Collegiate Times

Craig Harmon has traveled to the battlegrounds of Gettysburg and Bull Run to look for ghosts.

Everyone knows that the Hokies have spirit, but Blacksburg is also home to a different type of spirit.

Rob Baker, general manager of the downtown Blacksburg movie theater, the Lyric, knows something about these ghosts as the Lyric is a supposed hotbed of paranormal activity in the area.

Every year, around September, Baker begins to receive inquires from all types of people. From ghost-curious-middle-aged children to several newspapers, people are curious about what spirits float around the Lyric.

Baker said there are two main ghost stories that involve the Lyric. The first ghost story features a worker who supposedly plummeted from the 50-foot ceiling to his death. Legend has it that his soul now haunts the front of the auditorium. Specifically, the area where the orchestra pit used to be.  

 Although Baker has not had any personal paranormal experiences, he admits that the atmosphere around the theater can be chilling late at night. It is a place he is definitely familiar with: He's accustomed to staying late since he's been working there for four years as a projectionist.  "I haven't heard anything," he said. "But then you stand down at the bottom near the stage at night, you've got the lights off and you're there by yourself. (It's) Pretty creepy. I used to get a feeling that someone was watching upstairs from the projection booth. I always felt uncomfortable being down at the front of theater when there was nobody around."It's not just a weird feeling that Baker has, several of his staff also share his sentiments about the vibes of the auditorium."Some of my staff close the door to the auditorium when they come out here to clean at the end of the night," Baker said. "Because they just don't want to deal with the black abyss of the auditorium."

The second story doesn't deal with the actual movie theater, but with the space above it that is now the Lofts at Virgina Tech. Six or seven years ago, the offices above the Lyric were closed off. The tales goes that a bodiless voice of a woman could be heard screaming "Let me out."

Recently, paranormal activities at the Lyric have been nonexistent and Baker as well as his present staff have not had any encounters.

"The theater was renovated in 1998," Baker said, "So maybe whatever was here got exorcised. It's been pretty quiet, I guess."

Despite the fact that Baker is slightly skeptical, the idea of ghosts living in the Lyric is not out of the question and, occasionally, ghost hunters will come to the Lyric. The latest visit was last January; the response that the ghost hunters got was mixed. "They were here for about four or five hours," Baker said. "They had a couple instances when lights came on when they shouldn't have come on. They use a lot of electronic meters and this whole building is encased in electronics. It's going to set anything off." Craig Harmon, who is graduating from Tech in the summer of '09, is a ghost-hunting enthusiast. He is familiar with the type of tool described by Baker, known as an electrofield  meter which reads electromagnetic frequencies. Just as Baker, Harmon has also seen its shortcomings.  "That's another thing that you can't get too carried away with," said Harmon, "Because you have cell phones -- you could be near power lines. It's really important to remain objective."

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