Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

I live in a town in central Florida called New Smyrna Beach. There’s been some discussion about how old the city is. Some say it’s older than St. Augustine, making it the oldest city in the Country. Despite which one is oldest, you’d expect some paranormal activity at some point. There’s just too much history involved for there not to be.

When I was 17 I worked for the local movie theater. I did your normal concession stand work and occasional help in the projection room, but what kept me at this summer job was the constant hinting by the manager that the theater was haunted. So I went home and did a little research. As it turns out, Al Capone had once owned a house very close to the water nearby. He had tunnels dug so that in the event he was home during a police raid, he could just slip into the tunnel and take off in a boat waiting for him at the other end. I never found any indication that anyone had been murdered nearby or found anything saying that there were any unexplained disappearances. What I can tell you is what happened to me on 2 occasions at the theatre, 3 blocks from Al Capone’s house.

It was a typical day at the theater, the usual concession stand stuff and sweeping after the midnight show. My manager had come downstairs from the projection room and asked me to take out the trash from the theaters that had just emptied, so I gathered a few of them and took them down through theater 2 and out the back door. It was around 12:15 a.m. and no one was around in in this part of the theater because theaters 1-5 were shut off earlier in the night. I dumped the trash and on my way back up to the concession stand, I saw what looked like 2 red lights in the projection room. I didn’t think too much about it and went on with my night as usual.

The next night that I worked I got stuck with garbage duty again and again, saw the two red lights in the projection room. When I got back to the concession stand I asked my manager about it and he turned white as a sheet. Now I should point out that my manager was a no nonsense kind of guy. He rarely joked and was one of those “strictly business” type of people. Certainly not a prankster. He said “Are you sure you saw him?” I got goose bumps when he said “him” because all I asked about was whether or not we had gotten new equipment or something.

He told me that for the last few months people at the theater had been telling him that there was a man in a trench coat and a large brimmed hat looking down from the projection room as they left theater 2. No one knew who he was and assumed that it was one of the projectionists playing pranks. The figure never did anything but look down at people. Whatever it was scared my manager and I eventually quit because of the other things that went on there; ghostly singing coming from the ladies room when no females were in the building, dramatic temperature fluctuations in the theaters, and even a had on the security camera when the manager and I were the only two people in the building at closing time. It was too much for me and I got out. To this day I won’t even watch a movie there, and you couldn’t pay me to go back into theater 2.

Sent in by David, Copyright 2011 TrueGhostTales.com