199: Spooky Theater Stories

Hello, creeps. It's me, the Crypt Keeper. And you're listening to Movie Meltdown, the greatest movie geek show on Earth. Ha. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Good evening. The following feature has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America. It is intended for mature audiences and parental discretion is advised. Our nuclear reactor pumping out one million kilowatts of power. In the containment chamber.

To your citizens, we have a movie meltdown. You have been a participant in the biggest interdimensional cross-rip since the Tunguska blast of 1909. Sounds great. Happy Halloween and welcome to Movie Meltdown I'm Brian, and this episode, we're bringing you something a little different. I love in the middle of any episode when we just happen upon an amazing moment or story that we didn't really even plan on.

It just happens. To me, it's when our conversational style is most impressive. Well, this episode, we have just that. So when we were recording our last episode on William Girdler, we sat down at our favorite local movie theater here, And as I mentioned it last time, I described it as a spooky movie theater. As it turns out, I was more right than even I realized.

As Dave and Bo went on to tell us not just one, but many spooky stories centered around the very movie theater we're recording in. Involving both questionable supernatural beings, as well as some pretty creepy individuals. All of which seem like a fun way to round out this year's trilogy of Halloween-themed episodes. So we'll take a quick break here, and when we come back, we'll be in the theater, and we'll head right back into the stories. Again, the cast on hand for this session is myself, Dave, Beau, Fred, Marlena, and Ben.

So settle in and join us for Movie Meltdown's Spooky Theater Stories. Spooky Theater Stories. Now gather round while I elucidate on what happens outside when it gets late. Long about midnight the ghosts and banshees get together. For their nightly jamborees.

There's ghosts with horns and saucer eyes, and some with. Fangs about this size. Some short and fat, some tall and thin, and some don't even bother to wear their skin. Oh, I'm telling you, brother, it's a frightful sight to see what goes on in the night. When the spooks have a midnight jamboree, they break it up with fiendish glee.

Ghosts are bad, but the one that's cursed is the headless horseman. He's the worst when he goes a-jogging across the land. Holding a noggin in his hand. Demons take one look and groan. And hit the road for parts unknown.

And there's no wreath like a soup to spurn. There's a deserted theater down by the pier. And if you value your life, you won't go there. For up in the balcony and down every row, a killer with a knife roams ready to strike in the Flesh and Blood Show. They were young and beautiful actors and actresses, but little did they know they would meet a deadly fate in the Flesh and Blood show.

Ah, those young people of Shakespeare and love, they thought they knew all there was to know, but behind the scenes a killer awaited them in the Flesh and Blood show. So you brave and bold moviegoers, listen to me when I tell you what you ought to know, that the most chilling experience of your life will occur when you see The Flesh and Blood Show. The Flesh and Blood Show, brought to you by EVI, in color, rated R. We're a show that is ostensibly about horror. Booby bouncing from the running.

That monkey was Benson. He had sex with Kim Cattrall. Open your mouth so I can fill the void. Rats are gross. Far eastern yeti have smaller feet than.

So like what are we supposed to learn from that? You're like, shit, this is the one with the really fat guy. Yeah. Damn it. Okay.

They gave each other a Dutch rudder. It was fine. Apparently you've never been to makeitandy.com. Those are flaps, not doors. Woody.

Anyway. Who's Woody? It's a wiker with a booty. It looks like Mike's jerking it over there. I'm going to class it up now.

After that smut. Shows are most popular by the way they smell. You're a real black hole right now. He sure is. I'd bang him.

The horror of unreleased Beach Boys songs. There you go. Are you referring to my lady right now? Nope. Night of the living.

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Then you'll get 33% off and free shipping. Tweaked Audio. Sounds better. It's spooky. It's eerie.

It's The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, starring three-time Emmy Award winner Don Knotts as the world's bravest coward. I have been called brave. Now let me clarify this. As you see, I'm a lion with girls, a tiger with men, and.

I'm just naturally at home in a haunted house. So what's brave? How should I know? What chicken? Mr.

Chicken to you. In this motion picture, he starts as a roving reporter. Now he's a raving reporter trying to solve a murder mystery in a house of terror. And he'll scare you silly. Don Knotts in The Ghost and Mr.

Chicken in Technicolor. And you're a chicken if you missed this movie. This is PJ Souls, and you are totally listening to Movie Meltdown. It's part of your problem. You know.

You haven't seen enough movies. All of life's riddles are answered. In the movies. And now, on with the show. Music music Well, you did say, this being the Halloween episode, this also has a little bit of history.

Did we want to go into the building and some stories? Yeah, we think the theater's haunted. We pretty much thought it was haunted since we opened. Since it is on the grounds of what used to be an orphanage. Yeah, it was the German Presbyterian orphanage.

That did actually burn down, did it not? I think they tore it down. It was torn down? Okay. Yeah, this property was sold sometime around 1959 or 60.

