Haunted Texas Theater Has Another Ghostly Performance

An American composer/pianist named Chad Lawson was onstage at the Paramount Theater in Austin, Texas, when he captured something very eerie in one of his photographs. After he was finished conducting a sound check for a live podcast episode, he snapped a few photographs of the piano on stage to post to his social media account.

However, when he returned to his hotel room, he noticed that there was a figure in one of the pictures that wasn’t present in the other two photographs. “I took three quick-tap photos from stage to share. In the photo you can clearly see someone in the mezzanine,” he said, adding, “Noticing it, I looked at the first and third pics and the person is absent.” You can check the pictures out here.

Built in 1915, the Paramount Theater has a long history of paranormal activity. People have reported seeing a woman wearing a white dress walking around the mezzanine floor aisles in the same location as a wall from the War Department of the Republic of Texas stands. It is believed that she was the wife or mother of a soldier who died during the Civil War. It’s quite possible that she was the ghostly figure that was captured standing in the mezzanine in Lawson’s picture.

An apparition of a man wearing a top hat and dressed in clothes from the 1920s is often seen sitting in a house right opera box and smoking a cigar. Several people have reported smelling cigar smoke in that area.

Probably the most famous ghost is that of a beloved projectionist named Walter Norris who passed away in 2000 while rolling “Casablanca”. He is said to play around with the equipment and people have to leave candy bars or chocolate doughnuts in the booth for Norris in order for things to start working again. As long as there is chocolate in the booth, employees have no problems with the equipment.

According to one of the employees, there is supposedly a negative presence at the theater. A custodian refused to clean a bathroom located at the top part of the theater close to the projection booth because he claimed to have felt something negative there.

Footsteps and disembodied whispers have also been heard from inside the theater when nobody else was around.