Haunted Cinema
NOTE: The following account was recently posted at Reddit Paranormal...very interesting:
What I'm writing here is 100% true, this isn't a made up story. Okay so I used to work in a haunted cinema. It was a purpose built out of town multiplex cinema that opened in the late 90's. When I started working there it had been open a year. I was 18 and I was the proud owner of my first car. Shifts at the cinema for Joe Blow employees (ie not managers or projectionists) were "earlies" starting at 10.30am, "mids" starting at 12.30pm, "evening" starting at 5.30pm and "closes" also starting at 5.30pm but lasting longer as it involved locking up the building when all the films had finished showing.
When I first started the job I was asked what my shift availability was. I was a student whilst I worked there so I could only do evening or close shifts on Monday - Friday but I could work any shift at the weekend. As the cinema was out of town and new it was (stupidly imho) poorly served by the local buses. It's only neighbours were factories (empty at night), a regional post sorting hub and a big out of town 24 hour supermarket. If you worked a closing shift you were entitled to a staff taxi home paid for by the company which obviously cost them money. Soon after I started working there management realised I drove to and from work and so I got way more than my fair share of closing shifts as it saved the company money on paying for a staff taxi. I worked 30 hours a week and it wasn't uncommon for me to do three closing shifts a week. I didn't mind this though as after the last film goes in you are left in an empty foyer waiting for the films to finish playing. You'd see a handful of people come out of the screens to use the toilets but essentially you're just sitting there in case the fire alarm goes off or there was an emergency of some sort. I spent a lot of those evenings/into the early hours of the morning sat at the box office in the main foyer with a textbook in front of me.
After the last film goes in at say 11pm the box office staff close up the tills for the night, the concessions stand (popcorn, drinks etc) and upstairs bar close up and the evening shift staff go home. The only staff in the building after the last film has gone in are a manager, a projectionist - who always stay upstairs and two closing staff. At weekends there is a security guard too just in case of any trouble but the security guard would just be in the foyer, he wouldn't venture into the screens themselves unless we summoned him in there for any trouble, like someone drunk or fighting or something like that. Anyway so the normal closing procedure for two closers, at least one of them male, would be for one to stay in the foyer and be visible to customers in case they came out of a screen to go to the toilet and then forgot what screen number they came out of and needed help getting the right screen number. The other closer would have the job of "checking" a screen after the film finished and people filed out of the auditorium. Usually we'd take turns doing the screens as they came out. All of us would be carrying a radio on us so we could communicate with each other eg if it was a nice projectionist working they'd say on the radio that screen 11 was rolling it's credits and that they thought a guy in the 5th row was asleep and would need waking up. We'd also tell each other where we were at what we were doing eg "Screen 9 has come out, I'm going in to check it".
So on my first shift I was shown how you check a screen on a close shift - basically what you are supposed to do is walk up to the back row and walk along every row of seats looking for people hiding and hoping to be locked in overnight (never happened) but I encountered many sleeping people still in their seats lol and you were supposed to be looking for lost property like bags and coats etc. Each auditorium also had a fire door that you had to make sure was closed/locked from the inside and not opened and left looking closed - in case someone from the outside had left it that way to use as an entrance after the building had closed.
Now depending on how diligent/lazy the closing staff member was some would duly walk up the stairs and along each row of seats, I know one who even did it with a torch - looking for any coins that may have dropped out of someone's pockets (!) I personally would walk up the stairs, along the back row and down the stairs again. I figured this was enough to see any crouching person hiding behind the seats and if someone had left their coat or phone or something tough (haha) they could just collect it in the morning when the morning cleaners came in. We didn't clean up people's rubbish after the last film finished as there was a morning cleaning team of external private contractor cleaners who would come in and clean up properly each morning before the first film started. If you did an early shift you'd be coming into the building as they would be leaving.
So when I first did a close I got lots of "advice" off other staff members like how screens two and three were haunted and I was absolutely not to check those screens on my own. I was like "right..." figuring this was just some sort new-staff member hazing type thing and I took it with a bunch of salt. Because it was a large cinema there were a lot of people working there you'd work with different people all the time depending on how your shifts overlapped but it became apparent that the females in the building (I'm female btw) would not even go into screens two and three on their own at any time and absolutely not on a close "because they're haunted". I even heard this from managers both male and female "you know to let the guy you're working with check screens two and three right?" The female employees' advice to me was to spend the whole night in the foyer and let the other closer do all the screen checks. I thought this was slightly unfair and as it was a new job that I wanted to keep (free cinema tickets!) I thought I should do my share of the work. I'm not easily spooked and I figured I'd need to see something with my own eyes before I started dictating what I would and wouldn't do on a shift.
