My city had an abandoned theatre on Fifth Street that everyone knew you didn't enter. Not because it was structurally dangerous — though it may have been — but because of what people said about it. What people had said about it for forty years.
The theatre had been closed in 1973 following an incident during a performance that nobody described consistently and nobody described fully. A performance had been in progress. Something happened. The theatre closed. The official reason was a permit dispute. The building sat empty.
People heard things from outside. Music, sometimes — the kind of orchestral music appropriate to performance, audible on quiet nights from the street. Voices, occasionally. And once, according to a documented account from a police officer who'd been called to investigate a noise complaint in 1987, laughter — sustained, theatrical laughter, from an audience that did not exist inside the empty building.
I went in. I was nineteen and stupid, which is the age and condition for this kind of decision. Three of us went in on a dare.
The interior was intact. Not decayed the way you'd expect forty years of abandonment to decay a building — dusty, yes, but structurally whole. Seats still in rows. Stage still set with a backdrop and props from whatever had been performed last. The set was for something I couldn't identify — not a play I recognized, props that didn't correspond to any production I knew.
We sat in the seats as a joke. We laughed. We were nineteen and stupid.
The lights came up.
Not all of them — the house lights stayed off. The stage lights came up, old incandescents, warm and amber.
There was a figure on the stage.
I cannot tell you what kind of figure. I can tell you it took a bow. I can tell you the bow was precise and practiced and performed for an audience that it appeared, from the angle of its attention, to be fully aware of.
We left. We ran. We did not discuss it much.
But the theatre is still there. And on quiet nights, people still hear the music.
Whatever is still performing in there hasn't stopped. Whatever audience it plays for, it hasn't stopped playing.