The Haunted Theater

I don’t believe in ghosts or the supernatural. I want to believe. But I just haven’t experienced anything unexplained. That was until August 2015.

It was a Friday evening, and Typhoon Soudelor was predicted to hit Taiwan that very night. People were preparing for the the most intense tropical cyclone of that year. The streets were becoming deserted. Everyone was locking themselves in their homes. People were even hoarding food. The air had that eerie silence before the storm. You could sense that something big was about to happen.

I was inside my top-floor apartment with my girlfriend. My place was quite small, and we were feeling restless. We are both adventurous and spontaneous people. So we decided to go out on the deserted streets, and find an open cinema to watch a movie. It’s not like we would be able to sleep through the noise of the typhoon anyway. Outside, the rain and wind were picking up.

We find one of those cheap cinemas where you have to take an elevator up to the 10th floor, and you watch movies that have already been out for months. It’s around midnight when we enter the empty theater for the screening. There is only us two, and a group of teenagers. They are sitting in the back row, while we sit towards the front. The movie starts, and as it plays, we can hear the rumbling and howling of the typhoon outside.

I’m holding my girlfriend’s hand, and I can feel how she is gripping my hand tighter and tighter. I ask if she’s okay. She looks at me and nods nervously. I figure she might be reacting to the howling storm outside, so I think nothing of it. Then she suddenly jumps in her seat. I ask her again if she’s okay. She says she’s scared. I assure her we’re safe.

Then she tugs at my arm and asks me: “Do you see it?”

“See what?” She glances past me towards the empty seats on my right. I look in that direction and see nothing out of the ordinary.

I go back to watching the movie. Meanwhile, I feel that my girlfriend is shaking. I also notice some sort of red color in my periphery vision. I disregard this. It must be the lights from the movie.

All of a sudden my girlfriend pulls me close to her, and I see that she is extremely frightened. She has gone pale. “We have to leave. Now!”

“What? Really? But we are in the middle of the movie…”

“We need to leave right now.” She immediately gets up and runs out the theater. I grab our stuff and run after her.

“What’s wrong? What happened?”

She doesn’t answer. She runs to the elevator. Once we are in the elevator, she tells me everything.

“In the beginning of the movie, I felt someone touching my back. I looked in the seat behind us, but there was no one there. I saw those teenagers in the back, so it wasn’t them. And it wasn’t you either. Then the touching became more intense. Like someone was massaging my back very hard. It made me jump.”

“Then I saw something next to you. I asked you if you saw it too. It was right there. It was standing right next to you. It was a girl. She was staring at the screen. Her face was….burnt. She was wearing a red dress. She was right there! I swear! After that I couldn’t take it anymore…”

Keep in mind that her heart is racing when telling me this. She is pacing around the elevator. I’m stunned. I’m not sure what to think. I believed she must have seen something. She couldn’t be making this all up.

At this point, the storm is very intense outside, so we take a taxi home. Once we get home, she is still very much affected by what just happened. She is still frightened. We decide to research this cinema. Maybe other people have experienced something too. Maybe we can find an explanation. And we do.

Many people have reported seeing unexplained things at that cinema. Some people have seen figures and shadows of people inside the theater. A couple took the elevator once, and it would stop on every floor. They would feel people entering and leaving the elevator. But they saw no one. We also found out that this building has had fires. That there were accidents in the past. And there were casualties.

Perhaps what my girlfriend saw was a girl who had died in one of those fires? Perhaps the red color I saw in my periphery was that girl? And who was touching her back so forcibly?

I have no logical answers.