Photograph sheds light on legendary ghost of Peoria Players Theatre
By scott hilyard
of the journal star
Local theater legend Norman Endean died in 1960, 12 days before his 35th birthday.
It is said his ghost haunts, in a friendly, mischievous way, the Peoria Players' Theatre to this day.
And here's the kicker:
Norman came to life last week. Flesh and bones. There he was, right where he belonged, his lanky frame folded casually into the front row director's seat in the theater. There he sat, focused intently on the unseen actors rehearsing on the unseen stage before him in the only known photograph of the actor/director who was locally famous as a man before he became locally famous as a spirit.
Norman, the ghost of Peoria Players, once sat for a photographer in the front row of the theater.
"It would be hard to overstate how excited we were to get our hands on this photo and this material," said Eric Haschke, whose family runs the business end of the Peoria Players theater group. "Norman was and is a huge part of Peoria Players' history, and we had virtually no historic or archival photographs or information about him until this stuff showed up. We were thrilled."
And then there's the way the photo showed up.
But first, some backstory.
Peoria Players began in 1919 and calls itself the nation's fourth oldest continuously running community theater and the oldest one in Illinois. Norman Endean, a Peoria native and Bradley University graduate, became the group's first theater manager in the 1950s. He directed a couple of plays, acted in a couple more and was leading a production of "Kiss
Me Kate," when he took ill in 1959. He was admitted to Methodist Hospital on Valentines Day 1960 and was dead by the end of the month, which that year was Leap Day, February 29. He was 34.
How he died is a mystery. The rumors that persist are that he had cancer or a heart condition that somehow was related to his service in the Air Force in World War II in the South Pacific. His obituary does not clear up the mystery, but it does fix his death in time. He did not die on stage or on opening night of "Kiss Me Kate" as some believe, but in a hospital bed at Methodist.
No one is precisely certain when Norman's ghostly presence was first felt in the theater. But everyone involved with Peoria Players has heard the stories. The loud sourceless thuds. The mysterious lights. The strange noises. The missing props. The unexplainable mishaps on stage. Norman gets blamed for them all.
Director Mark Atkisson doesn't have any specific Norman stories, but he knows the theater to be a seriously creepy place at times.
"When you're directing a show you're usually the first one in the theater and the last one to leave," he said. "It is not a place you want to be in by yourself late at night. I remember the feeling of wanting to leave in a hurry."
Howard Gorman, who is directing the current production of the spooky-in-its-own-right "Wait Until Dark" had some Norman moments in the production of the show.
"Our final dress rehearsal didn't go so well. The lead actress had to light a match and the matches were all wet, so there were lots of long dead pauses. The sound effects were off," Gorman said. "We had lots of Norman moments. We even talked about Norman after the rehearsal as being particularly active."
Last week a man who is a longtime patron of Peoria Players (and who did not want to be interviewed for this story) was going through the belongings of an elderly woman who was in poor health and leaving her home for a nursing home. It was his job to separate the keepsakes from the trash.
" He saw the picture and the playbill from 'Kiss Me Kate' and knew immediately the significance of what he had," Haschke said. "He was one of very few people alive who would even know who Norman Endean was and what he looked like. Anyone else would have thrown it away."
Turns out, according to Haschke, the woman was an old girlfriend of Endean's and had kept the pristine framed photograph and playbill, which contained a glowing two-page tribute to the late director, for 46 years.
Haschke plans to incorporate the photograph that will hang in the theater lobby. He presumably will NOT hang it when he's alone in the theater late at night.
What was THAT?
Hello? Norman? Is that you?
Norman?
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