And uh they moved down the street actually brooklawn now they're still a business and um it sat on this property there was a the orphanage up closer to the bartstown road section there was a park back here playground it was very nice by all reports i looked up the history it was a very good place we even used to have a customer who came in here. I remember the best years of his life an older man had. Lived here at the Archimedean and said it was a great place so no negativity involved with it but there seems to be some odd association with disturbances here that two people well I think two people two girls have seen a figure of a little boy I think it's three did Bob see a figure had he seen a boy.

I don't think any male, that's the funny, to me, I want to say the pattern is no male has ever seen the little boy. I heard that up at the old Winn-Dixie, which is now the Value Mart. Well, that's true, yeah. Yeah, one of the stockers. Said he saw an identical figure in the back, like, freezer area when they were actually doing some construction, kind of disturbing the property.

My niece saw a figure in theater number. Six at the end, back of the theater here, cleaning up after a movie, she saw a little boy out of the corner of her eye. He was about six or so, had a sort of a bowl haircut, blonde hair, and was wearing what she thought were denim overalls. She saw him in the row, and the credits were rolling, and she was cleaning up. And she, out of the corner of her eye, saw him, and then she looked directly, and he wasn't there.

And she actually was living with us at the time as well, and she came up and told me about this. She wasn't really freaked out. She was like, it's just kind of odd. She thought she saw someone, but there wasn't anyone there. Then it was maybe two or three years later.

Another girl who worked here was coming up the aisle as I was coming into work and was asking the ticket seller if he had sold a ticket to a family or to a child to whatever was playing in number six, which wasn't. Really a kid's movie at all. And he checked the and there was no ticket to families or kids. She had gone in there, and the credits were rolling, and she'd seen a little boy down in the front of the theater near the screen running around kind of playing while living in his own world. And she called out to him from the aisle, and he did not respond.

And she called out again saying, where are your parents? And he didn't respond. He was not paying attention to her. So she walked out and started trying to find this kid's parents and looked in other theaters, and she walked back in. He wasn't there.

That's a really terrible thing to ask a ghost orphan. She's really insensitive. So she told me about this, and I'm just starting to smile, and she tells this tale, and I'm like, well, I think you've seen the ghost. And I called my niece up on the cell and said, here, tell Lucy what you just saw. It was the same description.

I watched Lucy kind of turn white and start to cry a little bit. There was a third. I want to say it was Maddie, I think, or someone else to where it was after we were closed. And it was a night that I was working with Bob. And it's just back in the days when we would have like two closing ushers or she might have a concession or something.

But basically, Bob and I were talking and she was trying to get us. She called us to help find this kid that she thought was lost in the theater. And it was down by, like, theater number six. And Bob and I, of course, started tormenting her and telling her the Lucy story and the Sarah story and freaking her out. But I think that was Maddie.

It could have been, yeah. I think someone else maybe saw what they thought was the figure of a kid in the window over here that overlooks the auditorium. They saw an outline. And I've never seen anything. Here, but I have heard a lot of strange things.

Doors slamming. We're in the room with the door slamming right now. I can do a dramatization. What did it sound like? Like two in the morning, like I'm having a conversation with one of the ushers and a friend of mine, and there's nobody in the building.

Everybody's long gone. You know, projectionists and everybody. We're in the office next door, and we heard this very powerful door slam, which means the door had to be open to begin with, and this door's never open. But then we just suddenly heard. And.

I mean, it shook the pictures on the wall for like, Someone in the room next door. We got up and came in here. Nobody. So I sent them back next door, and I said, I'm going to slam this door. You tell me if it's the same sound.

It was the exact same noise. And it was hard. It was a hard slam. It was not like something that, you know, air conditioning or the heat coming on could affect the room air. This was a hard, intentional slam.

And I heard it again, oh, maybe a year and a half later, up here doing paperwork one night. And then they heard it downstairs. They could hear it. The concession is directly under here. They could hear it down there.

It's loud and salient. I came out of the office one early evening. It was still daylight out, and the only light comes in from that front window out there. I had the cash drawers in my hands, and I walked around the corner, and I felt like I was going to run into somebody. It was like a proximity feeling.

And it seemed like someone short. Now, the lights are off, so it's like dark, but it I could say it was like a shadow or a silhouette in front of me. It was somebody short. And I was like, whoa. And then I stopped, and there was nobody there.

And I looked, and there was just reflections on the wall, which I couldn't really pinpoint the source. They could have been bouncing off the platter system out here or what. But it was weird. I literally felt like there was somebody in front of me for a minute. And I thought it was that we had a kid working here at the time.

It was a boy who was pretty short. I remember that day when. that happened you'd drawn like a picture of like just the weird amorphous blob that you almost stumbled. Into the spinning thing you. Know and you were like have you seen this I was like no you're making posters have you seen this blob. But uh that was that was the only visual kind of thing that happened I can't say what it was the irony is that that kid is now deceased who I thought I was about to run into he died a few years later so it was a time slip but uh Quite possibly.

A lot of odd things over the years, noises. You know, Bo's had some very good experiences. When I was student teaching, I was student teaching up at Atherton, and so I would get off here at like 1 in the morning, and that was when I was still living at home, so instead of going home, I would just sleep here. And I would do that probably about three to four nights a week. It was pretty common for me just to sleep here in a theater and take a whore's bath in the break room sink in the morning.

