Haunted theater? Workers say Peery's Egyptian in Ogden is home to unseen cast of 'characters'

OGDEN — When the skies turn ominous and the dying breaths of summer give way to the crypt-like chill of fall, the unsettling stories that surround Peery's Egyptian Theater start to weigh on the workers.

"It's very spooky when you're by yourself," said Howie Heidrich, theater operations manager. "There are weird noises. I mean, we're an old building, so you can also relate the flickering lights and stuff to us being an old building, but, yeah, no, I definitely do not like being here at night by myself."

Heidrich is far from the only employee to hear unexplained noises and report inexplicable feelings and experiences, leading to the belief the historic theater is inhabited by a cast of unseen "characters."

"I have people that work for me that swear the place is haunted," the general manager, Kassi Bybee, told me. "I've heard many people over the years that have been here that say, yes, it is, indeed there is someone here or maybe more than one person that likes to stay here and they have had encounters with them when they are here late at night."

History

Peery's Egyptian Theater has been a cultural landmark in Ogden for over 100 years.

Built in 1924, the building served as a silent movie theater.

"Louis Peery and Harman Peery — they're the two brothers that built the theater originally, and they built the theater in nine months on a budget of $250,000," Bybee said.

Bybee said the theater thrived from the 1920s to the 1940s.

"They called it the 'crown jewel' of Ogden, or, really, the 'crown jewel' of the West," the general manager said. "King Tut's tomb was, you know, at the time being discovered in the early 1920s and things, so all these cinema houses were popping up all over the country."

The ornate design was intentional.

"It was really so the commoner, if you will, could go to the cinema and feel like they were the wealthy," Bybee said. "They wanted to build this cinema palace, and they built it with the Egyptian theme because of King Tut's tomb."

Renovated in 1997 after about a decade of abandonment, much of the history survives today in what's become a live performance venue with a live organ that still spends nights as a throwback movie house.

Haunted History

Bybee said she would like to believe the theater is not haunted, but her workers' experiences and even her own feelings paint a different picture.

"I do not like to be here late at night," Bybee said. "There is (a feeling) that maybe at times you're not alone. Even though you feel like you know everyone else has left the facility, you still feel like you're actually with other people."

Who those "other people" are is somewhat uncertain, but workers frequently point to the spirit of a little girl who has come to be known as "Alice" or "Alison."

"Usually it involves a little girl or a little girl laugh," Heidrich said. "So, we always say 'Alison' is our resident ghost here."

As the story goes, the girl met an untimely end early in the theater's existence.

"She was bringing her dad lunch, and I'm not sure if she came up here (in Box B) or if there were rafters, but apparently, she fell out of this box and passed."

Another worker, Taylor Sachs, said the spirit does not seem threatening.

"She seems playful," the lighting technician said. "Anything she does doesn't seem hostile."

Heidrich shared her "scariest" story — what she believed could have been an experience related to the girl's spirit — an inexplicable change in lighting in the main theater.

"We were doing a show, though, that required a really, really deep red, so they wanted us to go in and make all of the windows, all of the grates this really, really deep red," Heidrich explained. "The lighting designer I was working with at the time sat at the lighting board for hours and just could not get kind of a good, deep red that the client wanted. It was always a little too orange or it was a little too pink. He finally gave up. We did a show over the weekend. I came in on Monday. Everybody was off, and I walked down through the theater, and all of the lights were off except for the windows and the grates, and they were a deep, dark red, and so I made a bunch of phone calls. I was like, 'who has been in the building, is anybody working on anything,' and nobody had been in the building. Everybody was home."

Heidrich went to the lighting boards, and they were both turned off, and she got help from the lighting designer to do a "forced shutdown."

"He was like, they should not come back on, I'll check them tomorrow," Heidrich recalled. "I went upstairs, did my work for the day, did my eight hours, and I came back down just as a checkup, and they were all on again. No explanation; couldn't figure it out. I was like, I'm just going to go home because I don't want to deal with it, and the next day when he came in, they were all turned off and he could not ever get that deep, dark red again, so that's what I consider my Alison story."

The basement

Sachs said far more negative feelings exist in the basement, and many workers do not like to go through that space alone.

"It feels like being watched — it's heavy," Sachs said. "I feel threatened like I need to turn around or something is about to — like, it feels like I'm about to be grabbed by something around the neck. Like, it's super unsettling, and I try to get out."

Sachs took me and the KSL crew to a particularly unnerving area of the basement where there are two prohibition-era tunnels that have been partially filled in and sealed off at the ends.

"This is the really ominous area," Sachs said. "This foundation just feels super old and freaky."

Sachs pointed to the tunnel below one side of the stage where a coworker inexplicably found a red ball.

"(It's) probably not somewhere I will go," Sachs said.

Sachs said he felt affected standing next to the entrance of the tunnel as I interviewed him.

"I feel like I can just feel my breath kind of catching a little bit much in my chest," he said. "Yeah, it's a bad feeling for sure. Yeah."

