From: FURRJK@vtvm1.cc.vt.edu
Subject: The Ghosts of the Lyric (Repost)
Organization: The Ohio State University Department of Computer and Information Science
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 08:52:31 GMT


The Ghosts of the Lyric:
     Part I: The Lyric Theater: An Unusual Place
     Part II: The Ghosts of the Lyric
     Part III: The Lyric Today

Part I: The Lyric Theater: An Unusual Place

     The stories I have to tell you are set at the old Lyric
     Theater in downtown Blacksburg, Virginia.  The theater
     belonged to some friends of mine, the Kelseys, who had owned
     various incarnations of the business for decades.  When I
     was just starting graduate school at Virginia Tech, in 1988,
     the theater was past its prime, aging, soon to suffer a
     death blow when an eight-screen theater complex opened at a
     new mall south of town.  Still, the family held out and kept
     the place open, both out of pride (I think) and because the
     theater seemed to be the only thing keeping Grandfather
     Kelsey alive.  It was a nice old place, even if the some of
     the seats were torn and the floor had a stickiness scrubbing
     couldn't completely eliminate, and some nights I would
     wander by after class got out at 10:00 p.m. to chat with
     Beth Kelsey and her husband Bud Bennett.

     Beth had been a classmate of mine in high school, though we
     really hadn't become chatting friends until after gradua-
     tion.  She'd married Bud Bennett, four years her senior, in
     the summer of 1988 and the two of them worked days at the
     Virginia Tech library and then spent Tuesday, Wednesday, and
     Thursday evenings running the theater.  They hated the
     necessity of spending three evenings a week watching the
     meager crowds trickle in and out, but since they worked
     unpaid it permitted the theater to stay open a little while
     longer.  Profitable once, the days of compe- tition with the
     eight-screen cineplex at the mall and the burgeoning video--
     rental businesses had reduced the Lyric to the point where
     the bank account balance spiralled downwards rather than
     creeping upwards or staying even.  Without the clout to get
     the must-see movies, they showed what they could get, often
     having to show several also-rans as part of the package that
     brought them their rare popular film.

     I wondered why the Kelseys kept the place open, since they
     knew full well that they would never make a profit again.
     One day I asked.  Beth explained to me that, to be quite
     honest, it was only until her grandfather died.  Without the
     Lyric, he'd have no reason to exist; even in his advanced
     years he would wander down to the theater in the evening and
     poke uselessly around for a while before leaving.

     Evenings spent chatting with Beth and Bud while we waited
     for the late showing of whatever dubious blockbuster they
     had that week to finish generally included at least a half
     hour of extensive complaining about the Virginia Tech stu-
     dents who vandalized the building during the day, when the
     University leased the space for large lecture classes.  Each
     evening's crew would find a few new depreda- tions, whether
     it be Coca-Cola syrup emptied out onto the snack counter
     floor, or wooden lap-boards shoved up under the carpet, or
     graffiti written on the bathroom walls in magic marker.  We
     called the students "ingrates" out of a sense of irritation
     with the casual way they destroyed property that didn't
     belonged to people who had never done them any harm.   After
     Beth and Bud got that out of their systems we'd chat about
     life for a while, and then the movie would end and the
     twenty or thirty patrons would wander out and we'd close up.

     I felt odd about staying after closing with them, worried
     that they'd think that I had nowhere else to be, but I did
     enjoy talking and truth to tell they were about the only
     people outside my cluster of fellow students with whom I did
     get to talk on a regular basis.  And it was interesting
     getting to go in the places most patrons wouldn't even know
     existed: the back stair- well that must have been used
     decades ago by black theater-goers, the vast empty stage
     behind the movie screen where once, long ago, theatrical
     plays had been presented; the eerie crawlspace under the
     stage where no one had much desire to explore; the boiler
     room with Russell's 55-gallon drum of stale popcorn; the odd
     crawlspaces ABOVE the projection booth where we found stacks
     of 1940's-era phonograph records, hopelessly warped.

