WENDY WILLIAMSON: Eerie venue is known for creeping out actors, techies.
The ghost stories of the Wendy Williamson Auditorium could be material for a low-budget horror flick: a shadowy character onstage that wasn't cast in the play. Jazz piano tinkling from an empty lobby. Spotlights popping on by themselves.
Still, even to a skeptic, a few minutes alone in the darkened, cavernous theater at the University of Alaska Anchorage stirs a sense of dread.
Poetry professor Arlitia Jones plans to use the 31-year-old building -- long a mecca for psychics, Ouija-boarders and thrill-seekers -- to inspire students to add darkness and mystery to their writing. She will hold class there Halloween night. By flashlight.
"My friend told me about the ghosts, and it freaked me out," Jones said. "I did ask another actor, and he kind of backed away and didn't say anything."
Urban legend or no, she decided the space would be inspiring. To test her plan, Jones took a few students with her into the theater on a recent rainy night.
Shane Mitchell welcomed them, then locked the door. Mitchell has been around the theater more than 20 years and is an unofficial tour guide to supernatural events. He has a twin brother, Wayne, who also works there. Sometimes Shane appears to be two places at once.
"Suspend your disbelief for a moment," he said to the students. "Look out of the corner of your eye."
The first oddity about the Wendy Williamson is that it's not named after a woman. Completed in 1975, it honors John "Wendy" Williamson, a musician and conductor who died in 1988. Williamson's ghost is supposed to responsible for the piano music some claim to hear occasionally coming from the lobby.
Mitchell said money trouble during construction led to shrinking the size of the theater partway through, leading to abnormalities in the design -- a catwalk to nowhere, some strange-shaped rooms, and a door that opens into an empty 30-foot elevator shaft that belches icy air.
"The very building has an uneasy feel," he said.
A 1972 story in the now-defunct Anchorage Times about the theater reported that the auditorium was originally supposed to seat 1,200. It's now 1,000. Smaller than planned, but still enough room for the ghosts.
Theatrical personalities love spooky tales and are happy to keep the Williamson's reputation for supernatural adventure alive.
"Ninety percent of the stuff that gets reported are hoaxes and out-and-out lies," Mitchell said. "But the other 10 percent are uncanny."
Some people say they've felt cold spots in hot rooms; others sense they're being watched. One cast reported props flying from a table backstage. For several years in the 1990s, women with brown hair would trip and fall from a landing in the lobby. All of them said they felt as if they'd been pushed, Mitchell said.
Actors who work there carry good-luck charms. A Virgin Mary statue filled with holy water sits above a backstage door. Maintenance people have asked to be reassigned, Mitchell said.
Mitchell told the students that small things bugged him at first. He'd lock the women's dressing room, only to find later that the lights were on and the shower running. The stage lights would occasionally have a mind of their own.
Frank Hardy, another longtime theater worker, recalled the time a ream of paper scattered from an empty catwalk, sheets floating like feathers onto the empty seats.
Mitchell led the students into the auditorium and dimmed the house lights. He told them about the most commonly seen specter: the woman in white.
Mitchell saw her once, years ago, when he was waxing the stage floor to make it shine, he said.
"While I was waxing it -- it was about 11 at night -- I heard the sound of high-heeled shoes coming across the orchestra pit."
In the floor, he saw the reflection of a woman in a white dress, he told the students
"When I looked up to speak to her, there was nothing to cast the reflection," he said.
Jones' poetry students took seats and began to scribble by the light of headlamps and flashlights. A few explored the catwalks and the light booth, the small room at the back of the auditorium where a technician controls the lights.
Jessica Golden, 27, generated three pages of ideas, some of which she hopes to turn into a poem.
"I'm a skeptic, and I have been an actor in my past," she said. "I know actors tend to be showy about certain things. I was going into it with an attitude of 'this is fun, but I'm not going to let this scare me' but there were a couple of times I got goose bumps."
Toward the end of the evening, Mitchell gathered the students in the light booth for more ghost stories. Someone said the theater was like a haunted house and suggested Mitchell give tours. The Williamson isn't fancy enough for that, he said.
"It's not fog machines and guys with chain saws chasing you down the corridor; it's just whether or not you believe."
Moments later, in the quiet of the nearly empty theater, a lonely candle on the stage hissed and sputtered, echoing through the seats.
http://www.adn.com/front/story/8359515p-8255030c.html
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