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Evil Sid shares scary tales with Mr. Play by Play
On a real live ghost hunt at the Fabulous Crest
Evil Sid demonstrates just how to find ghosts
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THE HAUNTED CREST THEATRE
Explore the fabulous Crest Theatre’s ghastly past and spooky
present in Mr. Play-By-Play’s exclusive no-holds-barred bout with
Crest manager Evil Sid!
Mr. Play-By-Play: So when you first started, did you
hear any stories from the old guard of spooky things at the Crest, or
was that not until later?
Evil Sid: Yeah, there was a guy that hung out here
who told us a lot about the theatre, but he never really talked about
there ever being any spooky things going on or any ghosts or anything
like that. That was something that …we came to…
Mr. PBP: Firsthand?
Evil Sid: Firsthand. Just little things, like seeing
things out of the corner of your eye, or feeling somebody standing behind
you, waiting to talk to you, and you turn and no one’s there.
Just little things like that.
Mr. PBP: Anything moved, or doors opened that were
closed, or that sort of thing?
Evil Sid: No, Mr. Nimoy, you’ll have to go in
search of that someplace else. You have to keep in mind that there are
so many people that come in and out of this building that if that were
the case, it might not be even something that we would notice. With
management staff and janitorial staff and other menial wage slaves coming
in and out, it probably wouldn’t even hit our radar.
Mr. PBP: We’ll get to the apparitions later.
Anything like cold spots, or feeling strange for no reason?
Evil Sid: On occasion, a feel strange for no reason
kind of thing. One night, my friend Leon, who worked here at the theatre
with me, and I came back to the theatre. We had done an event with someone
who had left a photocopier here. So we came to the theatre in the middle
of the night to use the photocopier to make, like, little subversive
signs before it got picked up the next morning. I opened the back door
and we stepped in and there was just this really, really heavy angry
feeling, that just …angry angry angry. And both of us felt it,
and both of us were just like, you know, holy shit, what’s going
on? So we headed into the theatre, being fools, and …
Mr. PBP: You weren’t trippin’ or anything,
were you?
Evil Sid: No, we weren’t. How dare you make such
an assumption, you third-rate reject from the Weekly World News! We
headed into the auditorium to discover that the ghost light had been
turned off.
Mr. PBP: The ghost light?
Evil Sid: It’s a theatre tradition where you
always leave a light on in the auditorium so that the ghosts know that
you’re coming back, that the theatre hasn’t gone dark. Don’t
you know nothin’ about theatre, you pompous windbag? Jeez! Whoever
had locked up, had not put out the ghost light. And we walked into the
auditorium and saw that the ghost light wasn’t on, and just instantly
realized, you know, the theater thinks that we’re not coming’
back. That’s where the angry feeling came from.
Mr. PBP: They thought that Evil Sid didn’t have
no love…
Evil Sid: Right. So we immediately raced and got out
the ghost light, put it on, turned on the lights, apologized profusely
to the theater, and everything was good. Then we made our photocopies.
(Laughter) Not that long ago I had this sense, I was standing at the
concession stand, and there was somebody standing across the concession
stand from me, and I was talking to her. It was a staff person. I felt
someone come up and stand behind me. So I turned to address them, and
there was no one there. Once in a while we get little feelings like
that, that are…
Mr. PBP: Easily dismissed by skeptics?
Evil Sid: Are easily dismissed by skeptics. But they’re
for reals. Are you a skeptic, Mr. Play-By-Play?
Mr. PBP: Well, I don’t know, Evil Sid. I’m
an agnostic. Like they say in Missouri, “Show Me.” So tell
me, superstitious cinema supervisor Sid, did they do midnight shows
prior to the TFO here at The Crest?
Evil Sid: Well, wretched retarded reporter, I don’t
know if there were any midnight movie shows prior to 86 or not. I know
that I had heard from someone that there were three theatres on the
mall at the time that were operating, the Esquire, the Crest and the
Fox. And they were all doing low-dough, third-run films, etcetera, and
what I heard was that the Crest was the sketchiest of the three! The
triple bill for a quarter, kind of a…
Mr. PBP: Sleazy, downtown, raincoat crowd…
Evil Sid: Exactly. I think the first time we did midnight
shows here at the Crest in my era was in 1988. Your audience of dope-felching
reprobates certainly weren’t the first, sorry to burst your little
bubble.
Mr. PBP: How ‘bout dyin’? Do you remember
anybody dying? Not anybody necessarily dying here, but who hung out
here passing on. Or any stories about a famous projectionist, or kooky
character or something?
Evil Sid: Yeah, all the kooky characters that I know
about are still alive. Like the ones whose mommies or parole officers
allow them to come to your dear little TFO shows, Mr. Pay-To-Play. We
did have a projectionist here who was quite a character who passed away
in the last year or two, but he passed on long after we saw the projectionist’s
ghost. We had another projectionist who died, but he also was somebody
who died long after the guy up in the booth had been seen. Other than
the person who died from the marquee falling, and I’ve also heard
that there was a fireman who died. It was in The Hippodrome era. There
was a fire in a candy store next door, and the fire came through the
common wall, I think the lobby floor collapsed…In 1921, was that
the candy store fire, Bill? (Bill is another somewhat less evil Crest
Manager.)