     There were all manner of little nooks and crannies in the
     Lyric building, stuck as it was in the middle of a city
     block, part of one huge interconnected building that else-
     where had stores on the street level and apartments above.
     The Lyric was owned by the Kelseys but the land it sat on
     was the property of the HCMF corporation, the local real
     estate barons with a finger in every pie and little interest
     in preserving a fine old movie theater when there were rent
     checks to be cashed.  The money that had to be paid to HCMF
     was in large part the reason for the perpetual cycle of
     weekly losses, and Beth and Bud believed that HCMF would
     like nothing better than to take the Lyric and raze it and
     replace it with modern apartments, which would probably have
     made them a lot of money since the theater was a block from
     campus.

     Nevertheless, Grandfather Kelsey was still hanging on and
     while he was, the Kelseys managed to keep the place open.  I
     had the vague idea that they had money saved up from the
     flush years of decades past and that they were paying the
     deficits out of that, but for all I really knew, they were
     taking out huge loans each week to keep paying the power
     bill.  It wasn't the sort of thing I felt comfortable in-
     quiring into.  So while the place stayed open and the one
     dozen or two dozen people per night came in to see the
     movies the Lyric had to show, I'd drop by as often as I felt
     safe doing and would chatter with Beth and Bud until 11:00
     when they'd lock up and I'd help them with closing.

     There were certain things that had to be done each evening
     and eventually I learned them and was able to help out.
     They had to make sure everyone was out of the place, then
     lock up.  Then Bud would go up to the projection booth and
     start the movie feeding off the big platter it had collected
     onto and backwards onto another platter for the next show-
     ing.  Or, if the movie was being shipped out in the morning,
     we'd collect it into two massively heavy movie canisters and
     lug it down the back stairs to the street entrance.  Beth
     would go down to the right-side emergency exit passage and
     get the piles of wooden lap boards out for the students to
     use in classes the next day, and wheel out the overhead
     projector and microphone and slide projector and get them
     all set up.  We'd take all the cups and napkins from the
     snack bar and lock them in a closet so the students wouldn't
     fill them with soft drink "post mix" (the syrup that gets
     combined with soda water to make the actual beverage) and
     splash it around, as they had done back in the days when
     Beth and Bud didn't know better than to leave the cups
     sitting out.

     Fortunately, the actual cleaning of the theater was not a
     chore we had to do; that was taken care of by an extremely
     old, senile man named Russell.  Russell came in late at
     night, usually long after we left, and would clean up the
     spilled candy and popcorn and drinks and clean the restrooms
     and all the other distasteful things that one has to do in a
     place frequented by sloppy college students.  Russell liked
     to collect things; Beth and Bud laughed hysterically when it
     occurred to them to show me his fifty-five gallon drum full
     of stale popcorn.  Apparently he took all the leftover
     popcorn from the evening's showings and collected it in the
     aforementioned drum which he kept in the boiler room, a room
     accessed by a mostly-hidden panel located in one of the
     emergency exit passageways.  Beth had asked him about the
     drum-ful of popcorn and Russell had told her that he saved
     it up for his "pups."  "Pups?" Beth had asked, and Russell
     had assured her that the dogs he raised for sale loved to
     eat the stale popcorn.  Beth never failed to go into connip-
     tions if you mentioned Russell's corn-fed "pups."

     Russell also collected used drink cups, combs, burned-out
     fluorescent light tubes... assortments of all of these would
     turn up in closets and storage areas and the back stairwell
     to eventu- ally be thrown out by Beth or Bud or one of the
     other theater employees.  Once, he had retrieved some
     burned-out, dusty, singed-looking fluorescent light tubes
     from the garbage, had stuck them in a box, marked the box
     "new," and placed them safely away in a closet for future
     use.  Beth and Bud eventually stopped trying to understand
     why he did these things; they simply took each newly-found
     cache as a pleasant discovery to be examined for possible
     actual usefulness and then disposed of once the diagnosis
     had come up "negative."  Russell never seemed to mind; in
     fact, he seemed to be pleased when he noticed the absence of
     his prizes and would take it as an impetus to search for new
     and even more interesting treasures.

