From: FURRJK@vtvm1.cc.vt.edu (Joel Furr)
Subject: A personal ghost story for the folklore people in this group
Organization: The Ohio State University Department of Computer and Information Science
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 21:06:49 GMT


Let me begin 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 disclaimer, 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 subsequent examination, and you'd think that if there
really were such things someone would have been able to call in scientists 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.

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 graduation.  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 competition 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
students 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 depredations, 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 elsewhere 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 inquiring 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 back-
wards onto another platter for the next showing.  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 conniptions 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.

You'll have wondered several paragraphs back, and at intervals since then,
when I am going to get to the ghosts.  I will, presently, but I felt it
necessary to provide the background detail necessary to imagine what sort 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 corners that I'd never known
about back when I was a kid and attending movies there.

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 re- mained
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 building.  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 direction 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
position.

"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 edginess.
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 stairway 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 composed, 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 directly above.

I asked the obvious question: did they know of anyone who'd been walled up
alive in the theater?  I asked this facetiously, 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 acti-
vity" 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 mutterings 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 projection 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
lighting.  Wander- ing 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 employ-
ees.  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
explanation 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 something 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 ourselves, 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 sitting 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.



**************************************



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
essentially 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 themselves 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 wherewithal 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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