So here's the creepy stuff...
One closing shift the second closer and I were taking turns checking each screen as the films finished, it was lucky dip what screen you'd get and this particular night my male fellow closer went to check screen two after the film finished whilst I stayed in the foyer watching the customers from that screen leave the building. A few minutes after my colleague left he came back to the foyer white as a sheet, like SO white and he'd pissed himself (!) with fright. Screen two has two sets of stairs and my colleague had started walking up the first set when he'd seen what he's described as a "female hippy wearing a v-shaped cream shawl with a tassel hem" leap up from right hand corner of the back row, outstretch it's arms so they were like birds wings and run along the back row and through the left side wall of the screen. The security guard and I relayed this to management and my fellow closer was sent home from work. Only he was so scared that despite having a car himself and the offer of a new pair of trousers to wear he had to call his brother to come pick him up from work because he was too shaken up to drive himself home. As he hadn't managed to check the screen I told the security guard to come in there with me and I (bravely!) stood at the foot of the first set of stairs whilst he checked the screen. After that night my scared colleague refused to check screen two ever again.
Now after doing lots of closes it was screens three and eight that used to scare me because their fire doors were kind of along a little black corridor down at the front of the auditorium so it meant you had to turn your back on the empty auditorium to check the fire door was locked and it gave me the creeps to turn my back on those screens every time I did it. I always felt uneasy and like I was being watched. Other screens had this same fire door position but it was screens three and eight where I always felt creeped out. I would often walk backwards to the fire door and check it that way instead of turning my back on the seats however it was screen two where I had my strange encounter.
This incident happened a few weeks after my colleagues "hippy" sighting and on subsequent closing checks of screen two I would radio the projectionist upstairs and ask him to watch me as I checked the screen. I know some cinemas have tiny little projectionist windows but at this multiplex they were large windows the kind of size you'd have of windows at home so when the projectionist stood at the window you could see his whole upper body so he had a good view of the auditorium. So I had him watching me and he'd wave at me from the window when I was at the foot of the first set of stairs - screen two had/has two sets of stairs and I'd walk up one set, walk along the back row and down the other set, check the fire door was locked and we'd give each other a final wave as I left. Now on this particular close I was about 2/3 of the way down the second set of stairs when I felt something shove me really hard in my lower back, it propelled me forward several feet then of course I dropped as gravity took over. After it happened I was heap on the floor at the foot of the stairs but unhurt and just like "what?!" in disbelief at what had just happened. Actually kinda pissed that the screen two ghost had started on me because I'd been saying to colleagues who asked "How do you manage all those closes?! Omg I couldn't!" that I hadn't seen anything, aside from feeling creeped out in screens three and eight I'd seen nothing at all of this alleged ghost. And in fact I hadn't actually seen anything, but the projectionist who was watching me from upstairs immediately got on the radio to me and asked if I was ok. I replied that I thought I'd fallen or tripped or something but he said "just get out of the screen". I did and walked back to the foyer and the projectionist had come down from upstairs and asked if I was ok in person. I said I was but said what had happened was weird. The security guard and second closer were there with us and the projectionist told them I'd been picked up and thrown down the stairs in screen two. I started to correct him and said I was shoved in the back but he said one minute I was walking down the stairs the next I had propelled about six or seven feet in front of where I was on the steps and then dropped like a stone at the bottom of them "as if someone had picked her up, carried her a bit and let go of her". He concluded that it was "weird" and "no wonder nobody will go into screen two last thing at night". Needless to say after that I didn't check screen two on my own again, only with the second closer - who didn't want to do it on their own either.
Screen two also had a weird lost property problem. The closer, sometimes me, would walk along the back row of the screen as part of the closing check but several times the morning cleaning team would complain to management that there was a tonne of lost property left on the back row of screen two and it was always scarves or shawls or ties whatever went round your neck. One morning they complained to management that they had found 15 (!) scarves/shawls/ties in the back row of screen two one morning after I'd done the closing check on that screen - we had to sign our initials on a piece of paper to confirm each screen had been checked for hideaway people or anything other than people's food rubbish left in the rows so I had been fingered as the last one in screen two before them the following morning.