Part II: The Ghosts of the Lyric

     This narrative will shortly take a turn into a more mys-
     terious vein, but before I got to that part, I wanted to
     explain to you what kind of place the Lyric Theater was when
     I was spending some evenings there chatting with my friends.
     It was a nice old place, although it was disintegrating
     slowly.  Beth and Bud were nice too; they were big Grateful
     Dead fans, frequent wearers of tie-dyed shirts, the sort of
     people who I figured would always be fairly happy no matter
     what they were doing.  I was glad that I got to visit with
     them, and happy also that I got to look around the theater
     and find out about all the little cubbyholes and dark cor-
     ners that I'd never known about back when I was a kid and
     attending movies there.

     Let me begin this part of the narrative by saying "I don't
     believe in ghosts."  It's almost obligatory, I think, to
     begin a true-life account of a "haunting" with that dis-
     claimer, so as to keep the reader from thinking that they're
     in for another credulous narrative from an under-skeptical
     lunatic.

     I really don't believe in ghosts.  I've never heard of any
     "documented evidence" on the subject of ghosts that didn't
     turn out to be misinterpreted or manufactured upon subse-
     quent examination, and you'd think that if there really were
     such things someone would have been able to call in scien-
     tists and settle things for once and for all.

     However... (long pause, deep sigh), I do have a few stories
     to relate that strike me as being pretty close to saying "If
     there aren't such things as ghosts, you tell me what it was
     I heard that night."  I present them here not as evidence of
     the existence of ghosts but rather out of a desire to share
     my puzzlement with the reader.

     At first, it didn't occur to me to be spooked about all of
     the old out-of-the-way places I came across while exploring
     the Lyric.  I was generally not the sort of person to get
     myself all worked up over creaks and cold drafts, especially
     when there were neat things to be looking at.  I really did
     like poking around, so I wasn't going to spoil things for
     myself by imagining haunts.

     All this changed in a hurry one night when Beth and I were
     in the projection booth, high above the theater, watching
     Bud do what he had to do to get the movie off the platters
     and back into the cans to ship out the next day.  It was a
     quiet night, and we'd long since shooed everyone out and
     locked the doors and gotten the stuff out for the morning's
     classes.  All that remained was to stow the movie away and
     we'd split, perhaps to go over to the nearby Cellar beer-
     joint for a pitcher of something cold and effervescent.
     Then, during a lull in the conversation, there came a loud
     shriek, basically what one would expect to hear if you had a
     banshee close at hand, coming from just outside the booth
     and over to the right hand side of the balcony.  All three
     of us reacted in the same way: we blinked and snapped our
     heads around to stare in the direction the noise had come
     from.

     "What the hell was that?!" I asked, extremely startled by
     the volume of the shriek coming from what I had every reason
     to believe was a completely deserted balcony.

     Beth and Bud looked at each other, then at me, and then Beth
     shrugged, and said "We hear things like that all the time."

     "What is it?"  I wondered if it was some sort of equipment
     in the walls rasping against something.  Ever the skeptic, I
     was looking for a reasonable expectation before jumping to
     the conclusion that it was ghosts.

     Bud spoke up, matter-of-factly.  "We assume it's a ghost.
     Like, there's no one in the theater and even if someone had
     hidden in the restroom and then snuck up here to scare us
     they'd have no way to get out without coming to us and
     saying 'Can I get out?'"  This was true, since even the
     emergency exits were locked at night for reasons I wasn't
     sure of.

     Intrigued by the bland way Bud accepted the fact that a loud
     shriek had come from a deserted balcony in an empty, locked
     theater, I wondered what else had happened in the past to
     accustom them to such things going on?

     "We assume that there's a woman's ghost haunting the build-
     ing.  Every so often we hear her screaming from over in the
     direction of the ticket booth."  Beth pointed down through
     the floor and to the right, in the approximate direction of
     both the ticket booth on the floor below and also the direc-
     tion the scream had seemed to come from.  I'd thought of it
     as more or less on the same floor as us, but then again it
     hadn't lasted long enough to stop and triangulate its posi-
     tion.

