Creating a Ghost

The Haunting of The Majestic Theatre

“In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.”

Wintergirls – Laurie Halse Anderson

February 25th 2022 –
By 3am, I was exhausted. I watched the group on the other table using an Ouija board to speak to a little girl who had apparently been murdered in this very room.
‘Why does is always have to be so grim?’ I asked Hayley – my friend, and the manager of the building. ‘Yeah’ she replied, ‘that never happened’.

When I started working at The Majestic, I was under the impression that the building had recently been converted back into a theatre, after spending some time as a snooker hall. While researching for this article I discovered that the building has only been a theatre since 2013 – it was originally built as The Majestic Cinema in 1932. This information confirmed some suspicions that I already had – that we humans feel the need to fill in every gap, answer every question; and that we tend to do so in a fairly macabre way.

I haven’t been able to find any records of deaths in The Majestic. That’s not to say that no one has died in the building; there’s certainly a chance that in the 90 years since it was built someone may have fallen ill, or had an accident. Perhaps one such person was rushed to a nearby hospital – and so The Majestic has never been listed as the place of death. Maybe someone has died in the building, but their death was deemed so ordinary that it never made the news – or such news wasn’t worth bringing over to modern records. I can say, with some certainty, that The Majestic has never been the scene of a grisly crime. No murder has ever been committed within it’s walls, no unfortunate individual was driven to suicide in the attic, no bodies have been discovered – the cause of death a mystery. So why do so many people who come to ‘ghost hunt’ in the building leave convinced that they have spoken to a victim of a heinous crime? Why are there rumours of a mysterious body found within the building? Why do so many of the staff insist that a ballerina hung herself in the attic? Particularly when, it appears, that a ballerina wouldn’t have performed in the theatre until at least 2013.

February 25^th 2022 –
An empty auditorium is a creepy place. Every shadow in the stalls looks like a phantom spectator – every noise sounds like a spectral jeer.

As a person with an avid interest in the paranormal, I had jumped at the chance to work this night. We had professional ghost hunters in our building. Most of the people involved were sat in the seats, a few were stood on the stage. They were questioning ‘whatever’ was in the room with us – and we heard some strange noises in response. But, as weird and wonderful as these responses were, it’s impossible to count out the source as being outside of the building. The theatre is on a main road, and Darlington on a Friday night can certainly be a loud place.

We weren’t allowed to tell the investigators about anything that had happened in the building. I couldn’t mention how, two months earlier, something had grabbed my arm as I walked up to the tech box, and seemingly tried to pull some papers out of my hand. We couldn’t tell them how the manager’s husband had been freaked out by the voice of a little girl, talking to him in the empty changing rooms. We couldn’t bring up our running joke about a ‘man with a moustache’ who haunted the building.  

When the group finished up in the auditorium, they split into three. One group headed into the changing rooms, one down into the kitchen, and another into the children’s play area. As Hayley was speaking to one of the investigators I went off to go and find her Husband, Matty, who had wandered off. I found him checking the safety of the cellar (a section of the building truly worthy of a horror movie – think of the creepiest cellar in any film you’ve ever seen, and then make it worse. That’s The Majestic’s cellar). One of the investigators had followed me into this section of the building, and asked if he could have a look round the cellar. The ‘five minute’ look round turned into the three of us, stood in the back of the cellar – lights off – speaking to ghosts. Once again we could hear strange noises, but nothing that jumped out as absolute proof. The cellar was so dark that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face – but there was a very dim light at the bottom of the entrance to the room. The light was emanating from an emergence exit sign in the room above us, but that light was dim, and around a corner, so it really illuminated nothing in this room. I watched the light for a while, and noticed it getting dimmer – I mentioned it to the other two, and they couldn’t really tell the difference. It wasn’t until about 10 minutes later, after I had stopped paying attention to the light, that I looked back again and it was back to it’s original brightness. I mentioned it to the other two again, and this time they acknowledge that it was brighter than the first time they had looked. This, genuinely, isn’t possible. An emergency exit light cannot be turned off by anything less than a power cut, which didn’t happen that night. No one walked past the entrance to the cellar – it was in a section of the building only accessible with a door code that only Hayley, Matty, and myself knew. Interesting, but not mind blowing.

