The Play

I want to let you know that this is a true story, even the names have not been changed, although last names have been omitted for privacy purposes.

It was the fall of 1978, I was 22 years old. I was in a play "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" for the city of Eureka, California. My roommate had talked me into auditioning and said he thought I'd be great. Larry was an actor and his mom taught theater arts at Humboldt State University. Larry still acts and lives in the Seattle area now. It must have taken 4 different auditions before I knew I'd gotten the part (geez that's nerve racking).

We had been rehearsing for approximately three or four months when we began our final stage of preparations, painting back-drops and readying facades. After a few weeks the Carson Theater building was ready for our presentation.

Two nights into the play, my friend Marianne who was playing Candy Star and I who was playing Sandy (we were the hookers) were exiting the stage from the party scene. We crawled through the window and crouched down so the audience couldn't see us behind the window facade to the asylum. As the lights dimmed we realized there was something crouching with us. We felt a whoosh of air as it bolted and ran between us up the back stairs to the stage, and vanished at the dressing room entrance. It was a shadowy, three dimensional figure of a well proportioned man. We were so shocked because neither of us had been thinking about anything remotely scary, or ghostly...

After the play we asked if anyone had seen anything strange, like a man running through the dressing room... You see, the stairway we were exiting through lead straight to the dressing room with no windows or doors to exit through, just a hallway... straight to the dressing room! Later that evening we shared our story with everyone in the play and no one was surprised.

In fact, they said that they were surprised that we hadn't heard about the strange shadowy figures that had been looming around the light fixtures during rehearsals for the past weeks before the play opened... I have never seen anything like that since, but my aunt Josephine, who will turn 103 this October 2nd, 2005 (really) has promised me that when she passes from this life she will come visit me to let me know if there really is life after death... I really hope I see her.... I'll let you know if I do...