Originally Published Oct. 31, 2006

By LORIE JEWELL
The Tampa Tribune

NEW PORT RICHEY - The ghost in the balcony of the Richey Suncoast Theatre has a preference for seat BB 1.

Charlie Skelton, president of the theater’s board of directors, has never seen the apparition. But for at least the past 10 years, he’s heard the accounts. Young people, mostly, swear they have seen a man occupying the aisle seat in the upper right side of the balcony.

He just watches. He has never paid for a ticket. Most have taken to referring to him as Willard, as in Willard Clark.

Clark has been dead for more than 20 years. A plaque on the front of the Grand Boulevard building, dedicated in June 1982, honors him as “Mister Theatre” and a patron of the arts.

Some patrons who have heard the ghost stories seek out Clark’s favorite seat. Others refuse to take it, Skelton said.

“Maybe they don’t want to sit on Willard’s lap,” he quipped.

The spooky feelings and accounts of strange happenings aren’t limited to Clark, although he usually gets blamed for anything that can’t be explained. Briana Waldorf, 14, said she took a pair of shoes off a shelf in a dressing room and left. When she returned, the shoes were back on the shelf.

“No one else went in there,” she said.

Skelton and others aren’t necessarily interested in ridding the historic theater of any ghostly occupants, but they wouldn’t mind knowing for sure what’s going on.

So when a relatively new group of ghost-hunting hobbyists called Haunted Hunters PSI (paranormal scientific investigators) contacted Skelton about investigating the theater, he invited them to come take a look.

On The Lookout

For the past two Saturdays, the Haunted Hunters have set up their cameras and other equipment, such as electromagnetic field detectors and voice recorders. They arrived after the audiences had filed out of the playhouse and stayed until early the next morning.

John Sullivan, who moved to Holiday from New York almost three years ago with his wife, Jodi, and three children, started looking for other PSI hobbyists this year. He was involved with a group in the North and missed the thrill of the hunt.

Sullivan counts the battlefields of Gettysburg as his favorite haunt hangout to date. He was there with his wife after midnight once and swears he heard a voice shouting orders and whistling. He also heard cannons being fired in the distance at one point, he said.

Sullivan found Chris Bratz, his go-to guy for technology, on the Internet. The group has about 20 members now, several from Pasco County and others from throughout the Tampa Bay area. They have a Web site: http://www.hauntedhunterspsi.com.

“I had never done ghost hunting before, but it’s a lot of fun,” said Bratz, a collateral analyst from Hudson. “I think it’s made me more of a believer.”

The group has checked out the Spring Hill cemetery, where Bratz thinks he heard the sound of hammering. One of the voice recordings sounds like someone saying “accident,” he said.

They’ve also been to the historic Belleview Biltmore Hotel in Pinellas County. Sullivan thinks he may have captured a digital shot of an image coming toward him in a hallway.

At the Richey Suncoast, they haven’t come up with concrete evidence of Clark staking a claim on the balcony seat. But on one voice recording, Sullivan said, there seems to be a woman’s voice saying something like, “I’m not dead.”

Both men know that what they do sounds strange and kind of creepy. But they aren’t crazy and they don’t try to invent what isn’t there, Sullivan and Bratz insist.

“We’re very skeptical,” Sullivan said. “It’s all about the science.”

He Can Stay

Should evidence of Clark’s ghost materialize, Skelton said it will be business as usual at the theater.

“We won’t do anything,” Skelton said. “But we’ll probably have more psychics wanting to come.”

They, and the general public, are invited to the Halloween Mystery Theater at 6 p.m. today. Tickets are $10 per person.

Ghosts get in free, naturally.