Ask Lemmy

I used to work in a theater where the main director had recently died. It was cancer, and was a relatively long battle. The entire cast and crew watched the slow attrition, and her loss hit everyone pretty hard. She always sat in a specific seat during rehearsals. When she died, the theater even had an embroidered ribbon with “Reserved for [Director]” made, to hang on the seat.

About a week after she died, one of the audience lights started acting up. It was the one directly over her favorite seat. It would just randomly come on during rehearsals when the rest of the audience was dark. We all very quickly started calling it “the [director’s name] light.”

Those of you familiar with theatrical lighting may know that this “randomly decides to turn on” phenomenon is colloquially called ghosting. It happens often enough with older lighting systems, so it’s not unheard of. But the fact that it was directly over her seat, (and only ever during rehearsals, never during shows when an audience would have been bothered by it) fueled a lot of superstition. Needless to say, there were a lot of other “this theater is fucking haunted” things that started popping up.

The most memorable one for me happened after a rehearsal. The rehearsal had already ended, and most people had already left for the night. The lighting tech and I were in the booth, going over some of our notes and updating lighting cues. The director’s light was ghosting, but we didn’t think too much of it. Then the wall phone in the booth rang.

The phone ringing was notable for a few reasons... First, it was like 11:30 at night; Who the hell calls that late? Second, to the best of our knowledge, the phone didn’t fucking work. As far as anyone knew, it was just left over from when the theater had a landline patched into the booth. But normally it didn’t have a dial tone or anything, so you couldn’t dial out with it. And nobody knew the phone number for it, so it never got any calls.

The lighting tech and I swap confused/concerned looks, and I reach over to answer it. On the other end is just pure static. Like straight white noise. And no, I know what a fax sounds like. This wasn’t a fax. After answering and a few seconds of trying to hear a response through the static, the line goes dead. Okay, whatever. I hang up.

The very moment the phone returns to the wall hook, the director’s light in the audience flickers out. The lighting tech and I swap another confused/concerned look. She starts to worriedly say “so I think we’re done for now“, and I’m already shutting down my gear and grabbing my bag to leave by the third word in.