Drama In The Theatre Department
A high school shows it’s real spirit.
Ahwatukee, Arizona - High school theaters make great settings for ghost stories.
But students, teachers and graduates from Ahwatukee Foothill’s Mountain Pointe High School say Eldridge, a spirit that haunts the school theater, is more than just a tale.
To the Mountain Pointe Theater Department, Eldridge is real enough to command his own room off stage - and his own seat in the audience.
As long as anyone at the Mountain Pointe can remember, seat E-13 has been taped off during theater productions.
And as long as anyone can remember, Eldridge has reportedly been haunting the theater with mysterious footsteps, flickering lights and other unexplained occurrences.
“There are a lot of places I won’t go alone in this theater,” said Jessica Plate, 17 and a veteran of nine Mountain Pointe theater productions. She currently is a senior and director
of the school’s production of The Odd Couple.
“The first time I heard about Eldridge I was like ‘Yeah OK, maybe,’ “ said junior Jake Toepel, who is 16 and has acted in three school plays.
“But the longer I have been around here, I started to see what people were talking about. Last year, my friend and I walked by the makeup room and the toilet flushed.
“There was no one in there,” Toepel continued. “We walked by again and it flushed again. There was still no one in there. Then we felt something like a big gust of cold wind. So we just sprinted out of there.”
Eldridge is so much a part of Mountain Pointe theater lore that his story has been incorporated into the theater department’s orientation for new students.
The story told is that Eldridge fell to his death from the catwalk onto the area that is now seat E-13. Then students are given a tour of the catwalk and the empty room dedicated to the theater’s spirit.
“It’s an initiation. It’s to scare you away,” said sophomore Molly Brantingham, 15. “If you stay, you have what it takes to be in theater.”
But if teachers Kim Bonagofski, the school’s current theater head, and her two predecessors, Suzanne Idler and Corey Quinn, don’t believe in Eldridge, they are - well - pretty good actors.
All three teachers talk about lights inexplicably turning on and off when no one is near the switches; costumes, props and other gear mysteriously vanishing then reappearing in odd locations; and footsteps that can be heard parts of the theater that should be empty.
“One Halloween, we told ghost stories on the main stage,” said Idler, who now teaches English at the school.
“The lights were out except for the on the catwalk. Suddenly, the kids and I saw something floating from the catwalk - when we turned on the lights we found a balloon in seat E-13.”
Idler said right after that students cleared an old storage room and dedicated it to the ghost. On performance nights, they slide a ticket for E-13 under the door.
Plate said Eldridge isn’t normally more active around Halloween than other times of year. She said he gears up right before opening nights, playing tricks on the cast by making their makeup or props disappear - or helping solve problems by making items appear as if by magic.
“Last year we needed two things for a performance and could not get them anywhere,” Plate said. “We needed a small bell and we needed a purple polycarbonate gel for one of the lights.”
Near performance time, Plate said, she nearly stumbled over a small box near the stage. She picked it up and inside were a small bell and a gel in exactly the color needed for lights in the production. No one around had any idea where the box came from, Plate said.
“We will scour the place looking for something,” Bonagofski said. “Then it will turn up later right by your foot.”
The occasional disappearing object, flickering light or flushing toilet when no one seems to be around could be shrugged off as creative high school pranks.
“At first I thought it was just a practical joke the older kids would play on us younger, more gullible kids,” said 2009 Mountain Pointe graduate and former theater club president Shandi Ilyse Mortenson.
As Mountain Pointe assistant principal Pat Goolsby says, “every high school has a ghost in the theater. They are place that lend themselves to that. Props fall unexpectedly and closet doors stick.”
But Mortenson said during her four years at Mountain Pointe she heard too many mysterious footsteps and saw too many unexplained flickering lights to remain a skeptic.
“There was an almost constant feeling of being watched,” she said. “At first, it frightened me. But as the years progressed I simply learned to deal with it. Eldridge is not a mean spirit. I just consider him to be our theater guardian.”
Mountain Pointe science teacher Corey Quinn, said he normally is not superstitious. But when he was theater teacher, there were so many odd happenings around the stage that he began leaving what those in theater call a ghost light on when he left.
“I would always come back to find it tipped over,” he said.
Quinn, who has taught at the school for 11 years and also was a student in Mountain Pointe’s first freshman class, recalls seeing a newspaper clipping about a construction worker’s death about the time he started high school. Mountain Pointe opened in 1991.
Lauren Sego, 15, a sophomore who has been in four plays, says she thinks there should be some research of the kind done on the cable television show Ghost Hunters in the theater.
“Last year I got the officers together and said, ‘Look, we should bring sleeping bags and Ouija boards and spend the night here,’ “ Sego said.
The answer from both the school and theater club officers? No.
“I really don’t know,” Bonagofski said when asked why she thinks Eldridge haunts the theater.
“Maybe he just has unfinished business here,” she said. “Maybe he never got the chance to finish his theater so he is still here.” - Cathryn Creno
Image: Seat E-13 is always reserved for a ‘special’ guest
Source - http://www.azcentral.com/
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