But anyway, no, for actually where we're in right now is where I slept a lot. I used to, in that room right there, I used to keep an inflatable mattress and I would just blow it up and sleep in here. Until we got the couch that, we ended up having the couch up here for a while. Yeah. But, no, there was more than once where I would come in here and it would be late at night and there was no consistency to it.

I never noticed it was a certain day of the week or a certain time or anything like that. But on more than one occasion, after I'd shut the door and was getting ready to go to bed, hearing a girl's voice singing. And the couple times I heard it, I mean, for me it seemed weird to have the door open and go to sleep. The theater is kind of spooky when you're here alone. And it sounded like it started way at the back of the projection booth and was just making its way forward, and I would listen to it.

Couldn't make out any kind of. Particular lyrics or even set melody per se, but it was like a young girl singing, and it would just go right up to the other side of the door and then just stop. And it's like more than once, I was like, okay, well, just open it up. There's nothing there, and I'll be fine. But it's like I could never get the balls up to open the door.

Because they're just so weird, and it's not something to where, like right now we're hearing background audio because I've got one of the monitors on for the projector. It's like, you know, projectors are off, music's off, TVs are off. It's not any of that. It was just odd. And the banging is common too because, I mean, there have been several times with that, I can't think, but, you know, you've got a distinctive one, the most distinctive one to me.

I was in the office over. There about the same time at night, about 2 in the morning after closing at midnight, And there's just this large bang on this wall that runs all. The way up into the other office. On the other side of this wall, there's, basically it's about yay wide, and then the projectors for theaters one and two are right over here. And it almost sounded like, you know, somebody ran a car into the other side of it.

I mean, it was a huge impact, and it knocked a couple of the clipboards off the shelf when we used to keep them there. And I jumped around, I was like, it sounded like something, maybe I thought one of the speaker towers or something had fallen over. So I got up and went around to the other side of the wall and I didn't see anything. It was just the weirdest slam I'd ever heard. And it was more than one occasion, too, to where back when I was still sleeping here, and those were the nights where if something creepy would happen, a lot of times I would actually just leave and go home.

But then I would still come back the next night. So, like, I would flip out the lights in the booth and I would have to walk down about halfway into the booth in complete dark because the light switch is really far away from me. Where the couch was. And more than once, I flipped out the lights, and I would swear it sounded like footsteps, not just like slow footsteps, but almost sort of like a hustled walk, just approaching from up here by projectors one or two towards me, and I would go and turn on the light, and they would stop, which really, really freaked me out. But.

The last time I ever spent the night here was during that time. And so that would have been 2004. I haven't spent the night here since because I was just out on the couch. And on the verge of going to sleep. And I heard what could only.

The. Best way to describe it is if you're ever in a completely quiet room like this and somebody's going to sneak up on you, you hear like the distortion of just the air in the room. Something kind of moved, almost like you could hear somebody trying not to make any sound as they walk up. Well, I was just laying out there, and I started hearing that. And at first I thought, that's just my imagination, but then I couldn't tune it out once I'd noticed it.

And it almost sounded like somebody who'd just taken off their shoes and were just walking quietly in socks on that floor, just trying to be as quiet as they could, approaching me. And since I'm laying on the couch, basically approaching towards, like, where my head is. And at first I even thought maybe it was, like, a night terror or something, because I'd read the book The Terror That Comes in the Night, is that the name of it? So, I mean, I'd read about night terrors and all that, and I was, like, methodically checking. I was like, no, I can still move my hands and feet.

There's no, like, paralysis associated or something. Not that, but I just laid down, so I couldn't have, like, gone to sleep and woken up, but it's possible. But. You know, I continued to like listen to this and this point as it gets closer, I just became gripped with like this completely irrational fear. You know, there was no way to describe, you know, what it's like to somebody who hasn't experienced it.

But once you experience it, I mean, it is, it's just this completely irrational fear comes out of nowhere, very animalistic. And I remember just like that suddenly kicking in just like complete terror. And I didn't know why I'm like, I've just psyched myself out. Just relax. It's nothing.

But at the same time, I'd gotten so worked up, and similar to not wanting to open the door, it's like, I know if I just open up my eyes, there'll be nothing there, and I'll be fine. But there was that fear, like, what if there is something there? At which point, I had heard the word, and essentially, it felt like I'm sitting here with my head on the couch, as if somebody's standing right here. Like, there's the distortion of the air and that blowing up there. It's like there's something blocking right here.

And I continued to listen, and then it just continued. also sort of progressed where I felt like somebody just kind of leaned over and was just staring at me. And I could even feel like some sort of like weird warmth coming off of that. And I just remember just like being completely gripped with terror, feeling the sensation for the longest time. And then the next thing I knew it was morning. But I mean, I haven't spent the night here since then.