I was hauled into the managers office about these 15 ties and scarves and asked why I didn't bring "all" the lost property down to the foyer as part of my supposed screen check. The managers attitude was "if you don't want to check screen two tell the other closer to do it with you but it must be checked" and I was like "I did check it and I walked along that back row and if there were 15 scarves or whatever on the floor I think I'd have noticed at least one or two of them". As luck would have it the next day was the weekend and I had an opening shift and I caught some of the cleaning staff in the staff room as they were packing up to go home and I asked them what the deal was with the scarves in screen two. The conversation was very strange. The cleaning staff were apparently annoyed at the evening closers for dumping the lost property in the back row of screen two "all the time". I said that I did three closes a week minimum and I was pretty sure we were doing no such thing. If we were I would have known about it. Hell the last thing the closers wanted to do was to go up the stairs to the back row of screen two for shits and giggles. No way. But the cleaners were adamant that there was always clothing like head scarves (the kind old ladies or maybe Asian females wear) and ties in the back row of screen two "most days". I was like "what?" We don't get that much lost property in a day, maybe only like three things a day and certainly nothing like 15 ties and scarves from one screen after one film. The cleaning staff were pissed about it though saying they had to stop their cleaning duties and log all the lost property they had found and the previous morning it had been 15 items, all in one row - the back row of screen two and how it was unfair that the closers were clearly dumping the lost property for them to find so we didn't have to log it - place found, day, time etc. I assured them that we were doing no such thing. I suggested that it might be something to do with the screen two ghost but the morning cleaners (being separate from the normal cinema staff) had never heard of it.
During my break that day I decided to go check out the lost property log book which was kept in an upstairs office and truthfully we didn't like to have to go fill it in. It's a maze of stairs and corridors to get up there and with most lost property we'd just keep it behind the desk at the box office because 95% of the time the person who had lost the wallet/phone/coat whatever would show up an hour or two later as they retraced their steps and ask if it had been found. Anyway when I looked at the lost property log book there were literally thousands of neck wear items in it. Either found in screen two or at that end of the building eg "corridor outside screens two and three" or "ladies toilet opposite screen three" always in that vicinity. I was totally creeped out and I was in the managers office at the time and I asked him to take a look at the log book and clearly nobody (except the cleaners!) had realised just how many neck wear items were being lost in the cinema. Also who the f wears a tie to go to the cinema?! Certainly not many people! But the log book had probably 90% lost neck wear - and none of them had been claimed! We knew because we'd ask a customer to sign the log book if they came back for anything. I then asked to see this apparently incredible mound of ties and scarves in the office where the lost property box was kept and sure there was a pile of ties and shawls and scarves in it, maybe around forty in total - which was a lot, you could open an accessory shop with that amount but there was nowhere near the number that the lost property log book implied had been found and were unclaimed.
The next shift I went back upstairs to the office and asked to see the lost property log book again, a different manager was working and I explained to her the weird lost property tie and scarf thing that was going on and she and I both examined the log book and it was same scarves being lost then found again as if on a loop eg a blue see-through triangle head scarf had been "found" seven times that month alone - by the morning cleaners, not the regular staff. The manager couldn't believe it and we went to check the office where the lost property was kept (a locked office that only managers have the key to) and there was only one scarf matching that description in the box. We both had the chills at this now and the manager was adamant that that office was never left unlocked and she couldn't fathom out how any of it could get out and be re-found. I then reminded her that screen two (with it's resident ghost) was all over the lost property log book re: the ties and scarves and she said she thought we should take all the ties and scarves to some wasteland adjacent to the cinema building and burn them. I cautioned her against this and said if the cinema ghost had somehow collected them and liked them and was playing I dunno, dress up with them (!) then she should leave well alone and burning them might piss it off. Best leave things well alone. She agreed and the whole repeated finding of the neck wear in and around screen two continued and quite probably continues still. Weirdest part for me is that we don't even see many customers with head scarves and ties on, people don't tend to wear that sort of clothing to the cinema.
