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Topic: Any ghost stories?

Dana Stutzman
Film Handler

Posts: 9
From: IN
Registered: Nov 1999

posted 11-06-1999 12:15 PM

I know Halloween's over, but I just wondered if anyone has ever had anything unusual happen in their theaters. One place I worked I'd swear had something there but I never saw anything.

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Ken Layton
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1452
From: Olympia, Wash. USA
Registered: Sep 1999

posted 11-06-1999 01:08 PM

Go to www.historyinacan.com

The 16mm forum has a few ghost stories still posted.

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Art Averett
Film Handler

Posts: 14
From: Orlando, FL
Registered: Mar 2000

posted 11-06-1999 01:12 PM

I filled for the projectionist that went on vacation at a General Cinema theater in Lake Mary, FL. Though the story goes it's supposed to haunted ever since it was built in 1990. However, I worked the weekend that Stigmatta opened and Sixth Sense playing. I had a lamphouse exhaust on the roof of number 2 house go out. The contractor who takes care of them said that the wire was pulled off of the connection. The next night number 7 lamphouse exhaust on the roof stopped working. This time the contractor said it was a switch on the exhaust that was turned off. At all times the manager has control of the keys to the locks to the roof top. The only way to the roof top is through the projection booth. The next day I received a call from the manager to come in early as they could start the first show in theater #2. Came in and found the lamhouse fan not working. Typical Cinemechanica lamphouse, I had to reach over the lamp to get the vane switch for the blower to move open. If it's closed, the lamp won't strike. SOOO, yes there are some instances where a booth might have some projection gremlens.

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Scott Ribbens
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 118
From: Los Angeles
Registered: Oct 1999

posted 11-06-1999 01:57 PM

The First Theatre that I ever worked at was a six plex, (that was a big complex back then), but there was a story that a customer had died in Theatre #5 shortly after they added houses 5 & 6, It started out as a four plex when it first opened. Number 5 was the only one in the complex where the platter would throw the print. Granted 1-4 had AW3 platters and 5 & 6 had AW2s, but #6 never threw any prints.
Mind you we did not yet have the wonderful polyester that we have today.
Number 5 also had some other problems, such as exciter lamps would burn out much fater than any other house(voltage same as all of the others). And overall just a strange assorment of small problems that would just happen at random times. That house would be fine for two weeks or more at a time, then all of the sudden, somewhere near the middle to end of the month, BAM! a series of generally small but annoying problems! Very strange, and it did not matter who was working in the booth.

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Scott

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Masao Garcia
Film Handler

Posts: 34
From: Lancaster, CA, USA
Registered: Oct 1999

posted 11-06-1999 05:18 PM

Okay, this one will fall under the "weird and not scary" category. I work at a 10-plex and at the time, we were showing "The Blair Witch Project" in #2. I had just started the closing shift and the movies were just starting to drop. #9 started first, so I went over to thread it. I turned on the light and found that there was a black hair/carpet-like substance all over the projector head. It felt soft, but if you pressed it together, it would contract and hold its shape. To this day, I cannot tell you what it was, and can only describe it as "hair/carpet". We do have a carpeted booth, BTW, and it's green. Anyway, there was no way I could brush the crap off, so I went over to #7, where the air compressor was at. I bent down and unplugged it from the socket and noticed a spot in the carpet where a couple white threads had begun to unthread (we have many spots around the booth like that) and I $#it you not, the threads were in the form of the little stick man figure of the Blair Witch Project! I was like, "oh, great" and looked down the booth toward #2.

Now, I guess it is possible that somehow, a glob of that fabric stuff became airborn and landed on the film as it was going through the projector head and it got caught up in there. But there was a bunch of it in the gate and no one had complained about there being anything that blocked the image on the screen. I asked my Usher-B who had worked the morning shift if she noticed anything before she left, and she hadn't. There have always been stories that our booth was haunted because the theatre was supposedly built over some Indian burial ground, but I think the Indian burial ground part was made up. I have noticed some other strange stuff happen in our booth, but this event just happened to come to mind.

--MG

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Ken Layton
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1452
From: Olympia, Wash. USA
Registered: Sep 1999

posted 11-06-1999 06:48 PM

I worked at the State Theater in Olympia (Wash) for 10 years. There was something strange that would happen once every 6 months on a Saturday night. Sometime between 7:30 and 9:30 the xenon lamp would go out and stay out for exactly 30 minutes. This was a 2 machine booth and neither lamp would work. Contactors would not energize. I had been over everything with a fine tooth comb and it always checked out fine. After 30 minutes, the lamps would re-strike ALL BY THEMSELVES! This continued even after the booth was converted to platter AND after replacing lamps and power supplies.