I mean, it doesn't even sound like that spooky of a story. It almost sounds like a dream or something. But, you know, the way I looked at it is, I'm sort of skeptical towards all that stuff, but in theory, if there is something within the building, I feel like that would have been its way of telling me that I'm not welcome to stay here at night, if so. So that's why I haven't done so since. But pretty much everything, with the bangs on the wall, maybe that's the building settling, with the voices, that could be imagination, same with that out there.

The only thing that I couldn't. Dismiss as imagination or anything else like that was I saw a chair, kind of like these, just completely rolling by itself. And that was one night where I was here. It was after we'd closed. It was probably about one in the morning.

So all the projectors were off, and actually the lights were on to the booth. And as I was sitting there, I heard this sound. I was like, sounds like a chair rolling. And I scooted over to look out the office door, and then I just see the projectionist chair go rolling right past the office in that direction. And If you go out there, I mean, over there, it's a dead end.

So there's nowhere for anybody to go if they push it past. And I assume somebody was actually trying to pull a prank on me. But if you push the chair, there's no way for you to run ahead of the chair without making noise to where I would hear. Your footsteps over the chair rolling. And it was, like, dead quiet anyway.

And not only that, but, you know, once you've pushed it in that direction, the only way out is to go that direction. So for it to come that direction and then me look down there and not see anyone, it just, for lack of a better word, it just moved by itself about 50 feet-ish. So that's like out of all the stories, the only one that I can just dismiss. Like to that, there's no logical explanation to it. There's several people who have heard their name called here.

Sometimes it'll sound like a child's voice or a girl's voice. Usually it's like a. Maybe 13, 14-year-old girl. And it'll be your name, but it'll be really close to your ear. And for me, it happened a couple times, and it was always downstairs on a busy night, like a Saturday or something.

You can always say, well, somebody's just talking to somebody else who happens to have your name. I have a common name, Dave. But it would be weird. I'd be moving through the crowd, and then there would be this voice like right here going, Dave. I think Bo and several other people have heard that because we're the people who.

Are always here the most, like late at night. We're doing the most talking and just hanging out here. We've always wondered if maybe this stuff happens during the day, but it's just there's so much noise with the movies going on and people going in and out and all that stuff to where we just don't notice, and it's only when the building's quiet that you actually can pick up on it. This place is quiet. Do you know the story about the mural downstairs?

The painting of the silhouettes of the crowd? Mm-hmm. Mario Muller? Mario Muller, yeah. It's interesting that it used to be an orphanage because the story I've heard is that he didn't know who his parents were, and he's been obsessively painting these, like, silhouettes of crowds, people walking.

Around the airport. Yeah, he's at the old walls at the Vogue, back when Marty first opened the Vogue. Mario did those pieces. Yeah, and down at the Kentucky Center, I think they've got one in that drive-thru. I used to joke before a lot of this.

Came up, you know, when we started reading odd experiences, I would joke about the Mid-City Mall before we even knew. Much about it. I heard it was an orphanage and I used to say, I think this place is like a beacon. It's like people respond to it. It's why so many homeless guys were always up here.

They're always drifting in, you know, and then people would just come here. And it was sort of a crazy magnet that remained so. And there used to be a couple of things along the street here that were like, I don't know where you could sell blood or or where you could get one of those IDs that homeless people have to have to get a bed and a shelter. Because I know. At the gallery, like an art gallery, when I worked there, it's just like a magnet for insane people.

And some of them are, like, really nice, and I keep up with still. Like, Mark Anthony Mulligan is, like, a legendary homeless guy. I sold one of his paintings to. Ah, I'm forgetting his name now, uh, the guy who did Hot L Baltimore playwright, Lanford Wilson, when he was in town. Uh, and he does, he does these great invented Louisville, they're partly invented, but partly he actually just remembers Louisville in the 70s, and he knows where everything was because he rides the bus.

Um, and I saw him like down the street the other day in the corner. Um, But, yeah, we used to get people who would come in and just, they were on that parade of craziness that was part of the community. I'm trying to think of some of the other regulars around here. Michael Dean Jagalow used to see for a while. Oh, yeah, I remember him.

I haven't seen him in years. Sounds like a rock star's name, don't it? Yeah, it does. He was always up at. The pie kitchen.

I haven't seen him in decades. Yeah, Barstow Road is kind of that way. This place in particular, I had been working here in one capacity or another in this general block since I was a teenager. I worked in the costume place. Act One was in the big building out here, out front, and then I worked at the video vault for years.

Yeah, which is the opposite end of the... Yeah, so I've been, this place is an odd, you know, home away from home. I think that extends into other realms, you know, for people. Other dimensions. It's like there's a hell mouth underneath the building.

Some very Lovecraftian hell mouth. You just find it, you're like, oh, that's why, there's the hell hole, okay. And because we run movies, you know, it's a bunch of alternate realities spinning. All the time, you know, I think that. That attracts people.

And movies always attract crazy people. Movie theaters, the video stores. Like, it's always, like, it's such a weird grouping of people that are attracted to movies. Well, I think that's, I mean, it probably seems that way if you work in one of those places. You're like, God, a lot of crazy people come here.