Now the biggest incident that I was around for occurred one morning. Two days/nights previously the cinema had begun an over-night screen painting maintenance program. Essentially a manager and the security guard were staying overnight in the foyer/box office area and a team of painters were coming in and re-painting the auditorium walls. The morning after screen two was painted (pissed off ghost perhaps?) the following occurred. I came in for an open shift and found the manager on duty (incidentally the female manager who'd wanted to burn the ties and scarves) shaking like a leaf in the downstairs staff room chain smoking. She was clearly upset and shaken up about something and she told me what had happened.
She'd arrived at the same time as the cleaning crew and unlocked the building (the overnight painting crew had left with the manager and security guard at dawn) and she'd walked through the foyer, up to the bar on the second floor, through the bar area and though a door up some stairs to the office, leaving the cleaning crew to get out their equipment and starting cleaning and hoovering the screens. Nothing was amiss. She'd unlocked the office door upstairs and turned on the computer to do whatever paperwork it is that cinema managers do. A few minutes later she heard a huge crash and she said it sounded like a car had been driven through the glass doors next to the box office and foyer on the ground floor. She rushed down from the office and when she entered the bar area there had been a huge display of beer bottles piled up in a display on the rear bar counter in three triangle/pyramid shapes (is the three/triangle significant? I'm only just thinking about that now). Every single one of these bottles had been broken on the floor behind the bar which was swimming with beer and broken glass. The manager thought there must have been an earthquake tremor that had disturbed the bottle display (but the place is nowhere near a fault line and earthquakes just do not happen here, ever). Anyway she began to clean up the mess behind the bar and was thinking how long that would take re: getting the bar open for customers and how she'd have to write off the stock that had been smashed when she realised that the glass bottles had been broken into tiny little pieces. You know when you smash a beer bottle there's the neck and the circle base well nothing like that was apparent, I went up there and saw it with my own eyes and it just looked like bits of paper and glass you couldn't tell they had been bottles at all. No piece of glass was bigger than your pinkie nail. That creeped me out a lot.
I asked the manager if she had checked the cctv footage and she, the projectionist (who had just come into work the same time as me) and I went up to the office and watched the footage of the bar back and there was nobody in the bar at all and those bottles did not fall onto the floor and break because of an earthquake. The display was about 3m across, the full length of the bar. All the bottles were standing at the back of the rear bar counter against the mirrored wall behind and then they all slid forward together 2ft, the width of the rear counter and and fell off the edge of the bar onto the floor where the bar staff stand. The kind of motion if you were you use your arm to clear a space on a table. But this was 3m worth of clearing moving together and it didn't explain how on the bar floor the bits of glass were in tiny pieces. I concluded that the painting in screen two must have pissed off the resident ghost. (And I was so glad I was on an open that day so someone else would be doing the close!) Oh and also, when we went back up to the office to review the cctv footage the pc monitor (the old cream colour thick screen type) that the manager had been working on had been rotated 180 degrees so the cables and things were touching the keyboard and the glass screen was facing the wall. There was only the manager who had been upstairs and she swore she had done no such thing to the computer monitor. She and I cleaned up the glass and beer in the bar and she called another manager to come in and cover because she said she was too shaken up to work that day.
Another weird thing that happened a few times, again in screen two. A customer who had left and who had forgotten something would rush back in to the foyer and ask to go back into the screen (two) to retrieve it. Obviously because it was screen two we'd just say "sure, go ahead" and let them go get it themselves. Any other screen (except maybe three and eight which creeped me out) I'd offer to help them with a torch but if it was screen two they could just go down on their own. Now this happened on my closes twice and I'm aware of it another three times on other people's closes but it was always customers who'd report it, never staff. I wondered if the screen two ghost just liked messing with the customers? Anyway both times on my shift it was exactly the same, the male customer would say they'd left something behind and could they go get it, we'd say sure and they'd jog off down the corridor towards the screen. Then a minute or so later they'd run back to the foyer in a panic/hysterical yelling (sometimes in front of groups of other customers coming out of other screens!) that there was a woman hanging from the ceiling (as in hung themselves) at the back of screen two. The first time it happened I was like "what?!" and the security guard, the other closer and I set off running down to screen two, telling the manager on the radio that we might need them to call us an ambulance. Of course when we got to the screen nothing was amiss. But the customer (who would know nothing about screen two's reputation) was adamant that they'd seen a woman hanging from the ceiling at the back. This happened twice on my closes (although we didn't radio for an ambulance the second time) and with different customers. No staff ever saw this hanging woman but the (presumably unrelated) customers sure did. The second time it happened on my closes the customer ran to us saying there was a woman hanging and when we got to the screen there was nothing there. The customer then confusedly walked out and it was just the security guard and I were left in there and I said out loud to the ghost (and I didn't talk out loud to her at all) "you shouldn't go scaring the customers like that, they pay our wages" and as soon as I'd said it the lights in the screen all went out (apparently a fuse blew) and we were left standing in the pitch black. We got out of the screen unscathed but the security guard yelled at me for talking to the ghost and telling it off and "upsetting her"!