     "No kidding," I said.  "Does she ever say anything, or does
     she just scream?"  I was being facetious, not expecting the
     answer I got.

     "No, sometimes she says 'Let me out, let me out.'"  I
     thought Beth was kidding but from the look on her face, I
     realized that she wasn't.

     Now I began to get the impression that there really was more
     going on here than I had originally thought.  I was still
     mostly expecting to go downstairs after Bud finished and
     find something parked out on the street that could have made
     the noise we'd heard, but Beth and Bud seemed to take it as
     just another odd occurrence in a string of odd occurrences.
     The fact that all three of us had heard it and registered
     shock was another point in favor of it being something
     requiring more explanation than I had handy.

     Bud finished his work and he and I each carried one of the
     heavy movie canisters down the back stairway to the street
     door.  On the way, we passed many little openings stuffed
     full of old flyers and boxes of junk, and a door that was
     nailed shut, and more boxes of junk, and an opening that led
     off to a dead end, and so on down to the door.  Where once
     I'd just poked around and wondered what all that stuff was
     kept lying around for, now I was eyeing the door and the
     dead-end opening with a little suspicion and a little edgi-
     ness.  Bud, for all that he had much more experience with
     the noises, could just as well have been walking down Main
     Street at high noon as using the dark, cluttered back stair-
     way of a haunted theater at eleven thirty in the evening.
     He didn't seem nervous or worried so I just shrugged and
     went on down and out to the street, where we met Beth coming
     out of the main doors and locking them behind her.

     "Do you really hear things like that often?" I asked?

     They maintained that they did.  For two people who had to
     work three nights a week in a place where they regularly
     heard eerie screams late at night, they were pretty com-
     posed, I thought.

     We were all fairly tired that particular night, so we didn't
     stick around to discuss the "ghosts."  Beth and Bud went on
     home and I went off home too and mulled it over.

     The next night, after class, I came back and sat in the
     foyer with them and we talked about the ghosts.  Beth said
     that there were actually three or four places within the
     theater that had ghosts or ghostlike phenomena associated
     with them.

     The first was the screaming woman, who usually just shrieked
     wordlessly but sometimes screamed to be let out of wherever
     it was she was trapped.  For some reason, Beth and Bud
     focused in on the origin of the sounds; they both went to
     great lengths to explain how it had seemed to come from the
     direction of the ticket booth.  They usually heard it when
     they were up in the balcony, but one time Beth had been in
     the ticket booth itself, which sat just in from the street
     in a large entranceway open to the weather, and had heard
     the screaming coming from directly above her, from the other
     side of the ceiling and perhaps coming from the rooms di-
     rectly above.

     I asked the obvious question: did they know of anyone who'd
     been walled up alive in the theater?  I asked this face-
     tiously, of course, but their story seemed to indicate that
     a spirit of a woman was trapped in some way in the offices
     or ceiling above the ticket booth.

     The answer?  "Well, a workman WAS killed when the Lyric was
     getting built..."

     Not the answer I'd expected, but it did make me stop and
     think.  If ghosts did haunt the place they died, it might
     mean that some of the "paranormal activity" in the theater
     might be caused by the ghost of that workman.

     And, in fact, there were some stories that made one think
     again of this workman who'd been killed there.  Beth said
     that she sometimes heard a man stomping around on the stairs
     leading up to the balcony and sometimes on the old back
     steps leading from the balcony and projection booth to the
     street.

     A good place to hear and sometimes see odd things was the
     balcony steps, they said.  If you stood on the steps up to
     the balcony, still in sight of the candy and drink station
     in the lobby, you could often feel a chill brush past you
     and now and then you'd be able to hear and see faint mutter-
     ings and shadows from up above.

