stage. I got up and ran around to the open side to peak under and see if another student had some how snuck in and hid underneath the stage and was knocking to scare us. Even with my phone as a flashlight, I couldn't see anyone. The tapping had stopped so we all gave a collective shrug and went back to work. After about two minutes, the knocking started again. It sounded louder, closer to us, under the part of the stage where we knew someone couldn't fit. It was just a regular knock-on-a-door type of sound. We ignored it talked over it, because it was just a "knockknockknockknockknock". That must have made the spirit or ghost or whatever mad because it started slamming against the wood, non-stop. Shannon and I slapped our hands over our ears because it was so loud but Sara leaned and pounded her fist against the top of the stage and yelled, "Stop it!"

It stopped but only a moment later her head whipped back and she fell on her back to the stage, like someone had grabbed her pony tail and viciously yanked her to the floor. She was in tears when she sat up, and she and Shannon ran out of the theater. I was the one left there with the keys to the light booth.

I was terrified, but I quickly shut down all but the ghost light. Before I scrambled out of the theater I said, "Thank you, I'm really sorry" and left.

Which leads me into my next story.

Two years later, and I'm the costume director for a steampunk themed play our teacher wrote. I'm sitting backstage in the boy's dressing room, hand stitching some gears onto a few vests. I have my over-the-ear headphones on, because no matter what it always freaked me out to sit alone in the theater. For two entire years I always had another person with me if I went into the theater.

The dressing room I'm sitting in has mirrors on three sides: the back wall, the left and the right. The front wall is where the door is, and the wardrobe. I'm facing the corner of the back and right wall, because that's the best spot to sit, I can spread my supplies out on two counters and still reach everything. Over my shoulder, the door is about half open into the room. I can see out into the hallway through the mirrors in front of me. Out of the corner of my eye is an empty chair.

As I'm sewing, I can see a short blonde boy walking back and forth down the hallway. I knew none of our cast and crew had a shade of blonde hair that this boy had, so I figured it was one of the band kids putting things in our storage area. He must have walked past about five or six times before he decided to peak into the room. He saw me and walked in, sitting down in the chair right out of the corner of my eye. I told him to give me a minute, I was almost done with this gear, so he waited.

When I pulled off my headphones he smiled, still looking at me, and I could still see him in the mirror. But when I turned around, there wasn't anyone sitting in the chair.

I dropped everything and bolted out of there, running down the hall and into the open safety of the workshop. No one there had seen a short blonde boy backstage, they all thought I was nuts.

Suddenly I got this feeling like I'd been Punk'd. Instead of fear, all I felt was humor, like he was showing me that he wasn't angry or upset with me for doubting his existence two years before. Why such a long wait, I don't really know, but I was never actually feared being alone in the theater anymore.