Ballet West's Annie VanAlstyne remembers the event well.

She was working in her Capitol Theatre office during a production of "The Nutcracker" a few years ago when she heard the latches on a door banging. She looked, but no one was there.

Then, a clock flew across the room. She picked it up and put it back, only to have it happen again and again.

"I realized it was George visiting me," she says. "He wanted to play. I was annoyed with him."

"George" is the legendary ghost some insist haunts the venerable Salt Lake City theater. Retired security officer Doug Morgan named the spirit. He believes it is the ghost of a young usher killed in a fire at the Capitol in the 1940s.

Morgan has many George stories. On the eve of Halloween, he was in the mood to tell them.

His favorite occurred opening night of "The Nutcracker" in 1978. He got a call from a lighting technician shortly before the ballet was to begin that the stage lights were not working. He checked out the power source, but still no lights.

"We were down to five minutes to show time and I was exasperated," Morgan says. "How do you put on a 'Nutcracker' without lights? I looked up and said, 'Damn it, George, knock it off or I am going to have you exorcised.' And the lights came on."

Another time, Morgan said a bored security guard working the night shift made paper airplanes and flew them off the balcony, trying to hit the stage. He soon tired of the game and returned to the security station. While sitting there, alone, one of those paper airplanes hit him in the back of the head. He came unglued.

Charles Edwards, who works as a security guard at the Capitol, tells the story of another guard who decided to play a few tunes on the old theater organ. When finished, she turned off the instrument and lights, only to have the organ begin to play the same tune by itself.

Troy Wood of the Utah Ghost Organization that investigates strange happenings around the Salt Lake Valley had his own experience at the Capitol during a production of "The Nutcracker," when George seems to be particularly active.

He was doing an investigation with a camera and tape recorder near where the 1940s fire occurred. A shipping crate started vibrating violently and then slammed into the wall by itself.

"I did not want to be down there by myself," he says. "I got the sound on one of the video tapes. It happened behind me. I jumped. It scared me."

Gary Mlynarski of Roy, who heads the Salt Lake City Ghosts and Hauntings Research Society, has a photo of orbs of lights inside the Capitol posted on his Web site, www.ghrs.org. Yet he remains skeptical.

"I do not believe in ghosts," he says flatly. "I consider a ghost to be an apparition that appears before you and scares the hell out of you. I have never had that happen."

In his investigations of the Capitol, he has seen the security elevator run by itself, something Morgan has also witnessed. He has smelled burning wood and cotton candy in the balcony. He once sat alone on the stage with a news reporter and recorded a voice on his tape recorder that said, "Crybaby, get out." He says the reporter quickly left the building.

Still, Mlynarski remains an unbeliever. Some things, he says, are simply unexplainable.

"I believe in God and I believe in the devil. Why mess with it? The devil is not the first thing I want to see."

CREDITS:

By 'George,' Is Capitol Theatre still haunted ... 10/31/2001

The Salt Lake Tribune

Date: 10/31/2001 Edition: Final Section: Daybreak Page: C1

Keywords: Phenomena; UT

Subject: Arts, Culture and Entertainment Matter: Theatre