Leonia, Oradell theaters' invisible guests
Some of the liveliest actors at two local theaters, the Players Guild of Leonia and the Bergen County Players in Oradell, may be ... ghosts. They laugh. They talk. They clomp up and down stairs. They turn the lights on and off. And sometimes, according to members of both theater groups, they reach out and touch you. "I can feel the ghost walking through me," says J. Edmund Fond, 39, of Secaucus, who acts with the Players Guild. "I felt this friendly little tap on my shoulder," recalls Eileen Deutsch, 54, of Hawthorne, a member of the Bergen County Players for 10 years. "I turned around, and there was no one anywhere near me."
Haunted theaters are an old story.
Long before "The Phantom of the Opera" popularized the theme, Broadway managers were known to keep a single light bulb -- the "ghost light" -- illuminated onstage at all times to chase away spooks. But ghostly tales involving these two Bergen County community theaters have been so persistent -- and go back so many years -- that they cried out for investigation. Preferably on a stormy Friday, close to Halloween.
| Players Guild of Leonia
Structure built: 1859. Ghostly manifestations: voices, weeping, lights going on and off, mysterious crashes with no source. Possible ghosts: Civil War captain, little girl with curly dark hair. On the Web: leoniaplayers.org. * * *
Bergen County Players
Structure built: 1879. Ghostly manifestations: footsteps, self-shifting objects, touch of a ghostly hand. Possible ghosts: lady in blue, fearful little girl upstairs, man whose last name begins with a D. On the Web: bcplayers.org. * * * SEND YOUR PHOTOS
* * *
COMING SOON: |
VIDEO: Haunted homes of Passaic CountyThat's when Wayne-based paranormal investigation group Vestigia set up shop. "OK -- there's something here," says Vestigia's consultant Karlene Matthes, halting about four steps from the top of the stairs leading to the Players Guild costume shop. "There is crying," says Matthes, 46, brought in from Alexandria, Va. "It's a woman. There's a lot of crying going on here, sniffling, tears. Even a little moaning type thing going on." Matthes is the "sensitive" -- not psychic, thank you -- tapped by Vestigia to investigate the two theaters where at least three generations of actors have sworn that something is going on.
Both theaters are old -- and eminently suitable for haunting.
The Bergen County Players do business in an old firehouse, dating back to 1879. The Players Guild is housed in an 1859 Civil War drill hall. Tradition has it that the ghost who haunts the Leonia theater is Capt. John H. Margerum, Company G, 22nd Regiment, N.J. Volunteer Infantry -- whose bewhiskered portrait hangs in the lobby. Could be, Matthes says. "I'm not picking him up active right now," says Matthes, putting thumb and middle finger together into a kind of otherworldly antenna, to better catch signals from beyond. "But I wouldn't doubt if he were active at other times," she adds.
Picking up clues
Flanking Matthes as she surveys the theater corridors is Vestigia member Janet Kroenke, 58, of Westwood, holding a TriField meter to measure minute fluctuations in the electromagnetic field, and Vestigia co-founder John Berkenbush, 64, of Wayne, manning a video camera -- in case there's any ghost activity. "I'm picking up a man's name like Grady or Grayson," Matthes says as she comes down the guild stairs. "Something like that." TV viewers have seen teams like this in "reality" shows such as Sci Fi Channel's "Ghost Hunters." But Vestigia, founded in 1975 (the name refers to "vestiges" of humanity, aka ghosts), is a group that has done hundreds of painstaking investigations, from the Gettysburg battle site to private homes in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. The TV ghost hunters, Berkenbush says, are mostly hotshots with lots of high-tech bells and whistles but small credibility.
"They have equipment they're not familiar with, but, when they use it, it's very spectacular, very showy," Berkenbush says. Trooping behind the ghost-hunting team are anxious guild actors, directors and executives. All of them are looking for answers -- because all have had firsthand experiences of it. "I walked into the foyer and thought, there's people rehearsing inside," recalls longtime guild member Ceil Boris, 62, of Bogota. "I heard voices, quite a few people, talking, laughing. When I opened the door, the theater was completely dark." A man's voice called "Wait!" to past President Annette Lenge, 61, of Guttenberg.
Findings revealed
Then there was the time the lights kept popping back on as quickly as theater co-President Dori Persson, 46, of Leonia could turn them off. "We had an electrician come in and check everything, and while he was here, the lights went on [by themselves]," Persson says. "He goes, 'I can't explain it. I don't know. It's nothing I've ever seen.' " After gathering impressions for 90 minutes, Matthes offers a preliminary report. Yes -- the Players Guild of Leonia is haunted.
Among the entities on the premises: a playful little girl with dark curly hair just outside the building, a weeping woman on the stairs, and a man associated with the letter G who may or may not be Capt. John H. Margerum, of Company G. She has other impressions as well: of illness (the place may have been used as a hospital at one point, she says), of a traumatic fire across the street, of interpersonal conflict in the basement. And then there's that inexplicable "cold spot" backstage. "There are a lot of secrets in this place," Matthes says. It's a banner day for these Vestigia members -- their second bona fide haunting in eight hours.
Bergen County Players, which they explored earlier in the day, is also haunted. Very. "Oh, my God, what happened up there?" says Kroenke, taking note of the ghostly pressure drop -- a telltale sign of ectoplasmic activity -- in the upstairs BCP costume room. For years, folks at BCP have been telling stories of mysterious footsteps, objects that seemingly shifted themselves and equipment that turned itself on, unaided. "It had been dark onstage," says life member Marci Weinstein, 54, of Hackensack, recalling one incident. "When I came upstairs, the stage was lit -- and there was nobody else in the theater."
By the time Matthes and her team got to the upper rooms where the costumes and playbooks are kept, they had logged a bumper crop of spirits. There was a woman in blue, 60-ish, her hair pulled back, pacing the vestibule. There was a man buried in back -- last name D. "Dylan, Dempsey, something like that," Matthes says. "First name Bart, Barnum, Bartholomew, with a B." There seemed to be, disturbingly, an 18- or 19-year-old woman who hanged herself onstage. "The woman feels she can't take it anymore and this is her only way out," Matthes pronounces. And upstairs, in the costume room, there was fear. Lots of it. "Somebody's afraid," Matthes says. "A young girl. Cathy or Cassandra. Almost like they're hiding out." Not all of these manifestations, Matthes points out, are necessarily ghosts.
'Residual energy'
There's also something called "residual energy" -- an incident with strong emotional associations that replays itself endlessly in a kind of tape loop. And a theater -- a place where strong emotions are enacted every night onstage -- is just the place for such a thing. "It's like somebody wearing heavy perfume and then leaving the room, but you still smell the perfume," Matthes says. Suddenly, one of the BCP actors, Eileen Deutsch, remembers something. As part of a play she appeared in called "Accomplice," in 1992, an actor named Wayne Markover was bound and suspended onstage -- with a noose around his neck, she now recalls. And the spot was exactly where Matthes had sensed a hanged person. "That's right where it was," Deutsch says. "In a word -- wooooo," she adds.