At the turn of the century (1900) the land that the State Theater sits on was the MORTUARY for Olympia City Hall then in the mid 1920's that was torn down and replaced by a gas station, then in 1948 that, too was torn down and replaced by the State Theater. The State has since been converted into one of those "high brow" performing arts centers and no longer shows movies (the booth is still there, but gutted out & empty).

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Mark Ogden
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 943
From: Little Falls, N.J.
Registered: Jun 99

posted 11-06-1999 07:56 PM

I know of one haunted theater for sure: the Landmark Theater on South Salina Street in Syracuse, New York. This was once the Loews State, a Thomas Lamb designed palace opened in 1928, and I have to tell you, this place looks like the house from "The Haunting" inside. Beautifully done, though, and the people who are running it these days (as a concert venue) are doing their best to restore it to its former glory (it has state landmark status).

Anyhoo, the theater went out of the movie business in the early seventies, after a long run as a first run house they finally resorted to martial arts double features, and that's really what killed it. I remember during the intermission between features, the mostly hopped up male crowd
would kick the shit out of the seats and ornamentation, practicing the karate moves they had just seen on the big screen. The place finally gave up the. . .er. . .ghost about '72 or '73.

Around that time I kept hearing about the ghost of a woman that would be hanging around the balcony. The Head there was a fella named (are you ready now?) Jon Tombs, and in later years he told me about the strange noises and feelings that the employees would get as they worked in the place after closing. A few people copped as to actually having seen her walking around. I can imagine that this place must be eerie as hell when you're alone in there.

I've seen the theater written up in a few "Haunted House Guides" at bookstores. If you're ever in that neck of the woods, drop in, if only to see one of the last surviving movie palaces of the Golden era. I'm told they are still set up for projection there, and show a revival now and then.

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Erika Hellgren
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 168
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: Jun 99

posted 11-06-1999 10:22 PM

At the 12 plex that I used to work for, there was a legend that when the place was being built, a construction worker closed an A-frame ladder on the index finger and middle finger of his right hand and severed them. So whenever any strange things would happen, the employees blamed it on the "ghost of the two fingers". Kind of lame, I know, but it made for some amusing conversation when we were bored.

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System Notices
Forum Watchdog / Soup Nazi

Posts: 215

Registered: Apr 2004

posted 08-13-2009 05:54 PM

It has been 3567 days since the last post.

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Jeremy Weigel
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1062
From: Edmond, OK, USA
Registered: Mar 2007

posted 08-13-2009 05:54 PM

"Bump"

The strangest thing that I have happen here was...

On a weekday during the school year we had a manager, myself, and a projectionist on duty. About an hour after the last film started, all 3 of us are down in the lobby shootin the bull when a customer comes out of Titanic (this after it was re-released after the Oscars) to tell us that it had stopped. So, the projectionist goes up to check on it. He calls down and asks if we were playing a prank on him for hanging out downstairs. I responded no, why? He tells me that I need to come up.

So I go up and he's standing by the platters with this bewildered look on his face. I ask what the problem was and tells me that the rewind deck was turned off. We use Strong Alpha platters with the rotary select switch for "Payout" , "Rewind", "Makeup" and "Off".

Now anyone who has these platters knows that if the rewind deck is turned off the failsafes will drop immediately or in the event that they got stuck up there's going to be film dumping all over the floor (and there was no big-ass pile of film and mind you the film was at least an hour into it).

A side note: Since then there have been other occurrences of switches being turned off.

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Andy Bajew
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 136
From: Bellaire, Texas
Registered: Jun 2009

posted 08-13-2009 07:22 PM

My theater is the third cinema to occupy the property--when the original theater was a dollar theater, there was some lady that had committed suicide in what was theater 8 at the time. We tend to get things turned on rather than off. One night every theater had dropped except one on the opposite side of the booth from where the projection desk is. Long story short, a projector that had been totally shut down(beside main breaker) started randomly. Didn't think much of it until I realized that the automation is broken on the projector and the motor, lamp and changeover zipper all turned on by themselves, totally bypassing the failsafe. We have a sink that runs randomly and the occasional fire door that shuts (can only be shut by means of a fire alarm going off or total power loss). There is also a door by one of the theaters that always opens itself (that's the one that keeps me away).

