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Kelso's Theater Pub building.

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Home > Top Story

Kelso's haunted theater

Saturday, July 26, 2008 11:42 PM PDT

By Amy M.E. Fischer

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Until very recently, the Kelso Theater Pub’s owners wanted to bury the ghost stories that haunted their downtown movie house, fearing rumors of paranormal activity would scare away customers.

For the last few years, though, the theater’s owners quietly have allowed the Southwest Washington Paranormal Research group to prowl the building with ghost-hunting equipment at night after the pizza-eating, beer-drinking moviegoers go home.

On their numerous investigations at the Kelso Theater Pub, SWPR members say they have recorded EVP (electronic voice phenomena) readings of disembodied voices in empty rooms, seen shadowy figures on the balcony, felt cold breezes in the theater and been touched by unseen hands. Their motion sensors go off when no one’s around. Their digital cameras capture unexplained moving orbs of light.

Some investigators believe they’ve seen the apparition of an old man in a dark suit standing in the lobby and a black cat in the men’s restroom. A guest psychic claims two little girls haunt the women’s restroom, and a ghost named Franklin walks the balcony.

“It’s a rad place. You can definitely feel stuff. ... Sometimes you just don’t feel like you’re alone,” said SWPR director Kim Travis of Longview, a certified EVP specialist.

Some things that have happened during the investigations the SWPR can easily dismiss as non-paranormal, but others they can’t explain, she said.

However, “there’s nothing bad there,” emphasized 33-year-old Travis, whose organization has investigated dozens of reported hauntings in the Pacific Northwest and other parts of the country. The SWPR, which does not charge money for its services, promises clients confidentiality and received permission to talk to The Daily News about its Theater Pub findings.

Employees and the Theater Pub’s owners say they’ve had creepy experiences, too. One worker claims something pushed him on the balcony stairs, making him stagger. Another has heard women’s laughter in the middle of the night coming from the cafe that adjoins the theater lobby. Others have seen apparitions and strange shadows, heard footsteps pacing behind the curtains, walked through cold spots, or felt a rushing wind pass through them in the theater’s stillness.

Despite all the stories, owner Mike Julian questions whether the building’s truly haunted.

“I can see where it could be, but nothing’s happened to me,” said Julian, who seems amused by a reporter’s interest in the subject.

His wife, Dawn, considers herself more of a believer, but she hasn’t experienced anything overtly paranormal, she said.

“I’ve said, ‘OK, I hope somebody will manifest,’ but nobody has,” Dawn Julian said. “I’m convinced, probably because I want to be, that it’s a woman playing tricks because I call the building an Old Dame.”

Only because the SWPR thinks the spirits are harmless did the theater’s owners agree to go public with the ghost stories. Also, increasingly popular reality TV shows about paranormal investigations seem to have sparked the public’s interest in amateur ghost hunting, and the Theater Pub’s owners began to realize that their building’s haunted reputation might actually attract a few curiosity seekers rather than hurt the business.

“I’m OK with it if it’s all fun. If it gets people talking about the Kelso Theater Pub, that’s good,” said Mike Julian, who owns the theater with his wife and another couple, Lori and Ole Peterson, all of whom grew up in Kelso.

This summer, the 256-page book “Weird Washington: Your Travel Guide to Washington’s Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets,” by Jeff Davis and Al Eufrasio, devoted an entire page to the strange phenomena the SWPR reported finding at the theater.

“It’s nothing that major,” Dawn Julian said. “There’s no harm—it’s not like the ax murderer. ... If we found something really negative at the theater, I wouldn’t want to publicize it.”

Mysterious past

No one’s come up with more than vague theories of who the haunts might be — former employees? Dedicated movie fans? A man who was rumored to be shot on the street outside decades ago?

“I think it’s a place where in life they had a lot of fun at,” Travis said. “I would like to think that maybe they’re not stuck there.”

It’s even tough to pinpoint the theater’s exact age.

Elderly residents say the theater was constructed in 1937, while the county assessor’s records list the year as 1924. But according to the Cowlitz County Historical Museum, the theater at 214 S. Pacific Ave. dates back to the 1910s, when Kelso was a wild frontier town where loggers would gather to blow their pay on booze, cards and women. The Vogue Theatre, as it was named when it first opened, held vaudeville and movie shows as well as the occasional Christmas pageant. A balcony was added in 1922 to compete with the new Liberty Theatre down the street.

