TAUNTON ? It has been confirmed by the ghost hunters, there are spirits in the ancient Town Hall in Middleboro.
The next question for selectmen is what to do about them?
The logical answer is to be nice and try not to disturb them. Don?t suggest they register to vote or pay a property tax. After all, the Town Hall is the ?peoples? building,? past people as well as present.
The presence of the supernatural was confirmed by a company that uses various equipment to detect it. One is a camera. Ghosts turn up as white spots when their picture is taken. Knowing that is sort of eerie.
Of course, the finding by the ghost hunters led another company to pooh-pooh the evidence and tell selectmen that they could do a more thorough job. That?s known as competition, which may explain why one of the ghosts reportedly was heard to cry ?Help.?
The ghosts, selectmen were told, were found in the balcony of what now is being called the Grand Ballroom on the second floor. Before the ghosts started making too much noise at night, that room was called simply an auditorium.
For a few years after World War Two it?s where the Mitchell Memorial Club played its basketball games. One can assume that the ghosts in the balcony seats enjoyed them. For a couple of centuries at least, it was where town meetings were held. Some of them were pretty lively, too.
The closest to a ballroom the auditorium came was in the last century when the Memorial High School senior and junior proms were held there. That was before the town built a new high school. In the 1930s and ?40s, Henry Burkland?s Bates School eighth graders held their Operetta there. That had to be enjoyable too for those undetected in the balcony.
These operettas were the way that those eighth graders of the town came to know every nook and cranny of the second floor of the old building. They discovered the exits and the entrances and the backstage and its rooms, and by the time rehearsals were completed, the kids could have walked through the place with their eyes closed.
Now they are being told, along with everyone else, that there is a presence in the auditorium that has been hanging around for who knows how long. Maybe the ghosts are just waiting for the kids to put on another show.
Ghosts, one supposes, can miss things, too.
http://www.tauntongazette.com/opinions/x1565503496
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