Ghosts of the coast

Alex Coolman

A door creaks slowly open, pushed by an unseen hand.

A boat springs a mysterious leak and goes plunging beneath the dark

waves.

Late at night in an old theater, a faint melody seems to be echoing among

the empty seats.

At any other time of year, it would be easy to come up with a rational

explanation for such occurrences -- a trick of physics, perhaps, or maybe

an overactive imagination.

But around Halloween, another more spooky explanation comes immediately

to mind.

Ghosts.

They’re haunting Newport-Mesa, phantoms of the past that will not be

forgotten.

At the Edwards Lido, a gorgeous but dilapidated old building with

art-deco details and a creaking dumbwaiter, assistant manager Natasha

Langer says she’s more terrified by the spirits that occupy the theater

than by the movies that play on its screen.

The narrow, dimly lit staircase that leads up to Lido’s projection room

gives Langer the creeps, and the room itself isn’t much more comforting.

The old reel-to-reel projection equipment is gathering dust up there,

having gone unused for years. The walls are scrawled with odd bits of

graffiti and initials of generations of former employees.

At the end of the night, when the last show is over and the audience has

left nothing behind but spilled popcorn, Langer must walk through the

cavernous theater -- and she often has the sense that she’s not alone.

“It’s when I turn all the lights off and everything’s quiet,” Langer

said. “You can still hear things. There’s no noises from the projection.”

Langer describes the sound as “just a weird faint sound of music,” a

melody she associates with all the crowds that have passed through the

theater in days gone by.

“The other managers think I’m crazy,” Langer said. “But to me, the place

is just creepy.”

Ghosts seem to enjoy haunting theaters. A technician at Costa Mesa’s

South Coast Repertory Theater once saw “a huge blue thing” looming over

the stage, said Michele Roberge, executive director of the Balboa

Performing Arts Theatre Foundation, who recalled hearing the story.

“He closed everything down and got out of there,” Roberge said.

In drama lore, the spirits of characters that good actors create are said

to remain in a theater after everyone has gone home. It’s a legend that

has Roberge wondering what sorts of phantoms are being unearthed as the

Balboa Theater is renovated.

“We’ve found a couple of old photographs,” Roberge said. Workers also

came across a broken-down desk chair, a piece of furniture so battered it

was headed for the garbage before Roberge intercepted it.

“I said, ‘Don’t take that chair, because its wheels are going to be the

base of our ghost light,”’ Roberge recalled.

A “ghost light” is the dim lamp -- traditionally constructed from

salvaged materials -- that is left on in a theater at the end of the

night. Its main purpose is to cut the pitch darkness of the room for the

person who enters it the next day.

But Roberge said the ghost light is also kept on for the spirits of the

theater -- the ones the actors have created.

“It lets them know we’ll be coming back,” she said.

Balboa resident Gay Wassall-Kelly has a less amiablerelationship with the

spirits she thinks have haunted her Monterey fishing boat, the S.S.

Michigan.

The boat is cheerfully painted today in bright reds and yellows and looks

more or less seaworthy. But Wassall-Kelly says it sunk nine times as a

result of the cantankerous ghosts that haunted it.

In particular, she said, there was the spirit of a crusty old Norwegian

fisherman, a codger who had died at sea and chose the Michigan as his

residence for the afterlife. The fisherman (and assorted other spirits;

the Michigan was popular with ghosts) led the boat into mishap after

mishap, causing it to flood, burn, sink and have its mast severed.

Finally, Wassall-Kelly had enough of the haunting. In 1998, she arranged

to have the boat exorcised by Joseph Warren, captain of the riverboat

Angela Louise. The ceremony seems to have been conducted mostly in a

spirit of fun, but Wassall-Kelly says the Michigan has been sailing more

smoothly ever since.

“The only thing that keeps breaking now are the horns,” she noted.

But if the old Norwegian is finally resting in peace, the grim couple

that is said to haunt Five Crowns Restaurant in Corona del Mar seems less

content.

Roberta Berger, who has worked as a server at the restaurant for years,

tells a story about a time the couple terrified a manager at the

restaurant by pounding on the locked door of the liquor room from the

inside.

“He was here pretty late,” Berger said of the manager. The frightened

cleaning people told him about the pounding and when he knocked on the

door, he heard a distinct response -- a thumping that sounded entirely

human.

The manger eventually called the police, who responded to the report with

billy clubs in hand.

But when the heavy door was finally pried open, the manager was baffled

by what he saw.

“There was nobody in there,” Berger said. There were only rows and rows

of bottles, waiting in the darkness.

FAVORITE HAUNTS

Here’s a few spooky places to spend your Halloween:

COSTA MESA

* South Coast Plaza, various stores handing out treats throughout the day

* Orange County Marketplace at the Fairgrounds, 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.

* Freedom Homes Canyon Park Neighborhood Parade, 4 p.m., Oak Street and

Republic Avenue

* “Haunted” homes -- around Westminster Avenue and Wilson Street; around

20th Street and Fullerton Avenue

NEWPORT BEACH

* Fashion Island, 3:30 to 5 p.m. Information: (949) 721-2000

* “Haunted” homes -- along South Bayfront on Balboa Island