     Bud had several stories concerning voices he'd heard in
     places where he could definitely attest that no customers or
     Lyric employees had been.  He said that he had once or twice
     been up in the balcony and heard a voice speaking quietly to
     itself down in the main seating area, in the area of seats
     nearest the screen.  He'd looked out from the balcony and
     seen absolutely no one anywhere out in the seats, and yet
     here was this quiet voice speaking to itself.  With the
     Lyric locked up tight so no one could get out without a key,
     it would have been tough for someone to hide there to fake
     the "ghost" and then sneak out after Bud had left.  And what
     would have been the point?  Beth and Bud were both so blasi
     about the whole mess that anyone who stayed behind in the
     Lyric night after night to try to startle them would quickly
     have gone mad watching Beth and Bud yawn and lock the place
     up and leave night after night.

     A similar story involved a man and woman talking in the
     balcony one night when Bud was tidying up downstairs.  He
     started up the balcony steps to take care of the movie and
     heard them talking and waited a few minutes for them to
     resolve their conversation and head on out.  When they
     didn't come down past him, he went on up and found the
     balcony area empty.  Since the back steps leading down to
     the street required one to use a key to get out of the
     building, the people couldn't have gotten out, so either
     they had hidden themselves in one of the dead-end passages
     off the back stairs or in the crawlspace above the projec-
     tion booth, neither of which sounded likely, or they had
     vanished into thin air.

     The idea of anyone staying around after closing might have
     made sense if the Lyric had ANYTHING worth stealing, but it
     didn't.  The projectors were these massive, far-too-heavy-
     to-move pieces of equipment that used carbon arcs for light-
     ing.  Wandering into the projection booth was like wandering
     into a mad scientist's workshop and if a thief had found him
     or herself there, the first reaction would likely have been
     to curse at the junk and head for the exit.  Vandalism was
     by far the greater problem for the Lyric management and
     employees.  People would tear most anything apart if it was
     left out for anyone to get their hands on the next morning.
     That nothing substantial ever turned up smashed or wrecked
     by some "stay-laters" makes me think that some other expla-
     nation was needed to explain the Lyric "ghosts."

     None was forthcoming at the time, and since Beth and Bud had
     no explanation either save that it might possibly have
     something to do with her great-grand- father who had spent a
     lot of time in the building during his life, we went on to
     talk about other subjects.

     A few nights later, Beth and Bud were in fairly perky moods
     when I dropped by, and Bud asked me if I wanted to see what
     was behind the screen.

     "Sure," I said, not really expecting anything in particular
     but willing to look.

     Once we had closed up, Bud led the way to the right-hand
     emergency exit passageway and opened a locked panel a few
     feet above the floor in the left-hand wall.  Beth hopped up,
     and then I climbed up, and Bud followed.  We were behind the
     screen, in the vast emptiness of the old stage.  It was
     fairly dark but Bud turned on a few lights that revealed
     just how large it all was.  High above us, if you turned to
     look, there were openings that led into rooms, or something,
     but there was no way to get to them.  I pointed and asked
     and Beth told me that those were the old dressing rooms,
     used when the theater had offered stage productions.  The
     stairs and catwalks that led to the dressing rooms were long
     gone.  Bud said he had been up and in them, finding nothing
     all that exciting to look at, but I didn't think to ask how
     he'd gotten up there because he was leading us over to
     another locked panel, this one in the floor of the stage
     near the middle of the screen.

     Bud opened the panel, and looking down into the opening, I
     saw just blackness. Bud said that if you jumped down you'd
     find yourself in a tunnel leading along underneath the
     stage.

     "Hmm," I said, for some reason none too enthusiastic about
     jumping down into a pitch-black tunnel leading into the
     bowels of a darkened theater.

     "A friend and I once got some flashlights and went down
     there.  It was spooky as hell."  Bud placed a great deal of
     emphasis on the phrase "spooky as hell."  I could see why.
     It was dark down there.  "We crawled down the tunnel until
     we got to this grate.  It felt cold.  Like there was some-
     thing just beyond it waiting for someone to come through."
     Anticlimactically, he finished, "We got the hell out of
     there."

     "Why don't you shut the hatch?" I suggested?