I left the cellar and met back up with Hayley. She really wanted to join the group in the changing rooms, as that is where most of the activity in the building happens. The changing rooms is a relatively new addition to the building. When Hayley and her co-managers took over the theatre in 2018, that section housed a spiral staircase that lead into the play area downstairs – it may originally have been part of the cinema’s balcony, but we have no idea for certain. A lot of people don’t like being alone in the changing rooms, many feel like they’re being watched, others hear voices.
The investigators had set up an experiment in one of the rooms. They were staring into one of the mirrors, with a really low light, and describing anything they could see. Almost immediately after we entered the room, the person looking in the mirror said ‘he’s got a moustache’. All three of us tried our absolute best to remain silent whilst also entirely losing our minds.

There has been a running joke between some of the staff, about the building being haunted by a man with a moustache. This started after Hayley (who is very much into the paranormal) had seen a moustached man in the mirror in this very same room. We all joked about who he could be, and whether he was a malevolent or incompetent spirit – I personally envisioned him with a Groucho Marx style visage. He wasn’t an entity that anyone feared, or even took seriously, and there had been no further ‘moustache man’ incidents, until today. The fact that the investigator saw the moustache man is less interesting to me than the fact that she saw it immediately after we came into the room – the only people in the building who that would mean anything to. The investigators had probably been in this room for half an hour at this point. When we stopped visibly losing our shit, they told us that they had been hearing a lot of noises, and even had a hat thrown at them; far more than what usually happens in this room.

After leaving the changing rooms, we wandered around the building with the group. Not much happened for a while – another group claimed that they’d contacted a male spirit in the kitchen, and he told them to ‘fuck off’. We all decided to go back down into the cellar. Hayley and I sat on some boxes at the back of the room, and everyone else was stood around us. A good portion of the group, including Hayley, were clearly frightened (I can’t emphasise enough how creepy that cellar is). This fear heightened the tensions in the whole room, which admittedly likely resulted in some of us having false experiences. However, two things happened that I’m certain of. First, I watched a shadow figure pass in front of the dim light at the bottom of the stairs – I pointed it out to the group, and a minute or so later it happened again; and this time I wasn’t the only person who saw it. Second, something touched the top of my foot – I reacted, honestly thinking it was a rat, but Hayley and another woman reacted to something at the exact same time. We had all felt something touch our feet in the same moment, despite none of us being close enough for it to be from the same source.

It is evident that strange things occasionally happen in The Majestic, and that these things defy explanation. But I wouldn’t describe it as a ‘haunted’ building. The experiences that those of us who work there have had have been few and far between. People are in this building nearly 24/7: we have a four bed bedroom upstairs for techies working until the early hours. I’ve stayed in there myself, and the scariest thing is wondering when the sheets were last washed. No one who is there regularly is afraid to be in the building alone, excluding perhaps the changing rooms and the cellar. That being said, even in these rooms very little happens. We’ve never had an actor run out of the changing rooms screaming, and the cellar is mostly avoided due to safety concerns; not because we’re worried about a demon hiding in the darkness. The most activity that happens in that building, happens when someone is there to investigate it. I’m not claiming that anyone has faked anything- quite the opposite. The things that happened on the 25^th of February couldn’t easily be faked. No one could mess with an emergency light without getting through a locked door, no one other than us knew about the significance of a moustachioed man in the changing room, no one would be able to silently pretend to be a shadow figure in the cluttered cellar, and I don’t think anyone had access to rats who were trained to run over our feet. It seems like the phenomenon within The Majestic is a bit of a Trickster – fitting for a venue that is mostly known for its pantomimes. Every experience everyone has had, barring perhaps the voices in the changing rooms, fits in better with a benevolent trickster phenomenon over any kind of ghost/malignant poltergeist. The only direct communication that I am aware of from that night was the aforementioned ‘fuck off’ in the kitchen, and the Ouija board conversation with the ‘murdered girl’ (who, coincidentally, was very afraid of another spirit – leading everyone to believe that we had a cranky, murderous chef haunting our kitchen). I don’t personally put much stock into Ouija boards – I think they’re too easily manipulated, both intentionally and unintentionally.

As humans we desire explanations for things – an entity that we can’t see, touch, or easily interact with, is a difficult thing for us to process. We want to know what we’re dealing with. We want to know why paranormal phenomena is happening in a particular place, and the only explanation that our culture has (in the U.K. at least) is ghosts. We create ghosts to haunt areas that we are afraid of, to give us a reason to be afraid.

Visit The Majestic Theatre’s Official Website – https://themajestictheatre.co.uk/