Civic Theater story still gives me chills

Happy Halloween everyone!

I've received tons of calls, emails and knocks at the doors over the years of folks wanting me to do stories on their local haunted tales. Everything from traditional haunted houses to cry-baby-bridge-folklore.

The one that still gets me when I think about it comes from Richard Hodges, Stage Manager at the Akron Civic Theater. He's a great guy by the way and a great historian of the theater.

A few years ago as I was doing a story on the Civic's historic renovation, Hodges and I were standing in the theater's grand lobby. Just making conversation, I brought up the idea of ghosts in theaters and whether Hodges had ever experienced any at the Civic.

Hodges told me that during the renovation, workers came into the lobby to find one side of the lobby in the dark. The lights on the that side were completely out. I'm talking about the large set of lights -- probably 30 of them -- that line the upper levels of the grand lobby walls probably 20 feet off the floor.

The other side of the lobby was still lit so workers could still see there way around. Assuming it was a bad fuse or a flipped switch, workers stayed focus on the tasks at hand.

Later, crews checked the fuses and found that all were working normally. All the switches were checked as well and they too were functioning normally. Crews even checked the electrical lines themselves and discovered that they were "hot" -- meaning power was going through them to the lights.

"So why weren't the lights working?" I asked.

Hodges told me that eventually someone brought in a large ladder and ascended to the top of the lobby for a closer look. Turns out, ALL of the light bulbs had been twisted loose by hand so they wouldn't come on. Every single light.

As I recall, Hodges said there's no way a person crawled up there and did that because there were no large ladders around. All of the lights just suddenly went dark.

So it must have been a ghost ...

There's other Civic Theater haunting stories out there .. but that one just gets me every time.