A believer, a skeptic and a noncommittal walk into an old, haunted theater.

Managing Editor Selma O’Malley ‘26 selects “Spiritual” whenever she downloads a dating app that is deleted less than 24 hours later. Co-editor Benjamin White ‘27 has only consulted psychic readings as a joke. We did not stay overnight at Easton’s State Theatre to prove that ghosts are real, just to convince the indecisive Editor-in-Chief Elisabeth Seidel ‘26 that they are — or are not.

The theater, with original architecture from 1873 remaining, has long been a site of alleged spiritual activity. It is believed by theater staff that a former manager who died in 1957, J. Fred Osterstock, still lingers, amongst other unnamed spirits.

The State Theatre leans into its association with the supernatural. Fred is revered by the theater’s community: “Fred’s Den,” a glass-enclosed shrine, stands next to the front entrance, and the organization’s annual high school theater awards and WiFi password are named for him.

Amidst an assortment of mysterious bumps, thumps and phantom footsteps, three unexplained incidents proved most challenging to our beliefs.

Lured into the bathroom

We opened our night with a tour of the ornate space by a self-described easily-spooked skeptic, marketing director Jeffrey Hall. He seemed delighted to chaperone our visit, an arrangement for which he was given an extra day off.

Our expedition was interrupted halfway through by the first eerie event: an isolated toilet flush from the main lobby bathrooms. Innocuous as it may sound, Hall had repeatedly assured us that “no one” but the four of us was in the building.

With an amused Hall in the lead, we plunged into the women’s bathroom to investigate. While looking for a source of the lone flush, it happened again.

Neither bathroom yielded a clear human or inhuman culprit. After some testing, the automatic flushers proved to be difficult to trigger.

Close encounters of the door-kind

After several attempts to commune with spirits to no avail, we sent Benjamin on a quest to the second-floor men’s bathroom, allegedly a site of frequent Fred encounters.

Despite Benjamin’s scare, we persevered, keeping in mind that Hall revealed theater staff wagers on whether we would make it through the night. 

Shaken from sleep

Only after getting warm and cozy in our Lafayette Outdoor Society-loaned sleeping bags did the scariest sequence of the stay begin at midnight: clanging from inside the walls.

As the clanging and banging began to sound on all sides, becoming louder and more rapid, we called urgently for backup from our adult.

Hall walked the perimeter of the theater and hypothesized that the terribly loud noises may have been a side effect of the building’s heating starting up — “If you need a human cause,” he said. 

However, Selma remained suspicious of spiritual activity, citing the noise’s immediate movement to the opposite side of the theater when Benjamin went to investigate, and its sudden pause when Hall emerged.

A little bit shaken, we drifted off under the watchful eye of a life-sized Fred cardboard cutout placed in the theater’s balcony earlier that day by a mischievous staff member looking to give us a scare.

Survived

Despite spooky sounds here and there, our cacophony of morning alarms sounded off to conclude a relatively restful night of sleep.

In the morning, Benjamin revealed a strange dream of his: a faceless panel of judges in the theater seats before us, evaluating the three of us sleeping on stage. The characteristics of the judgment in the dream were unclear or forgotten, but Selma and Elisabeth maintain that it had to mean something.

We bid farewell to Hall and Fred and headed back to the land of the living, plotting more eerie experiences.

Selma was convinced the theater’s spirits felt like playing prankster. To Benjamin, it was just a night spent in an old building — though he did admit, “I can’t explain what happened to that door.”

And to Elisabeth, it was spooky entertainment, but not a complete conversion to the ghost side.

“Scary things happened,” she said. “I’ve never experienced scary things like that before, but I feel like I can rationalize explanations that are not paranormal.”

A correction was made on Oct. 31, 2025: A previous version of this article contained several misspellings of “State Theatre.”