Bill: Yeah. It was right around Halloween, and it was
very suspicious, because a candy store burned down the street, and 12
hours later, the candy store that was next door to the Crest caught
on fire. It went underneath the lobby of the Hippodrome. John Brock,
and I think Manuel Peters, were the firemen. They went down in, and
at that time, candy stores used nitrous. Nitrogen. Some chemical for
cooling that they don’t use now. The fumes overcame them. It was
very suspicious; it was like somebody that was out after candy stores.
Evil Sid: Let this be a lesson to you, kids. Candy
kills!
Sid & PBP: Candy kills!
So I want to hear about the first time you saw something. Did the ghosts
appear transparent like in the movies, or do they look like regular
people?
Evil Sid: They look pretty much like regular people,
you nosy bastard. It’s generally dark in the theatre, even if
all of the lights are on; it’s certainly dark up in that projection
booth doorway. So you look up there, ya see the guy, you blink and you
look again, and he’s gone. That’s kinda how he works. The
little girl in the white dress in the front of the upper section is
more like a corner of your eye, you think you see something, and then
you look straight on. But the guy hanging out by the projection booth
door, you look at him and you see him full on.
Mr. PBP: Is he doing anything in particular there?
Evil Sid: Just standing there.
Mr. PBP: Looking in any certain direction, pointing,
rolling a cigarette?
Evil Sid: No, Geraldo, he just turns and goes in the
door. No rolling a cigarette, no head spinning, no playing badminton,
nothing…
Mr. PBP: And that’s with the door open, right?
You’re not seeing him open the door, right?
Evil Sid: Right. The door is open, and he just heads
in.
Mr. PBP: You said you didn’t really hear anything
about the ghosts from the other people at the theatre; you just started
to experience it yourself?
Evil Sid: Exactly. And when I came to work at The Crest,
I really didn’t believe in ghosts, or apparitions, and I would
still say that I fall on the skeptical side of things. But having seen
the projectionist guy, having had the other experiences …
Mr. PBP: Other experiences? Tell us, don’t hold
back now. You’ve already stretched your credibility this far;
you might as well go all the way.
Evil Sid: OK. Listen close, hack. There’s a gentleman
who worked here at the theatre, and we were hanging out one evening,
and he asked me if I ever saw things here at The Crest. And I said,
yeah, I do, once in a while. I was curious to find out what he saw to
find out if it matched the things that I saw. So I said, what is it
that you see? And he said, “well, sometimes I see a little girl
in a white dress”, and that really, you know, caught my breath.
And I said where do you see her? And he said “I see her in the
front of the upper section.” And that just gave me chills. And
I said do you see anything else? He said, “I can’t go down
into the little theatres, they freak me out very badly.” I had
an experience had when we were excavating next door to build the little
theatres. Standing just above the water table as all that was excavated,
you were actually below the foundation level of the Crest. And I remember
touching the building and thinking that it felt…active, that there
was energy there, and that, perhaps, the people that live in the theater,
the ghosts or whatnot, had been driven below ground during all of the
renovation work that we were doing.
Mr. PBP: Or maybe they chose to go down there.
Evil Sid: Or maybe they chose to go down there. But
I thought it was interesting that where I felt that energy is a place
that he can’t even go, it makes him that uncomfortable. So I asked
him if he saw anything else, and he said yes, I see a tall, thin man
standing up by the projection booth. And that just finished me. And
I asked what he looked like.
Mr. PBP: And he described him?
Evil Sid: He described him exactly as I’ve seen
him. That’s the only time I’ve had any real verification
of somebody seeing the same thing that I’ve seen. It’s not
like I talk about it a lot. I don’t think he’d read about
it somewhere and was just trying to yank my chain. What is interesting
is after we did the renovation; the building did not feel as active.
Mr. PBP: Maybe they’re satisfied that they’re
not going to be driven away or something…
Evil Sid: Who knows, who knows? It made me a little
sad, I gotta say, …I kinda felt like maybe in all of the cleaning
and work that we did that maybe we…
Mr. PBP: Got rid of them?
Evil Sid: Inadvertently cleaned some things away, I
don’t know. But what I thought was interesting was about two years
ago, I started talking about the ghosts more again. And shortly thereafter,
I saw the guy, the projectionist again, and then just maybe a week or
two after I saw him again, was when I had the experience at the candy
counter when somebody came up and stood next to me, and when I turned
around there was no one there. So, I almost wonder if it was, uh, I
don’t know. I don’t know. Could just be my mind playing
tricks on me. I am very old, you know.
Mr. PBP: And getting older every second. My sources
tell me your wrinkled old ass once used a Ouija board at the theater.