Oh and another weird thing is that the projectors for the screens all have cd players and during the gap between performances the projector would automatically play a pre-loaded cd so we had music to clean up to (picking up popcorn boxes etc). Full time staff members would bring in cd's from home, home burned copies of albums or their own home made compilations of stuff they liked (no explicit lyrics allowed) so they could have fresh music to listen to because after a month you'd get sick of the same songs and you'd know what track was coming up next in each screen and well you'd get bored of it pretty quick.
Anyway screen three (which aside from making me feel uncomfortable when I checked it I'd had no actual incidents in) had a cd stuck in the cd drawer.
Projectors cost 6 figures new and as they projected the film fine the cinema was not bothered that we couldn't change the cd so the cd drawer was left broken. Now screen three had a cd stuck in it's drawer that was a free cd from a film magazine and the first track of it was Amiee Mann's "Save Me" from the film Magnolia's soundtrack. Most of the time the cd never played and you'd have to clean in silence but sometimes the cd would start to play after several minutes of silence (at full volume and scare the proverbial shit out you) but it would only play the first track on the cd and only play it once. That was it, no second track and not repeated.
Screen two's projector also had an unknown cd stuck in the drawer and it would play the same song on repeat throughout the cleaning time and before the adverts and trailers would start. (I'd like to take whoever put that cd in that drawer out back and beat them to death because repeatedly hearing that song did my head in!) It was Tony Orlando and Dawn's "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree".
After I quit working at the cinema I kinda reflected on these things and wondered whether they all fit together - "tie" "tree" - hanging? and "save me" song and the whole customers seeing a hanging woman and the lost property ties and scarves. I think it's all connected to someone's hanging but that's all I know.
Oh and final nugget of info here, after I quit working at the cinema I still had friends who worked there and in 2011 there was a film out, a comedy called Our Idiot Brother with Paul Rudd and Emily Mortimer in it. Anyway this film was being shown in screen two for it's first "preview" screening and the Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree song was in the film (screen two ghost's favourite song!) and the celluloid snapped just after the song finished in the film. And film's totally don't snap. It's really rare for it to happen and if ever it's when the print has been shown repeatedly and dust/dirt has gotten onto it. But yeah, that for sure was the screen two ghost who snapped it. - Reddit.com
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Witness Reports UFO Near Collision With Airliner on LAX Approach
Looking into the north east sky traveling east, Airliners on approach to LAX in the sky's lined up. A object lit with orange and yellow lighting heading north in the sky towards an airliner on approach heading South West at the same altitude. I almost crashed watching what I thought was going to be a mid air collision. Just as it almost collided, the craft dove and circled under the airliner then continued north for 10 to 15 seconds then completely disappeared in a flash. Both my daughter and I witnessed this. We are aviation enthusiasts this craft was no airplane or helicopter. There were no red, green or white lights. - MUFON CMS
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Square-Shaped Anomaly Over Miami
I was trying to take a photo of the Guess ad that was on the side of the building in Miami on Friday the 6th of June 2014 and I didnt see the image till I reviewed the photo later...just an interesting image. - MUFON CMS
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'Possessed' Cars Mystery
Residents of a small village say they are in a 'Bermuda Triangle' where cars keep locking and unlocking themselves – trapping people in and out of their vehicles.
Locals in Summercourt in Cornwall – population 300 – claim a small area of the community is effected by the bizarre incidents.
They say around 30 cars in the same few streets lock and unlock themselves – with reports of at least one child being locked in.
Motorists in the village say the locking systems on dozens of cars have been "possessed" – and have dubbed it the "Summercourt Triangle".
Resident Lin Howard said drivers have changed key fob batteries but the problem, which started six months ago, won't go away. Ms Howard, who is the school secretary, said a car had automatically locked itself with a young child inside which was "very distressing" for the mother. - westerndailypress
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