     Beth grinned at me and Bud shut the hatch.

     Once it was shut, Bud pointed out that the old orchestra pit
     was still down under the theater.  If you stood in the front
     row of seats, there was a semicircular area of floor between
     the seats and the screen where the old pit had been covered
     over.  Bud theorized that the tunnel beneath the stage might
     well have led to the covered-over orchestra pit; the grate
     might have been the entrance to the pit.  We had just been
     talking about the voices in the seats that Bud had heard one
     night, and I think we all started to wonder if there might
     have been any connection between the voices and what I
     privately thought of as the "malevolent force" beyond that
     grate.  Perhaps someone was buried under the floor in the
     old orchestra pit.  Once our thoughts started down that
     avenue we could keep coming up with new ways to scare our-
     selves, so we got out of there and locked the stage access
     panel back.

     Before we left that night, Bud showed me the boiler room,
     located beneath the stage and accessed through a panel at
     the back of a little niche that seemed made for a garbage
     can to sit in, there in the emergency exit corridor.  That
     was when I found out about Russell's popcorn.  The drum was
     three-quarters full and a whole stack of empty, soiled
     popcorn tubs was sitting next to it.   I wondered how an
     aged man such as Russell would be able to get the drum of
     popcorn out when the time came to take it off to feed to his
     "pups."  Perhaps he emptied it into smaller containers.  One
     might never know.  One day the popcorn would be there and
     the next night it would be gone.

     It was a few evenings before we resumed our explorations of
     the haunted areas of the Lyric.  Back up in the balcony one
     night, Bud mentioned that if I climbed up on top of the tank
     of the old, disconnected commode that sat in a closet off
     the projection booth, I could get up to a place above the
     booth, looking out over the suspended ceiling of the theater
     itself.  Not to be a coward, I climbed up, getting quite
     dirty from the accumulated soot and dust as I climbed up out
     of the closet and into a dark area lined with cinderblocks
     beneath the metal support beams.  There was a whole stack of
     old, warped records up there, and I took a few and hopped
     back down into the booth to see if any of them had familiar
     artists.  None did.  They were all the "Johnny Doe Band" or
     "Jackie Sings," with faded color jackets and dates from the
     1940's and 1950's.  I assumed that they'd once been used to
     provide music for the theater... but why would they have
     been stowed up in the ceiling?  Who knew.

     I climbed back up and past the stack of records and looked
     over a low wall of cinderblocks where the projection booth
     wall continued on up past its ceiling, and looked out over
     the top of the theater.  In the dim vastness of the theater,
     I could see metal struts and beams, all supporting the
     weight of the ceiling and lighting, and far across the
     theater, at the stage end, I could see a catwalk of some
     sort.  Once I'd noticed it I could see it running back
     toward me, stopping part-way across.  I assumed that it
     might have been there for changing of lights or something.
     For some reason, though, my imagination started to click,
     wondering who or what might be out there on the catwalk.
     Before I knew it I was half-imagining something coming along
     the catwalk toward me, something headless and dark.  I
     ducked back down and into the projection booth, having
     actually seen nothing but having managed to spook myself
     considerably nevertheless.

     Back down in the balcony after we left the projection booth,
     I asked Bud what was on the other side of a door that one
     could see in the balcony wall, half-blocked by chairs and
     painted over.  I'd asked this before but forgotten his
     answer.  He replied that it led to the offices, he thought,
     although he didn't remember which office had a door that
     didn't go anywhere.  I'd never been up in the Lyric offices,
     which looked out over the theater marquee, since there
     wasn't any way to get from the Lyric proper into them.  You
     had to go out to the street, down past Carol Lee Donuts, and
     back in another entrance that led to a stairway and up to
     the offices.  Bud said he'd take me up there sometime.  It
     was nothing all that exciting, he said, but I just wanted a
     look around.