Evil Sid: Yes, excuse me while I let my mind go back,
waaaay back to 1987. There was a group of five or six of us who worked
at the theatre, and we decided it would be fun to get a Ouija board
out and see if we could talk to the theatre. We did the Ouija board
on the stage, initially, and really didn’t have much luck, so
we decided to head into the lower lobby, which most people know as the
bar area. We asked a question, and the paddle on the board was going
in all these directions…
Mr. PBP: Did you pee your granny panties with fright?
Evil Sid: No, I did not, Edward R. Dummo! Listen, there
was no rhyme or reason to the direction the paddle was going. It was
just going all over the place. And it occurred to me to ask the question,
“Are we talking to more than one person?” And then the paddle
just instantly flew over to the YES side of the board. YES! OK, then
that makes sense. “Who are we talking to?” was the next
question, and the board spelled out “THE DEAD.” (Pause)
Which (laughs) was a little off-putting.
Mr. PBP: Unless you’re going to try to talk to
Jerry Garcia.
Evil Sid: Ha ha, very funny, Mr. Gay-for-Pay. So then
we asked if we could speak to one person. We got a YES. And we said,
“How old are you?” And the response back that we got was
14. And then we asked, “Did you work here at the Theatre?”
And we got YES. Then we asked, “How did you die?” And we
got “OT”. It kept just going to the letter O and the letter
T. OT, OT, OT. It finally hit me, “Were you working overtime?”
And the board just went nuts. OT YES, OT YES, OT YES. So I think it
was somebody who was working overtime and was in the wrong place at
the wrong time and ended up kickin’ the bucket. We also asked,
and this is pretty funny, we asked if there was any money hidden in
the theatre. ‘Cause, you know, well…
Mr. PBP: You ARE evil and greedy.
Evil Sid: More than you will ever know, Mr. What’s-the-Frequency-Kenneth.
The reply was YES. So we were like, “Hoo-hoo, there’s money
in the theatre.” We asked if it was a lot of money. YES. “How
much money is hidden in the theatre?” TWO DOLLARS. (Laughs) Which
in 1949 was probably a pretty decent chunk of change, but it was a pretty
funny “hidden treasure.”
Mr. PBP: Well, it probably cost a quarter to get in.
Evil Sid: Exactly. So then we didn’t go in hot
pursuit of the two dollars.
Mr. PBP: So how did it end?
Evil Sid: We decided we’d had pretty good luck.
Mr. PBP: Did you talk to more than one personality?
Evil Sid: No, we talked to “The Dead” and
we talked to the OT YES guy. So then we decided to head up to the main
lobby. And we set up just outside my office here in the main lobby.
We always started out with a little introduction, like, you know, we
work here…
Mr. PBP: We are the living.
Evil Sid: Yeah, we’re the living, it’s
1986, at least we think we’re the living, we’re not really
sure. We’d explain that we worked here at the theater, and blah
blah blah just wanted to ask a few questions. This time the paddle went
all over the place, just kinda zippin’ around. So we asked, “Are
we talkin’ to more than one person?” NO. OK, well, that’s
interesting. “Who are we talking to?” The paddle went to
V-I-C. Vic. So we said, “So we’re talking to somebody named
Vic?” YES. “Did you work here?” YES. “What did
you do here?” And Vic spelled out MANAGER. So then we asked, “Do
you like what we’re doing with the Theatre?” NO. We’re
just like, Oh, great. Somehow we got on the topic of if you don’t
like The Crest, you seem angry. “If you don’t like the Crest,
what did you manage?” And the board spelled out H-I-P. Which is
hip, and at the time, we all knew of the Hippodrome as The Hippodrome,
and it wasn’t until later, asking more questions, that we found
out that most people in the know from that time period referred to the
Hippodrome as “The Hip.”
Mr. PBP: And did you find that out from talkin’
to old-timers?
Evil Sid: Exactly, Cronkite, and from having old-timers
refer to the theatre as “The Hip.” And after taking to Vic,
we were pretty much done, ‘cause Vic was not a happy individual.
We talked about doing the Ouija board after that, but we never did,
‘cause I think that our experience with Vic kinda soured us.
Mr. PBP: That was all in one night?
Evil Sid: That was all in one night.
Mr. PBP: Any last thoughts, you malevolent micro-managing
martinet?
Evil Sid: Well, Mr. Playa Hater, we would always go
through the theatre at the end of the night and pick up all of the trash
(something you know quite a lot about). The seats in the theatre are
called self-risers; when you sit up, the seat bottom folds. Well, the
springs don’t always work. So we would go through and we would
pick up all of the trash, and we would raise up all of the seats, so
it was easier for the janitor to get through and clean. And there were
times where we would come back the next day, and there would be miscellaneous
seats down that had been raised... So,…there is that. Is it merely
old springs, or something else entirely?
Mr. PBP: You be the judge.
Evil Sid: You be the judge.
This ends the first installment on a continuing investigation into
the darker side of the history of The Crest Theatre, 1946-present, and
it’s predecessors, the Hippodrome, 1918-1946, and the Empress,
1913-1918. Don’t worry; more details on deaths, hauntings, corruption
and crime will follow in good time.
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Did
you hear that??
