Ray Loftesness had stayed late to work on his role. During part of his role he had been told to look out toward the balcony. On this night as he looked toward the gallery...

"As I looked up into the balcony there became apparent this very steady glow. which was what I would call an aura. rather of a blue color. I assumed someone was playing with the lights.

"I thought for a moment that it was just a blue bulb that someone had turned on, but it began expanding. There was no sound to it. The aura gradually expanded to several feet in diameter and [was] very high.

"In the center was a man. I could not tell his mode of dress, but he was either pointing or beckoning to me. He seemed to be trying to tell me something."

As he was watching the light he was surrounded by cold air. He said the icy blast felt as if a freezer door had been suddenly opened, and then slammed shut. None of the theaters doors were open.

The man he saw could well have been "Larry," a ghost whose past is a mystery. It is said that he was a construction worker that died during the building of the playhouse or he could have been a stagehand that was killed in an accident when it was a vaudeville house.

Since Ray saw him in the balcony, it is likely that Larry fell in love with a married woman and was murdered by a jealous husband in the balcony of the theater.

Larry has rarely been seen and Ray may be the only one to have seen what he thinks was a ghost.

"That feeling of fright began settling into me and I knew I had to leave. I left the theater as hurriedly as possible. I remember going out and locking the door behind me, getting in the car and coming home. I spent a sleepless night." Ray went back to the theater the next day to see, "if perhaps someone had been in the theater after I left."

The theater's technical director, Gay Spielman, asked him what he did there the previous night. Ray replied that he didn't know what he was talking about. "Well when I came in here this morning, every fuse in the theater had been blown," Gay told him.

Ray had another experience during rehearsals for the same play. "This happened to be a 'whodunit' show and I was playing the villain. One of the actions was that a net was to be dropped down over me, trapping me beneath it.

"We went into dress rehearsals and the scene came and the technicians dropped the net over me. But appartently they hadn't correctly tied a sandbag which was necessary weight to bring it down correctly over me. The sanbag hit me on the head and knocked me out."

The technicians readjusted the net and sandbag, and ran more tests to make sure it was working ok. On opening night when the net fell the sandbag once again hit him on the head. No one could explain how it could have went off course.

Ray says "I don't understand it, but I do know that something very unusual happened that night [in the theater]. Some people have told me, whenever I bring the subject up, that surely I'm joking. What I say is that I don't understand the experience, but it was as real as any human experience that I've had since. It will always remain with me."