Audiences can see that the theater’s seating and staging area covers most of the building’s length.  They usually don’t see a backstage hallway that stretches even farther.  This deep, narrow corridor is made all the more claustrophobic by being lined with out-of-tune pianos, hats from various eras, memorabilia from past plays, pipes and ductwork, and boxes that might not have been opened in years.  It’s a difficult hall to light well.  This is where Kevin Worley heard a door slam and Susan Weber heard footsteps, though there was no physical explanation for either sound.  (The Encounters page includes these and other reports.)

 
The vibrations the hallway emits are less audible and more intuitive for some Town and Gown workers.  “You stand at one end of it,” says Charissa Prchal, “and you look at the other end, and you know you’re not wanted there.”  Charissa has doubts about the existence of ghosts, but Linda Thrasher says, “I’m not all that skeptical myself.”  Though she hasn’t had any waking encounters with the supernatural at the theater, the hallway has appeared in her walking nightmares.  Linda is a sleepwalker, you see.  She once dreamed about being left behind at the theater‑‑locked in with the shut lights off.  “I actually woke up as I was running down our hallway at home,” she explains, “thinking that I was running down the hallway that runs by the shoe room, prop room, etc.”  So ominous is this hall that it haunts even the subconscious.

 
Off the hall is a costume shop, and this leads to a room packed full with dresses, coats, suits, shirts and so on.  Much of it is authentic apparel dating back to the start of the last century, possibly earlier.  All that fabric makes speaking a curious thing:  a person must yell to be heard by someone standing a few yards away in the same aisle, and the shouted words become muted and “tinny” as if over a bad phone line.  A Physics professor might be able to explain this, but what explains the behavior of Bogie, Susan Weber’s three-month-old puppy?  “A puppy is usually real excited and wants to explore everything,” Susan says.  However, after she put Bogie down in the costume room, “he would not budge.  He just froze, so I had to pick him up and carry him.  He was really jumpy wherever we went in the costume room.”  Did Bogie sense some immaterial danger, some psychic stain that can never be washed out of one of those old dresses or suits?

The lights and sound booth figures into two of the tales on the Encounters page:  the fastidious figure that Charissa Prchal sensed behind her and the stage phone that rang of its own accord while Bonnie Cain sat at the sound board.  A dim red light fills the booth during shows, and this might contribute to the ghostly atmosphere up there.  The greenroom, though, is typically fully lit while actors wait for their entrances.  There’s a door leading into the greenroom from the lobby, and it swings slowly open sometimes.  On occasion, it’s simply a person entering.  On other occasions, nary a soul appears behind the door.  It’s the latter times when the actors relieve their anxiety by joking about the theater ghost, since no gusts of air from other doors or from people passing by can account for the phenomenon.