I went halfway down the tunnel before it got too physically confining and uncomfortable to proceed. While no unexplained sights or sounds manifested, I told the crew I had an unsettling feeling as I left the tunnel.

"I can almost feel something on my back and it's not this wall," I said. "It's a very uneasy, unsettling feeling."

I remarked to photographer Nathaniel Gillis that the feeling stayed with me for over 10 minutes after leaving the tunnel.

"I'm not even joking," I said. "As soon as I got out of there, I was feeling it over my shoulder."

Paranormal Investigation

Even before an investigation began with members of the Western Association for the Science of the Paranormal, my iPhone captured a low, unexplained voice as I captured video in a production area up a spiral staircase high above the stage.

It appeared the unexplained voice — which sounded like a girl — said, "why are you searching here?"

W.A.S.P. members Crystal Watry, Laura Hansen, Andrew Parks and Faira Wilson did a walkthrough prior to the investigation, and during that time they said a double door in a corridor to the right of the stage inexplicably opened on its own.

"That door is completely shut," Hansen said as she showed off the video she recorded on her phone. "It's completely shut and it's going to open here."

The paranormal investigators brought a host of devices to potentially detect unexplained activity or to possibly communicate with any spirits, including Alice.

Watry said the group also brought multiple "trigger objects" from a stuffed bear to jewelry that harkened back to the 1920s and 1930s, in hopes the familiarity of those items might prompt any entities to make their presence known.

Separate investigative sessions focused on the corridor where the door had already opened, on the stage, multiple areas of the basement and in Box B, the area most associated with experiences with the little girl's spirit.

While the sessions in the corridor, on the stage and with a red toy ball as a trigger object in one section of the basement, it seemed something was more communicative near the prohibition era tunnel that had provided unnerving feelings to both Sachs and me earlier in the evening.

As Gillis recorded on his camera next to that tunnel, his camera during a moment of apparent microphone interference picked up what sounded like a full-bodied voice of a little girl saying, "hey."

Watry believed she might have success communicating in that area through the Estes method, which isolates the investigator's senses.

She attached a phone with a "necrophonic" app, which uses a bank of audio fragments and sounds that an entity theoretically can manipulate to communicate, to noise-cancelling headphones and she also put on a blindfold, so she couldn't see or hear what any of the other investigators around her were doing or saying.

During that session, Watry using the Estes method produced multiple and instantly relevant responses to investigator questions to the room.

"Is there something you would like to tell us?" I questioned.

"Yes," Watry said, as she repeated what she heard generated through the app.

"What is it you would like to tell us?" Hansen asked.

"Let me show you," Watry said immediately.

"What would you like to show us?" I asked.

"I'm going to get you!" Watry relayed.

The "I'm going to get you" response was unsettling to those in the room.

When I asked if the apparent entity said, "I'm going to get you" Watry, using the Estes method, replied with a "yeah."

At another point in the evening, the KSL crew and paranormal investigators stepped onto the stage and immediately their attention turned to Box B.

Gillis said his camera was inexplicably attempting to focus on something in the box, but nothing appeared to be there.

"I swear I just saw a shadow up in there," Hansen said. "I think we need to go up into the box."

In Box B, the investigators once again received multiple relevant responses to questions.

A word-generating device blurted out "investigation," and the group acknowledged that was in fact what they were doing there.

A "dead bell" device, which sounds with energetic changes around it, went off immediately when I asked if Alice, or Alison, was there.

"Alison, do you enjoy watching the shows from up here?" Hansen asked.

The dead bell replied with an affirmative ding.

Wilson, utilizing dowsing rods, suggested something wanted to communicate with me when the rods pointed repeatedly in my direction.

"Is Alice still in here?" Hansen asked.

"Sure, yeah," Watry instantly stated, relaying what came through her headphones from the necrophonic app.

"Hi, Alice," Hansen said.

"Alice," Watry said, repeating what she heard through the Estes method.

"Alice, how are you?" I asked.

"Good," Watry repeated.

Watry then herself asked if Alice could speak up and she then repeated the response, "I can" that came through the necrophonic app.

"Are you having fun, Alice?" Hansen asked.

"Yes," Watry repeated.

Wilson asked if Alice liked that the investigators were there and got the response, "don't."

It appeared soon afterward that the apparent entity was finished, based on Watry repeated.

"Take yourself…outside," Watry stated via the Estes method.

Watry said the device then went "dead silent" as she removed hear headphones and blindfold.

"There was a little girl talking," Watry explained to the group. "She was very, very quiet — very quiet."

Hansen and others left the experience believing they had communicated with Alice, based on the immediate, intelligent responses.

"She was very clear in what she was trying to say," Watry added.

In the historic movie theater, all the investigators witnessed what seemed to be an epic performance — the kind of performance workers maintain all too often takes center stage, whether they're a willing audience or not.

"That was pretty remarkable," I said. "I felt like we got really intelligent answers there."