The Haunted Movie Theater

I was 18 years old when I started working at a United Artists movie theater in 1999. I was there for about 9 months and heard several stories from other people but then also had a couple of my own strange encounters with the thing that seemed to be haunting the movie theater. I will list the more interesting events in the order I remember them happening:

1) One night one of the girls who was on shift cleaning floors and empty theaters was standing in the hallway crying, and appeared to be very upset. She told us that as she was sweeping the floor by the big screen, the curtain that runs along the bottom of the screen had a wave go through it, like a large gust of wind had blown it. This scared her so bad that it made her run out of the theater and scared into tears.

2) I was up in the projection booth with a guy named Isaac and we were getting a movie ready on one of the projectors. We were both kneeled on the floor working on the lowest platter and then suddenly Isaac stands up with a scared look on his face, covers his mouth, and repeats "I did't see that, I didn't see that..." and then turned and ran towards the stairs. This made me freak out and follow him asking him what he saw. Isaac was a young kid, maybe 17, and he was extremely religious. He had a hard time accepting what he had seen, which he never really described other than saying it was definitely the thing haunting the theater. It was really weird seeing this kind of reaction from someone.

3) My first and only personal encounter with this thing was when I was working as the night shift manager one night. We had one last movie running and I was sitting in the office. I got a knock on the office door, opened it, and a customer told me the movie had stopped running. So I went upstairs, got the movie back on the projector, and was looking through the window into the theater while holding down the light dimming switch to make the theater dark again. As I was standing there, I looked to my right down the hall, and saw this huge mass of black cloud passing by the end of the hall from the right to the left side. I freaked out on the inside but tried to remain calm and collected on the outside lol. So I kind of pushed the light dimming switch down a coupel of times to try and hurry it but felt it was dark enough in there and I turned and started walking quickly to the stairs to exit the projection booth area. As I passed the final projector I heard something slam one of the platters I had just walked by, which caused me to book it the rest of the way. After this incident I didn't want to be upstairs in the projection booth alone anymore, and stopped working there shortly after.

The left photo is an example of the platters in the projection booth. The right photo is a similar hallway to the one I saw the black cloud mass walk by in.

Bonus 1) Actually this isn't an event, but more of an observation. While working there, we had several instances of movies shutting off, causing us to have to have a manager or projectionist go to the projector and get the movie going again. Most of the time the problem was that the movie film had come off of the projector and needed to be re-threaded back onto the projector. Looking back, I wonder if all of those issues were caused by the entity haunting the theater.

Bonus 2) When I first started at the theater, we had this old guy who had worked in the projection booth for years. He said it was for sure haunted but didn't really go into many details because he was always too busy. But one night he told me a story about closing the theater with a previous manager he had worked with. They were all finished up and were ready to leave, but the manager could not find the key to lock up. So they both started looking everywhere for it. Finally after searching for a while, they found it in a desk drawer, inside of a matchbox. They both swear neither put it there, and this guy was certain it was the ghost. Of course it could have been some other co-worker, or the manager was messing with him, but its still a cool story and I think it was great having this old guy from the past around and appreciated hearing this story from him.

If you want to read more of my personal stories, visit the Stories page!