But I think that's anywhere you work. Some of it, but there's a very specific, like, that's the thing. You'll just get, like, because I've heard your stories from, like, work. And they're just, like, crazy people. But, like, the people that come into the movie places are... like, crazy in a, like, laser-accurate way.

Like, yeah, they're, like, they have very specific things that they're into and weird, like, I don't know. It's just, like, weird little niche areas that they, like, fall into. Like, crazy people with a specific hobby. Well, no, basically, what if you took your crazy people and then, like, assembled a new crazy person out of those crazy people, like a Frankenstein crazy person. Let's just gather your crazy people and my crazy people and put them against each other.

I mean, the ones that are homeless, nobody will miss. Have your crazy people call my crazy people. We could have a dodgeball match to the death. I think the crazy people that just come to the movie theater are aliens. They're not even people.

Could be. Case could be made. I had what I think may be the quintessential Bardstown Road experience the other day when I tried to find a date movie for my son and his girlfriend make sure we had this movie and I thought we did but I couldn't find it and so I went and tried to rent it and it was out and I thought oh wait there's that used CD DVD store across the street I'll go over there and I go there And as I'm coming up to it, I see these signs that say going out of business, everything. And I'm like, wow, I might get a deal on it. And I get up to it, and it's like, oh, yeah, that place went out of business already.

This is a new place going out of business. And that, to me, that's like, that's Bardstown Road. Yep. Especially these days. Yeah.

And then I went home, and I'm like, no, I have that movie, and I found it. It was in a mausoleum my son had made as a school project for Maud Flanders. It was like a Spanish-language Day of the Dead. He's like, oh, yeah, Maud Flanders died. I'll make a little mausoleum.

And put in all kinds of things. And that's where the movie was. Of course. Where everyone keeps their movies. Yeah.

I would say there are spookier stories from the village than here, just from my time over there. Just the whole Crawlin' Joe stuff. Well, that's where the legend of Crawlin' Joe started. Yeah, I was at the village. I think it was me and Robert that came up with the nickname Crawlin.

Joe to refer to it as. And then Crawlin' Joe eventually materialized over here. Well, and that's still... How would he have got from there? Well, there's a fellow that we refer to as the pantless poker, and we think that the pantless poker would crawl in Joe's.

Some of the stories interlap, probably. Among other things. Yeah, because there was a fellow who would just lay down on the floor and take his pants off and touch women's legs like he would reach underneath the seat and grab their legs and or. Try to steal money out of their purse. I think it's and or.

I watched that guy And he would reappear. He was a skinny little black guy. And his gimmick, and I think he was crawling Joe, at least some of the time. He'd take his jacket off and hang it over the back of his seat. And if you kept an eye on him, his head would slowly sink.

Out of sight. Because he was so thin, he would slide down on the floor in the dark. And then he'd start sculpting around. on a, you know, a greasy theater floor. And generally, it was supposedly to steal, you know, from purses, but I think he had a fetish. Going on with grabbing legs and things.

Because we had that one group come in and said, we just walked on a guy. And they said, we just walked on this guy. And they came running out to tell us. And then I watched, and I watched this head rise above this jacket slowly. And somebody went down to check with him, and he claimed he had gotten out of his seat and was looking for his wallet.

And that was always his excuse, was you would look around, and if you were near him, you'd see a. Wallet on the ground. It was his. And that was his alibi. I was looking for a wallet.

But, you know, you had more experience with the actual. Crime show stuff. Yeah, because, I mean, that was sort of like the common thing, is, you know, people would say that there was. A black man that was sitting in the front of the theater, and then suddenly he would just reappear at the back, and the woman usually would claim that they had not seen him get up. And it was usually women, too, with kids.

It was also common with kids that they had not seen him. And this all started the first time I went over there, and somebody told me the story of where this woman said, well, he was up at the front of the theater, and the next thing I knew he was behind me, and I never saw him get up, so he had to have crawled. But I was sitting on the edge of the aisle, so we had to crawl underneath the seats. And I was like, you can't do that because they're like four inches off the ground. But there was that one X file.

Oh, man. The man that married that 16-year-old girl? What is that man's name? Cherry Lee Lewis? No.

Woody Allen? Woody Allen. Not those two. He was on Lost, and he was the creepy man who could, like, with the yellow eyes and X-Files, that could, like, slide through the small space. There were two episodes.

Yeah. Because he came back. In real life, he married Courtney Stoddard or something, that really annoying 16-year-old girl who looks like a 40-year-old lady with a bunch of plastic surgery. This was, like, a year ago. Hmm.

Which one of those? Who was he on? Really annoying. I'll have to show you. I haven't seen the X-Files episode in so long.

I'll have to show you her music video, Don't Put It On Me, Girl. It's the worst thing you could even imagine. Don't Put It On Me, Girl. Don't Put It On Me, Girl. It's the worst thing.

