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The ghost that could steal the show

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Probably the most well-publicized (It got covered by both the Star and The Examiner.) campus haunting involves another bygone building, this old theater.

The building had once been an enlisted men’s club at an army base in Paris, Texas. To help relieve campus crowding, the building was moved here in 1948 and served the drama department. Also making the move, say many, was a soldier’s ghost.

This apparition liked to whistle as he walked the hallways, occasionally opening doors to check inside. At least that’s the story people would tell the department head at that time, Dr. Pat Pope.

An old East Texan story reports Dr. Pope as saying he didn’t believe any of it until the night he himself looked up from his desk to see the figure of a man wearing combat boots and a field jacket standing there.

“He just stood there, turned and left,” the East Texan reports Dr. Pope as saying. “I know there was a ghost. I saw him.”

The same story reports that there were actually two ghosts in the theater, the second one a beautiful woman dressed in a Grecian-style gown who was usually seen near the theater seats, which had come from an old theater in downtown Commerce.

While the seats were still in the Commerce theater, one of them already had a reputation for being haunted, with patrons who sat in it claiming it enveloped them with a chill and overwhelming sense of dread.

Which may explain why, when it came to building and furnishing the current Performing Arts Center, the University went with the new stuff.

BEWARE WHAT WALKS THE HALLS OF THE HALL OF LANGUAGES

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The universe has its black holes, the Atlantic Ocean its Bermuda Triangle. And we have our Boiler Bizarreness—not as titillating as the first two, perhaps, but these are true. The old Dealy Building, now gone, was heated by an ornery boiler that often gave up the ghost. And when it did, only one maintenance man, Coy, could resurrect it. Coy, however, was eternally coy about exactly how he could always revive the boiler, leading to some wild speculation about his preternatural powers.

A more recent boiler story originated in the Hall of Languages, where a man turned casual Friday into uninhibited Sunday. Well-known on campus, many knew when he took up semi-residence in the third floor “boiler room.” But that familiarity didn’t help the poor female faculty member working one Sunday afternoon when, on a routine trip to the ladies room, she was the unfortunate witness of the boiler room hermit making a rare appearance—bare bean and buck nekked.

AND SOMETIMES THE SPIRIT JUST LIVES ON

Not to be outdone by the old theater, the new one comes with its own uncanny drama, according to alumnus Jim Anderson, who currently teachers in the theater department. (Keep in mind, he says, that all theaters are supposed to be haunted. Else why would a perennially burning stage light be called a ghost light, and why else would actors say on the day they get paid that “The ghost walks tonight.”) For the past several years, Jim recalls, students rehearsing late at night will notice one theater seat is folded down. It’s the seat that Dr. Pat Pope, longtime department head, always did his directing from. “No matter how many times that seat gets pushed up, it’s always back down when we look out over the theater,” Jim says. And students have often said that they’ve seen out of the corner of their eye a white-haired gentleman. It’s not a threatening experience, they say, just the feeling that someone is watching over the department. And oh, says Jim, Dr. Pope had a habit of hiding the face of a cat or a clock in his painted sets. Today stage hands frequently find cats and clocks bleeding through their painted backdrops. Says Jim: “We’re very fond of our folklore about Dr. Pope, who put so much of himself into this department. If it isn’t true, it ought to be.”