Ghosts in the wings...

a study of ghosts in the theatre

Jennifer Dalio, M/W 5:30

 Are ghosts real?
In a 2016 Harris poll of randomly selected Americans:

➢ 41% said they believe in ghosts

➢ 20% said they are unsure if ghosts exist

In a SurveyMonkey of cast and crew members conducted for this essay:

➢ 39% said they believe in ghosts

➢ 54% said they are unsure if ghosts exist
➢ But 75% had a ghost story to share

The good die young--but not always. The wicked prevail--but not consistently. I am confused by life,
and I feel safe within the confines of the theatre. ~Helen Hayes
Why so many ➢ Accustomed to ‘suspension of disbelief.’

unsure ➢ Want to feel a part of something

greater.

responses from the ➢ Power of suggestion is very strong.

theatre group? ➢ Don’t want to ‘ruin the magic.’

➢ Don’t want to disagree with people

they rely on.
Why are you so anxious to destroy in the name of a
vulgar, commonplace sense of truth, this reality which
comes to birth attracted and formed by the magic of ➢ Ghosts provide a sense of history and
the stage itself, which has indeed more right to live community, especially during times of
here than you, since it is much truer than you--if you change.
don't mind my saying so?
~Luigi Pirandello,
Six Characters in Search of an Author
 Is this an image of a theatre
ghost?

Or is it simply a man, jumping

between a row of disassembled
seats in a long exposure photo?

The Seventh Street Theatre, a

movie house and live theatre in
the Pacific Northwest, is
undergoing renovations. This is
a time when stories of the past,
including ghost stories, are
7th Street Theatre socially useful.
 What is a paranormal experience?
➢ After interviewing ghost experiencers for their 2016 book Ghostly Encounters: The Hauntings of Everyday Life,
Sociologists Dennis and Michele Waskul found that "many participants were not sure that they had encountered a
ghost and remained uncertain that such phenomena were even possible, simply because they did not see something
that approximated the conventional image of a 'ghost.' Instead, many of our respondents were simply convinced that
they had experienced something uncanny — something inexplicable, extraordinary, mysterious, or eerie”

➢ I had similar results. While 75% of my survey respondents claimed they had ghostly experiences, none saw an
apparition--they felt cold spots, heard music and voices, witnessed flickering lights, and the like. In fact, many more
people claimed ghost encounters than expressed certainty of the existence of ghosts.

I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost--it's there and then it's gone.
~Dame Maggie Smith
“The ghost light is basically a lamp that’s
left onstage when all the work is finished
in the theater, and everyone’s gone home
for the evening… when they power off
everything in the building, that’s the one
little globe that’s left on so that no one
walks in the theater and stumbles off the
stage and breaks their neck. The
superstition around it is that theaters Ghost Light
tend to be inhabited by ghosts, whether
it’s the ghost of old actors or people who HTS (initials) told me a story about a ghost light that turned off when he
used to work in the building, and ghost walked away and back on when he returned. He was alone in the theatre
lights are supposed to keep those ghosts building, but thought he heard laughter, so he “yelled at no-one to knock it
away so that they don’t get mischievous off.” After that, the lamp remained on.
while everyone else is gone.”
This story comes from a good actor, yes… but also a smart man, who when
~Matt Stern, not on stage works in a fact-oriented profession that requires great
Stage Manager attention to detail.

If it wasn’t a ghost, what was it?

Hallucinations
in the sane
➢ Hallucinations are more common among the
general population than most people realize.
➢ A trait called absorption is significantly higher
than average in hallucination-prone
participants with no mental illness.
➢ Actors also have very high levels of
absorption.
➢ Therefore, I theorize that actors are more
hallucination prone than the general
population. This, along with the cultural
factor of ghost stories and a tendency to
associate the unexplained with ghosts, may be
behind the long tradition of theatrical
hauntings.
What is absorption? It is a disposition for having
episodes of ‘total’ attention that fully engage
one's perceptual, enactive, imaginative, and
ideational resources. In other words, absorption is
an ability to realize different states of being,
which can be cultivated into role-playing skills in
a theatrical sense.
In the case of an actor, the object of absorption is
the inner life of a character. Absorption helps
actors to act--to behave as if everything
happening on stage is real.
Absorption
 In the words of University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Ghost Project, I do not want “to
prove that ghosts exist, but to show… that ghosts are not simply entities that haunt us,
but have been and continue to be… allies in many different cultures.”

Ghost stories serve a purpose, so I will continue to tell them. It may have been a
hallucination--but in front of me one night, while I waited in the wings, I saw a ghost.

An artist who works from impulse creates

pathways for his body and emotion; the lines
will naturally ride on waves of his or her
emotion or sometimes get drowned in it.
Jennifer Dalio, M/W 5:30 ~Val Uchendu