This sounds more terrifying than the show. But I'm very interested in this Carling Joe story. I went in and she had me go into the theater and look for this person. For whatever reason and he suddenly he was gone and i didn't think anything of it until like a few months later is the exact same thing and just over the course of the years there i mean it became like this common thing and other managers i'd talk to them they'd heard it too and some were just like that to work it almost be just explained just kind of sliding down and around they just didn't notice and then there were some odd ones because um there was this one where um this girl was like um She came out of the theater screaming hysterically, and this was, like, on a Saturday night.

And, I mean, it was me and the police officer dealing with her. And her boyfriend came out, too, freaked out, because apparently she was watching a movie with her boyfriend sitting right next to her, and all of a sudden, like, she's just kind of looking up at the screen, and she just notices that this guy is sitting in front of her, like he hadn't been there the whole time, and just suddenly you become aware that this person is, like, in the seat in front of you, which is weird. And apparently she was staring at him, and just without him getting up or anything, he just, like, the whole torso turned around and was just looking straight at her. And she couldn't, somehow she couldn't describe what the face was.

She was very freaked out. And then apparently it just, like, after it looked at her for a while, it just leaned over and it slid in between the back and the seat cushion of the seat next to her. And that's when she just went screaming out of the. Theater and the um boyfriend went out. After her because he hadn't seen anything wow and you know the police officer thought that she was on drugs or something but i mean you know it's he talked with her and i was just like.

It's hard to get those drugs that you can't find those in town anymore. This is really interesting my friend kim uh like this was probably close to 10 years ago she told me this story um she and her sister had gone to a movie like here one night because she owns Kaleidoscope down the street, and they were sitting on top of her car, and it was, like, late. It was probably, like, midnight or 1, and everything was kind of closed. And a man tried to crawl under. The car and grab her sister's feet.

And, you know, so they screamed and started running, and they don't know what happened to the guy, but, like, that's kind of interesting. You know, because, I mean, like, if you think about the creepiness of someone crawling under a car to get you, that's just really weird. Mm-hmm. I wonder if. It's...

But yeah, there was the one I told you about when the first night that Robert came to work for me as an assistant manager, didn't I? Because I was telling him all these backstories. As I'm telling him these backstories, all of a sudden the adding calculator just sitting on the table just punched a couple, it was like somebody hit enter or something, just punched out a couple zeros on the tape. And Robert thought I was pranking him. He's like.

He's like, oh, that's clever. I like that. I said, I didn't do that. He's like, no. I said, I'm backing away from it.

He's like, all right. Mr. Ghost, let's see you do that again. At which point the thing started punching him out like crazy. And then we were both actually kind of like, whoa, this is a little weird.

And then he found it funny. He still just tore it off and looked at it. And, um, He's like, you sure you aren't, like, doing this? I'm like, no, I swear I'm not. It's spelled out, get out.

And he's like, 18 zeros, three sixes. And we were almost kind of, like, hamming it up and having fun with it. And then all of a sudden this employee comes opening the door to the office, which the office door, we couldn't even figure out how he did it because the door. Automatically for that office would lock when it shut. Like, I didn't even know how to get the key to turn it that way.

And he opens up the door, and I was like, how did you just open that up? He's like, I don't know, I didn't even think about it. What did you all need? I was like, what do you mean? He goes, you just called me on the phone and said to come into the office right now.

I was like, no, I didn't. He's like, no, it was you. No, it wasn't. And that's when Robert's like, you've done all these. He kept thinking I'd staged it all.

I said, no, I have not staged any of this. That's still a souvenir I think I've got from the village. Somewhere at home I've got that section of adding tape. I just kept it for whatever reason. Maybe were there ones in it?

Maybe it's like binary. It was just zero. It's like somebody just kept hitting enter when there was nothing on there. And it kept just punching, punching, punching, punching, and that was it. That would be really frustrating to be a ghost around somebody like you or me.

Where everybody would just assume, oh, you're doing that. No, 666. What have I got to do? What do I have to do? It should be a comedy sketch.

Come on. It's a bunch of skeptics who are in a blatantly haunted house. And there's one guy that everybody goes, oh, it's him. I don't know. And the sitcom The Ghost, right after that situation, he would just look into an imaginary can and just be like, really?

And everyone would want to play. I suppose it is kind of the plot of Beetlejuice to an extent. What do I have to. Do to get rid of these humans? You know, whenever something weird happens in my house, my neighbor, we were standing in the hallway talking one night.

And my house was built in 1868, and it's just creepy. If any house was ever haunted, it would be that one. But we're standing in the hallway talking and the, like, Victorian light fixture above our head. Just starts, like, swaying violently. Like, there's nothing that could have caused that.

Even if it was, like, extremely windy, nothing could have caused that. And he just looks at it and he goes, huh. And then he goes, stop it. Like, he has control over. That's pretty bad when you get that used to ghosts hanging around.

Yeah. It's like, eh. I mean, you know, like, I've. Had weird things happen, or you were talking about that earlier, but I've never felt scared or anything like that. Well, that's kind of the plot of Truly Madly Deeply, is that her husband dies, and then he comes back, and then he just hangs out with his friends and watches movies, and they're always cold, so they keep the thermostat way up, and they just get to be annoying, and eventually she just gets over it.

