The Daytona Playhouse: Ghost Light
By J. Walker Fischer
Shorelines
Last update: October 2002
Paranormal Investigation at the Daytona Playhouse
“From ghoulies and ghosties
And long leggety beasties,
And things that go bump in the night
Good Lord deliver us”
(Cornish Prayer)
Things have gone bump in the night for decades at the Daytona Playhouse. Granted the looming fifty-six year old structure at 100 Jessamine Blvd. is prone to customary creaks and groans, but something else within causes the hair to rise on the back of ones neck. Playhouse old-timers chuckles at tales of ghostly sightings. Some roll their eyes and toss off the stories as superstitious theater nonsense. Others aren’t so sure. Such things, when not scoffed at, are eagerly sought by those whose experience and curiosity compel them to seek answers where others see no questions. Enter the Daytona Beach Paranormal Research Group. Led by Doris “Dusty” Smith, a team of six investigators cased the Daytona Playhouse for two hours, top to bottom, inside and out, on the night of September 7th. Walker Fischer, Larrie Tiffany and Linda Kaladjiank, old playhouse hands, served as guides. The team was armed, not with weapons or spells or incantations but with an array of electrical recording device: Gausmeters and hygro-thermometers, thermal scanners and cell-sensors, digital and 35-mm cameras, tape recorders and video recorders, reminiscent of the gadgets in the film “Poltergeist”. For those in the know, I’m told the “DBPRG” ranks of the top of Florida’s serious paranormal investigators.
Serious the team was. No winks or elbow nudging. Equipment was painstakingly calibrated. Explained sources of electronic readings – wiring and pipes – were relentlessly tracked down and recorded. UN-explained sightings were another matter. Excerpts from Dusty’s after – action report: “all members stated having feelings of being watched in the backstage area…All also felt an “odd” or “heavy” feeling…All purportedly “saw” someone looking down from the directors booth when no team members were present in that room…some noises that didn’t make logical sense. No one was in the booth. The sounds were picked up on audio tape…these areas would later show on digital and 35-mm to have some orb activity…Bench with plaque marked “In Loving Memory of Hazel Lewis” appeared to be the center of activity…photos would later show the presence of orbs.” Orbs, according to Dusty, are the most common form of spirit or paranormal activity. Mostly they are small globes of light, white in color, sometimes bearing visages. Although the team concentrated on it’s instruments and recordings, it was impossible not to note the frozen expressions on faces suddenly confronted with incomprehensible readings. The teams “sensitive” (“please don’t say, ”psychic””) halted in her tracks by an overwhelming other worldly sensation. Even Larrie, the playhouses assistant technical director and a sensible hammer-and-nails kind of guy, experienced a sudden icy chill in an upstairs dressing room, the kind to raise goose-bumps.
There was also levity, if not levitation. A state-of-the-art pair of dowsing rods inexplicably and repeatedly “crossed” over the stage prop bed, no where else. We playhouse folk stifled a knowing laugh: the prop bed was the centerpiece of several juicy scenes in a play then in rehearsal, THE LONE STAR LOVE POTION! At midnight the team packed up and left. Days later, I was debriefed in Dusty’s study. As expected, the pictures and videos taken at the playhouse were fascinating, but subjective. The readings of other instruments had not yet been poured over, the tedious part of paranormal investigations. Dusty’s conclusions? “...it is the opinion of the team leader that there is sufficient documentation to warrant further investigation, or to simply say “there is apparent paranormal activity at the Daytona Playhouse.". If only she knew the half of it!