     So, a couple of weeks later, I asked Bud if he'd show me
     around up there, since he'd just gotten through telling Beth
     that he'd come in early the next afternoon to set up a new
     movie.  He said "Sure, come on by and we'll go look."   So,
     I did.  I found Bud up in the projection booth, about five-
     thirty in the afternoon.  He left what he was doing and we
     went back out to the street and up to the offices.  The
     offices themselves were pretty humdrum, typical dusty old
     offices with pictures and things from Beth's father's high
     school days and even further back than that.  Bud then
     showed me the rest of the rooms, after having showed me each
     of the offices.  We went into a storeroom full of junk,
     passing right by another door as we went.  I stopped and
     opened the door we'd passed by.

     Dark.  That was my first reaction.  The hallway was none too
     well lit and the room beyond the door was not lit at all.
     More than that, it seemed to be full of a kind of inky
     blackness.  I kid you not when I say that I felt a kind of
     awareness in the room.  I was still standing there, staring
     worriedly into that room with the hair on the back of my
     neck standing up, when Bud came back, having noticed I was
     not following behind him.  "Joel, I would close that door."
     I closed it.

     I looked at Bud and said "Ack."  He nodded and said "I know.
     That was why I passed that door by."

     I looked at him, then at the door.

     "Wow," was all I could say.

     We poked around a little more, but it really wasn't that
     impressive a place; it was just a set of offices with old
     movie schedules and projector parts and boxes of cups sit-
     ting around.  Except for the Door.

     When we left and went back into the theater, I was thinking
     furiously.  For one thing, that room was just precisely
     situated to be on the far side of the painted-shut door in
     the balcony wall.  For another, it was more or less right
     above the ticket booth.  For a third, it seemed alive, or
     perhaps dead would be a better way of putting it.  Well,
     whatever it added up to, I left the theater that day certain
     that I would not go into that room for any amount of money.
     Not unless I had about six floodlights and a Bible and a
     crucifix and about six gallons of holy water with me.  I
     don't know what works against ghosts but I was fairly sure
     one was in there and that was good enough for me.


Part III: The Lyric Today

     The Kelseys sold the Lyric to HCMF a few months later,
     shortly after Beth's grandfather passed away (I think that
     was it), and I happened to be driving by one night by just
     as Beth and Bud and Mr. and Mrs. Kelsey were leaving the
     theater for the last time.  I didn't know that was it, but
     Beth looked pretty upset, and with all four of them leaving
     the theater on a week- night around ten o'clock I felt
     something had to be up.  I parked and got out of my car and
     walked down to where they were standing talking to each
     other.  Bud told me that they had just done their last
     walk-through of the Lyric; the next day they'd give the keys
     to the HCMF people and that would be that.  They'd essen-
     tially given the Lyric to HCMF in return for cancelling all
     the accumu- lated debts.  (I think.)  None of them were
     exactly happy about it, and there was nothing I could say
     that would cheer things up.

     With the sale of the Lyric, Beth and Bud suddenly had three
     more nights a week to do things in, so from that standpoint
     it was nice for them; they had not been getting paid for
     their time so they didn't even lose money in the process.
     HCMF tried to keep the Lyric open, using the old Lyric staff
     who'd worked for Beth and Bud and the Kelseys, but even with
     staff that knew the operation there was just no way you
     could make money at it.  Even without having to pay them-
     selves rent, the amount that they had to make to pay off the
     movie distribution companies each week before they could
     make any profit was way more than they could take in each
     week.  Eventually the Lyric closed its doors for good and
     wound up being used only when Virginia Tech needed it for
     some reason.  The Virginia Tech Union showed films there for
     a while (even going so far as to sell the incredibly stale
     candy that had been left over from when the Kelseys had
     owned it) but when the student center on campus re-opened
     that was it.

     Since the Lyric occupies the center of a block, with apart-
     ments above parts of it and stores all around it, no one can
     just go in and demolish it and build something on the site.
     So until someone comes up with the money to gut the insides
     and put something else there, or comes up with the where-
     withal to restore the theater and use it for theatrical
     productions or something people would come to, the Lyric
     will remain closed and shuttered, with only its ghosts for
     tenants.
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