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David Zylstra
Master Film Handler

Posts: 432
From: Novi, MI, USA
Registered: Mar 2007

posted 08-13-2009 08:53 PM

I have 3 . . . .

Rumor had it that one of the previous projectionists had died in the booth - one of his work shirts was left hanging in the booth for years afterward, a staff member claims that she threw the shirt out while on a cleaning binge - the next day the shirt was back. I suspect another staff member of retrieving the shirt, but he never fessed up to it.

When we ran Gorrillas in the Mist we had several occurences where we started the show, turned the booth monitor down and later we would hear one of the scenes with the gorillas screaming coming from the booth (usually spontaneously loud all of a sudden) - we would then turn the volume back down on the monitor. This happened to more than 1 person on various days.

In one of our auditoriums on more than 1 occasion while shutting the building down after the last show I could have sworn I saw something out of the corner of my eye - my brain said it looked like a dog running down the aisle. Several of us were talking once in the break room and found out that no less than 3 of us claim to have seen the same thing - out of the corner of our eyes we all saw what seemed like a dog running down the aisle in the same auditorium.

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Jarret Chessell
Master Film Handler

Posts: 288
From: London, Ontario, Canada
Registered: Jan 2009

posted 08-13-2009 10:41 PM

One location I was at had a few odd things happen to me.

One day before opening I was in the main office by myself. No one else was in there, not to mention I had the only keys at the time. No one could have walked past without me noticing either. Working away... the intercom on my phone starts ringing, the call display says "Cinema 3 Booth". I got the chills. I didn't answer it, i dropped the call. I went to check on it a few minutes later, no one around, all lights off. I have trouble seeing how a glitch could hit intercom then type in the code for the main office phone, and what are the odds it would happen to the phone at my desk?

Same place. The kids were opening up the front end and I was working on aligning the lamp in one of the projectors. I saw someone come into the auditorium and sit down from the booth window so I stopped working on the lamp (I don't like customers seeing that). I popped down to the front and said something along the lines of how did they sell a ticket so early. They thought I was screwing with them. They hadn't let anyone in yet. We went back and checked and no one was there. Mall security even came to check it out, nothing.

and final uber weird story from that place. I was in one of the booths cleaning up around 10 in the morning. I was bent over tying up a garbage bag, I saw something out of the corner of my eye near me, i turned and only three or four feet away I saw something looking right at me from the landing. I turned my head back to the garbage and pulled the bag out of the can, looked back over and it was gone. That's possibly the most freaky thing I've ever seen... but I've more or less convinced myself that I only saw it because I was really tired and under a lot of stress that week.... but who knows? I'm glad I don't have to go back there anymore.

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

posted 08-14-2009 02:41 AM

Sometimes the motorized shaft on our crappy Neumade PRT Ultra rewind bench likes to crawl intermittently. I attribute this to electrical crappiness, though. Put the switch in the middle and it stops. Scared the manager, however.

Another thing that scared the manager was the stall around where the booth toilet used to be. He REALLY didn't like it. So he removed it. Fine by me, as it allowed me to move the platter to the other side of the projector where it belongs.

Tonight, however, after all other customers and employees had left the building and it was all locked up, I could have sworn I heard a knock on the booth door at the opposite end I was at. I knew nobody was still in the building. I didn't answer the knock and the booth door is unlocked. I figured that "Who the hell are you??!!" would have been great last words for me to utter.

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Tony Bandiera Jr
Film God

Posts: 3067
From: Moreland Idaho
Registered: Apr 2004

posted 08-14-2009 12:55 PM

Shortly after the original installer of my booth at UC Irvine died last year, the #2 Kinoton projector developed a strange problem: when you start the motor it would only come up to half-speed. It would take multiple start/stops to get it to run right. This machine has the electronic inverter drive for the motors so we have 18, 24, 25 and variable speeds. I swapped the relays on the speed control card and it solved the problem, but now it occasionally won't run in jog mode.

My apartment is haunted, the ghost of a past tenant who died in here will knock the model motorcycles off my shelf and torment my cat. [Smile]

The first time it happened I thought the cat had bumped into the shelf, but since then every time the models fall the cat is not anywhere near the shelf.

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