The Ghost at the Palace

"Don't let anybody tell you the Palace Theater isn't haunted. I was there," Steve* warned me.

Columbus' Palace Theater was newly renovated and Steve had been invited to a private pre-opening party.

"They had invited Harry Blackstone Jr. to come for the opening. Somebody decided to have a medium hold a seance to try and contact Thurston the Magician, Harry's father's archrival."

The seance was held in one of the lobby areas on the main floor. The party included the medium, Blackstone Jr., and at least a dozen other people. The medium pointedly invited Steve to sit at the table with her.

"I said, 'No, I'm not good at this.' Frankly I was uncomfortable. I didn't want to be close to whatever was going to go on. I wanted to sit back and watch.

"In the process of trying to contact Thurston, we got a real wrong number. The medium went into a trance and the ghost of an old man who had been murdered or had died in the theater came through. It was quite frightening!"

The spirit found it difficult to communicate.

"He had obviously had a stroke or something. The medium physically changed. She got up from the table and limped away like someone with an impairment. Blackstone Jr. was dumbfounded. The tension was so thick you could have cut it with a knife. It was like electrical energy. It couldn't all have been a put-on--if it was one of the best I've ever seen. There were no rappings or hoopla. Looking back, I think it was more real than we wanted to admit."

After the seance broke up, Steve stood around talking with the medium and some of this friends.

"She looked at me through this crowd and said, 'Why did you not sit at the table?' I shrugged off the question with some noncommittal answer.

"That's a lie,' she said. 'Why do you say that? Because you know that it's a lie. You know you have a gift. I'll prove that you do. Go upstairs to the second balcony and walk back and forth. Then come back down and tell us what you experienced.'"

Steve went upstairs and started across the balcony.

"I got to the middle of the balcony and I was absolutely suffocating. Every ounce of my energy was drained. I couldn't breathe. You talk about dark and heavy air--it was there. It was already dark, but it got darker. All of this occurred in just one particular spot and it ended as soon as I moved out of it."

But moving out of it was a real effort for Steve. He could barely continue across the balcony.

"I was so frightened and startled by it that I decided I would go back to the lobby through one of the stair tunnels."

As Steve went into the tunnel, dread, horror, and then some. 'This is worse,' I thought, 'at least up in the balcony I know what to expect. I can force myself go into this. So I went back through the balcony.

"When I came back to the group I was trying to be nonchalant. As I told the story, one of my friends blurted. 'That's almost verbatim what she said you'd say.'

"So you can tell me there are no ghosts in the Palace Theater, but I don't believe you. I experienced it."