Creepy Images: Abandoned Theaters

Anyone who has enjoyed Reggie Oliver's work knows there's something really haunting about old theaters. However, Oliver's fiction mostly utilizes live performance theaters as functional, distorted, and autobiographical backdrops to weird terrors. The eeriness of the old theater seems amplified when the stages are crumbling away. And they need not always be venues for traditional performance arts. Water damaged movie theaters and sound stages for bygone musicians are just as haunting as their ancient counterparts.



The war zone like damages to the theaters pictured here is bad enough. But then, one needs to consider the stage itself. Curiously, tales of the haunted theater--allegedly real and fictional--position their spirits elsewhere in the establishment than on stage. Why is this? Do ghosts experience pre-performance jitters like living bodies? Or are the disembodied essences themselves frightened away from the bigger, meaner spirit of the abandoned stage, a place where Ligottian truths too terrible to name are acted out (in our minds or elsewhere) amid the rubble?


There's the high probability that supernatural infestation of the theater outside of fiction is pure bunk. Even so, the total removal of the ghostly component needn't lessen our trembling fascination with these places. Fear and fascination often go hand in hand, and with these sites, they are the ones on stage.

-Grim Blogger