Yeah, it's kind of like a blithe spirit, too. Yeah. That's such a weird movie, because the first time I watched it, I was like, so the ghost of the wife comes back, jealous of the new wife, and she wants to trick the husband into getting murdered so. That way she can spend time with him. That's kind of dark for 40s stuff.

Isn't that, what's his name? The playwright? Ibsen? No. I don't know.

No coward yeah by the spirit. He had a. Line i remember it was my favorite it's like quintessential little coward line was that lamp is so unrestrained it sets a bad example for the hell. Oh wow i think it's legitimately unexplained stuff i mean. I was going to say, we had that weird stuff the one night at the Ouija board, but any Ouija story just feels cliched.

But that wasn't this room. We had a call in the dark Ouija board, and several people were involved, like six or eight people were involved. That's some weirdness. We'd have to energize it with a lamp, and the lamp became unplugged. Well, that's because we asked it to move.

We asked the spirit to move something, and all of a sudden we hear this weird ping on the other side of the room. We're like, what was that? And they're like, well, let's turn on the light to see if we can go turn it on. Apparently the plug, which was way over here, and all of us were over there, just popped out and we'd also asked it to make the. Room brighter and it did which was really weird because you know we just had the booth lights on just the fluorescent lights on out there and we just had the door open a crack just enough to be able to see in here and what went from being just very very dim got to the point where it was illuminated almost to this brightness just by that crack of light coming in it's as if the lights all out there surged so brightly it cause that one little beam coming in here to.

Just fill up the room with light. It was very strange. And it was also me skeptical, thinking, well, since you and Bob had suggested the idea, that maybe you could. Call it some stuff. Which we kind of used to do.

We would do it with some, yeah. When we'd get a newbie in here, we'd say, well, you know, watch your radio at night, because you'll get some calls that are a little weird. You might hear children talking on the radio. Don't respond to that stuff. They don't get spoke, you know.

Well, we used to keep, Ron got irritated that we kept the Ouija board here and threw it out because we used to keep the Ouija board here because every time there was power outage, like on a day like today, I'm surprised we didn't lose power because a good fart in the. Highlands and lose power. And anytime we would lose power, once we got all the patrons out, it was just completely dark. Then we would, if there was any new employees, if it. Was me and Bob and some of the old seasoned ones, we'd be like, well, you know, this is when the ghosts really like We would start telling all these stories like we've been telling you all, except then we would proceed to screw with them.

We would take them back to Theater 6. Sometimes, one of them... God, this was a horrible thing to do. But we convinced... I can't remember who it was.

It was one of the girls. We said, if you go and you sit in Theater 6 by yourself long enough, you will see something appear. And what I had done. Was Bob and them convinced her, and while they're out in the alcove convincing her, I'm in there, and I'm down on the floor in the front with the flashlight, charging up a glow-in-the-dark skeleton that we had for Halloween decorations, and then just waited. And then what I did was, when I heard her getting ready to come in, all I did was I just held it up to my body length, and I turned around to face the screen to where you wouldn't be able to see it because of my body blocking it, and I just waited for like a couple minutes until it was like, very very dim like it was almost had lost its charge and that's when i just started like quietly approaching her just like the fuck there.

Was another one where um. There was another one where we're down in that theater and they were doing a ouija board and i was on the other side of the exit door and um i was just like whispering incoherent stuff at the door whenever they'd ask the ghost to say something, and eventually, like, Bob was leading the discussion. He got, basically, the ghost to say, come to the door, and the new employee came to the door, which freaked them out, too. Yeah, I had a night here. I can't remember.

Jay was closing, Usher, I think. I can't remember who the little blonde girl was. He was putting the make on her, and they were sitting out here, Nicky, I think. Nicky, yeah. I think it was Nicky.

And they were sitting outside in the alcove, outside of the alcove windows out there. And I said, well, I'm going. I had to go do the bank run. And I realized, well, they're out there by themselves, and he's going to keep her talking as long as he can. Did the bank run, came back, cruised by, and saw they were still out there.

So I went up the alley real quick, parked next to the back door, opened the back door to the theaters, ran in here. I had a mummy-type mask. With a hood on. It just started skulking up through the theater really quick in the dark and just gradually settled in right behind them on the other side of the window. They're busy talking.

I just got closer and closer to the window until finally she turned around. I was like, they both ended up like halfway across the parking lot. I just sat there looking at them. It was great fun. So yeah, it's one of the fun parts.

There was another one of the blackouts to where it was me. I think Will might have been involved. I think Sean. But there was. Some new kid, I can't remember.

I want to say it was Aaron. I think that's who it was. But it was during a blackout, and what we did was we just went into Theater 8, and each of us picked a corner in the theater, and we just went and put our faces in the corner. Because he'd gone out to smoke, and when he came back in, he was looking for us. And eventually he just found us in there, and he's just like, okay, that's funny, guys.

