Theaters are spaces that inspire imagination. On stage, comedy and drama hold sway, enrapturing audiences for a few hours at a time—a brief, joyous escape from the real world.
When the show is over and the candy wrappers have been swept up, sometimes the play isn’t finished. It’s just beginning.
Paramount Joe
Ashland’s Paramount Arts Center opened in 1931 as the art-deco style Paramount Theater. It is the main performance venue for the Paramount Players and annually hosts a variety of touring productions. The theater also is home to a more permanent resident.
Executive director Matt Hammond said, according to local legend, a spirit—dubbed Paramount Joe—is the ghost of a Cincinnati construction worker named Joe who allegedly fatally hanged himself in the rigging above the stage while the theater was being built in 1931. It is uncertain whether the death was intentional or accidental.
No matter the cause, staff and visitors believe Joe is still with them.
“I’m not a person who particularly believes in ghosts,” Hammond said, but his opinion has changed since he has spent time at the venue.
“Lights turn on and off constantly. Doors slam. Pictures fall off the wall,” Hammond said.
Box office manager Allison Keesee is one of the longest-tenured staff members at the center, having been there about 12 years. She has had several encounters with Joe. She’s never experienced anything malevolent from Joe and said he has a flair for playful mischief.
Following an evening rehearsal for a Paramount Players’ production of Rent, Keesee, who was acting as stage manager for the production, and a friend were the last ones left in the building. They were trying to find Keesee’s keys to lock up the facility and leave. Failing in the search, the friend looked at the empty stage from the lighting booth and said, “Joe, this isn’t funny. We want to go home.”
The keys fell from the catwalk onto the stage. Because the sets for Rent were static, there was no reason for anyone to be up in the catwalk, Keesee said.
“[My friend] thought that I had thrown the keys on the stage—that I’d gotten mad and had thrown them. So, he comes down to the stage right as I’m getting off the elevator,” she said. “He loses it, freaks out, grabs my keys. He’s like, ‘We’re out of here.’ ”
Hilltopper Hauntings
Since retiring from the Western Kentucky University staff in 2018, Dr. Tamela Williams Smith has made a full-time endeavor of studying paranormal activity on campus and in the Bowling Green community at large. She currently is working on a book that compiles the ghostly tales she has discovered and her research into the spirit world.
One such story involves a WKU theater student in the mid-1960s who saw a strange male figure while taking off his makeup in the Van Meter Auditorium green room.
“He’s sitting there looking in the mirror taking off the makeup, and he saw somebody standing behind him. They’re bent over with their face kind of close to his head and shoulder kind of leaning over, and they’re looking in the mirror at him,” Smith said. The student exclaimed something in fright, but the man in the reflection didn’t react.
“[The figure] was just staring in the mirror at him, and [the student] described him as having stark features, and that he had this type of blue glow around him,” Smith said. “And when he turned around to see who was there, there wasn’t anyone.”
Smith cited two similar occurrences separated by decades. A student in the 1960s and a service attendant in the late 2010s reported feeling motherly fingertips graze the backs of their necks.
Then there were mysterious visitors who looked as if they had stepped out of a time machine. Smith said that in 2017, a campus catering employee was pushing a dish cart past the balcony seats following a special event at the auditorium.
“He felt like somebody was looking at him. He looked down, and there was a man sitting in the middle of the auditorium,” Smith said. The man was described as older, bald and dressed in antiquated clothing.
“[The employee] was like, ‘Well, I guess he’s just waiting for somebody.’ And so he looked away, took a step or two, and thought, ‘Well, maybe I should check on him.’ ”
When the employee looked back down, the solitary man wasn’t there, and, after that, he said the atmosphere in the theater grew cold. The employee said he got the feeling that he didn’t belong there and that he needed to leave.
A ‘Little’ Mischief
On an Eastern Kentucky campus, a somewhat contemporary ghost has taken up residence.
The Lucille Caudill Little Theatre in Morehead State University’s Breckinridge Hall opened in the fall of 2002. It is named for noted Kentucky arts and culture philanthropist and Morehead State’s first-ever theater faculty member, Lucille Caudill Little.
On the day of the first-ever production on the new stage—Peter Shaffer’s Equus—Little died in Lexington. But Morehead State theater professor Denise Watkins said she and many other faculty, staff and students believe Little keeps watch over the theater that bears her name.
Lucille, as faculty and students call her, manifests in subtle, mischievous ways, Watkins said.
“There have been a few incidents where the dimmers have just gone completely out for no explanation—the lightboard just shuts down,” she said. “There have been a few instances of a rush of cold air seemingly from nowhere. And it’s just a little burst of air that’s five seconds, and then it’s gone, like a breeze off the ocean or something.”
‘The Lady of the Opera’
Roger Slade, owner of Rohs Opera House in Cynthiana, said he was once skeptical of spirits and specters.
“I was one of those people [who said], ‘I’ve got to see it.’ You could tell me a ghost story and show me a picture, and I would have been thoroughly entertained, and I still am today,” Slade said. “But I still looked at it through the lens of skepticism.”
That was true until an encounter with a spirit Rohs staff and volunteers call “The Lady of the Opera.”
“That’s the one that made a believer out of me,” Slade said. “I followed a lady into the balcony one night to tell her she couldn’t sit there. I didn’t think she was a ghost. She was not transparent. She was not floating. She was solid.”
The balcony was roped off, and there was a knee-high pile of debris blocking the entrance to it, Slade said.
“So, I scooted down the steps, opened the balcony, and the building was just electric. It was one of those instances where the hair on your arm stood up,” he said. “When I got to the balcony, there was no lady there.”
Rohs leans into its paranormal activity. The opera house hosts ghost walks every Friday and Saturday during October. The activity is a walking tour of haunted locales in downtown Cynthiana and includes a visit to Rohs Opera House. Slade said that even as active as the spirits have been in the venue, he must manage visitor expectations.
“I’ll tell people it’s like fishing. Sometimes they bite; sometimes they don’t,” he said. “When the building is active, it is crazy active, and when it’s not, it’s not.”
The Ghost Light
Haunted or not, many theaters engage in the tradition of leaving a ghost light on after everyone has left the building. Watkins said it’s usually a single bulb on a post set at center stage. Smith said some people believe the light attracts spirits the same way a flame draws moths.
“But I think mainly it’s there just to keep it lit for—you know—if there’s spirits around,” she said.
Watkins said she believes there are spiritual and practical reasons to keep the ghost light on.
“It’s left to let the ghost know that they’re not alone, that they haven’t been forgotten,” she said. “But really, it’s probably more about safety. So, if somebody comes into the theater when it’s dark, they’re not tripping over a set piece and falling off the stage.
“I think that’s where a lot of the myths in theater come from. There’s a practical reason for them,” Watkins said. “But I don’t know. I guess it’s just more fun for us to make a story out of it.”