It's really funny, guys. We just kept doing it, standing there. And what made it so perfect was, in that time when he was in there, and he just kept, like, standing there waiting for something to happen, the security lights, which, when the power goes. Out, they come on, they only got, like, 20 minutes. Like, the last one in there just went out while he.

Was in there, and it just freaked him out. It's a very Blair Witch, which... We used to do that. I mean, Blair Witch, which was a huge... The poster was in here, wasn't it?

It's behind you. It's behind you. Just employees, like when the movie was over, if the lights didn't come. Up right away, just for the ushers to stand with their faces in the corner at the back of the theater. This is the first indie movie like this that got a lot of guerrilla marketing online.

I'd been watching it and saying, this looks cool. I told Larry about it. Even the booker was unaware of it. He said, get on this as quick as you can. We nabbed it before this Backwoods Showcase was open.

Before they had a chance, they were so pissed off. Because we had this on two screens opening night. And everybody thought it was real. I was actually hired as part of the Blair Witch stocking. Because I was hired a couple.

Weeks before it. It was selling out two shows in advance. I had guys trying to bribe me. for a ticket, I'll give you $ 50. I'm like, no, we don't have any seats. Fire laws, you know.

But, you know, kids would come out, petrified, and we started skulking down into the alley next door, a bunch of trees out here, and all those little sticks were falling out of the trees, and we were making those little stick figures. People were parked out here with their windows down. So we'd just start laying stick figures in their cars. And then we'd just walk outside. And there'd be shrieks coming from the parking lot.

It was great. That was a lot of fun. It's fun when we can do this. Were you here the night that we opened up Snakes on a Plane? No.

I went down to... Because I. Watched it and knew where the scene was that the snakes dropped out of the oxygen containers. I just went down, and I got permission from Ryan. He let me go buy some money.

I just bought a huge tub of fake snakes. From the Louisville Zoo. And so I was just up in the booth and just threw them out all over the people on that one particular moment. Spirit of Wind Castle. I think I was here that night.

I don't remember snakes. It must have been a different show. I saw it opening night, though. Dork that I am. You were so excited about Snakes Are Playing.

I know. Samuel L. Jackson called me. I don't think I've ever been more excited during a build-up for a movie than that. It couldn't have been that good.

There's no way it could have met the hype. But the excitement. Me and my friends, we were just joking about it the whole time. Could not believe they had made a movie. See, I love animal attack films, but at the same time, I've never seen it.

I like true animal attack where they put the animals... in the scene it's like all the CG stuff to me doesn't appeal to me. It's bad but that's the thing I haven't gone back to watch it since because that night was so much fun like the whole theater it was like a party like at the end of the. Night nobody left the theater when. Credits were rolling everybody walked up to the front and were hanging out up there I've never seen that happen before in the middle of a movie it wasn't like a specific private event it was just a showing but everybody went and hung out after that it was weird. I remember right as that movie was about to come out, my friend was somewhere, like at a lake with her kid, and a snake, she had her door open, and a snake got in her car.

And I was like, it's happening! It's happening! Once my cat brought in a snake in her mouth. It was like a Salvador Dali mustache. It just came walking in.

My cat did that the other day. There was a tiny little garden snake on my front step, and I was like, oh, you're going to be cat food. Of course, then there's snakes in a pool. That's a whole different thing, so I will say. I'm getting pretty tired of these motherfucking snakes in this pool.

In this motherfucking pool? I really, I thought that. Is there somebody here? Who's here? You know I don't like games.

Someone brought the smoke machine. Into the pool. So we've wrapped up our ghost and spooky stories and creepy people and snakes. We've covered all those now. Well, I mean, we could probably sit here and babble on with stories from here for a while, but we better cap it while we can.

Well, I don't believe in goats. I've seen them. You've seen them? But I think there has to be a logical explanation. That having been said.

I don't believe. I don't believe that Liam Neeson is real. Prove to me that Liam Neeson is real. He's a CGI effect. He is.

Spielberg went back and, you know, put him in Schindler's List. You know, it's very. No, ghosts. We were just having this talk earlier. We were talking about orphans, too, and all this stuff.

We came up with the idea that on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He's dead. It makes sense because he's dead. He got killed in a knife fight. That's referred to in the opening credits. and then he ends up in basically purgatory.

He has to do all these good deeds, and the uncle and aunt are like the angels watching over him, and every time his parents show up in the show, which. Is very rarely, it's like when they're visiting his grave. Think about it that way. It's very metaphysical. Yeah.

I love it. And an odd way to wrap up the special spooky ghost stories edition. We had an opportunity to cap it a minute ago. Yeah, we'll wrap that up for now. Otherwise, that about does it.

We will return next week. Same geek time, same geek feed. Thanks for listening. We're just going to sleep. Here tonight, right?

Yeah, we have to now. We have to test the... Oh, by the way, we're locked from the inside. This episode is a production of Movie Meltdown. Produced and edited by The Oddity Studios. with opening music performed by the Empires.

For more on how to sponsor or support the show, email producer at moviemeltdown.com. Talk hard!