Some people say the back of the theater once housed a funeral parlor, but The Daily News hasn’t found evidence to support that notion.

The business changed hands in about 1931 and was known for the next five decades as the Kelso Theatre until 1984, when it closed due to competition from new multiplex movie theaters. In 1989 it was reborn as the Kelso Dollar Theater. In 1996, the Julians and Petersons, along with a handful of other partners, bought the building and created the Kelso Theater Pub.

Strange happneings

Theater Pub manager Tom Kell, 36, said he experienced strange things when he was a janitor for the Kelso Dollar Theater, cleaning up in the wee hours of the night.

On a handful of occasions, when he was in the hallway of the lobby between the theater and concession stand, he heard what sounded like a group of women laughing, Kell said. The noise was coming from the adjoining cafe. Although it was in the middle of the night, he assumed it was people walking by outside.

“By, like, the third time (it happened), I was popping around to see if I could see anybody. And nobody was there,” Kell said.

He also found himself repeatedly closing the same set of curtains that drape the theater’s exit doors on either side of the stage. He’d pull them closed when he’d start cleaning. Later that night, “they’d be all the way open. They’d be completely open, both sets,” he said. The curtains were lined with weights, “so it wasn’t just like the wind that blew them open,” Kell said.

Nothing odd’s happened to him in the six years since he’s become theater manager, but “I hear stories all the time,” Kell said, adding that if he hadn’t had his own experiences, he’d have a harder time believing them.

Workers once found the movie projector lens on the floor, miraculously unbroken, after leaving the machine intact the night before. An owner once discovered a water valve mysteriously shut off moments after toilets were flushing normally. A ladder would have been needed to reach the valve, which is on the bathroom’s high ceiling.

One employee said when he was in the balcony area, “out of the corner of my eye I saw kind of a dark figure, a torso. That scared me bad enough that I did an about-face and went back downstairs.”

Owner Lori Peterson, a former Kelso resident who lives in the Tri-Cities, said she started noticing funny things going on at the theatre when she and her partners began remodeling it in late 1996. They’d find the lights on inside when they swore they’d turned them off. They’d ask each other who made popcorn, and nobody did. They’d hear noises backstage when only two people were in the building.

“We just wrapped it up as a coincidence,” said Peterson, 44.

But when she saw a TV news report about a haunted theater in Astoria, “I kinda went, ‘Ding ding ding.’ It kind of opened that door,” she said.

Soon after that epiphany, her husband rushed up to her as she washed dishes in the theater’s kitchen. His eyes were huge.

She recalled Ole saying, “I swear, I heard footsteps behind me. I thought it was you. I turned around and there was nobody there.”

Things started to add up. She remembered former theater employees from the 1970s saying they’d get freaked out because they’d hear things moving behind the stage. She heard that when the business was the Kelso Dollar Theater, lights above the concession stand would mysteriously break. She remembered the time an employee brought her 4-year-old daughter up to the bathroom. After they finished, the girl asked, “Who was that lady in there with us?” There had been no one else upstairs, Peterson said.

A few years ago on comedy night, the opening act’s comic approached Peterson and demanded to know who was behind the curtain. He wondered if it was the owner.

“It was throwing my timing off. It was messing me up because someone was pacing,” the comic told her angrily.

In another incident, Peterson distinctly heard the sound of a man clearing his throat, just near her ear, when she was alone in the lobby with Ole. She looked around to see if someone had gotten into the building. The loud throat-clearing noise repeated, and this time, Ole heard it, too. Later, when he returned to the building to fetch something he’d forgotten, Ole was heard the noise again.

Another time, Peterson, Ole and Dawn Julian hung out in the theater “trying to conjure up things” while the paranormal research group was doing an investigation.

“We probably spent two hours down here goofing off,” Peterson said.

Finally, the owners turned off the lights and began walking up the aisle together. Then Ole and Dawn simultaneously “freaked out,” Peterson said.

“Ole thought it was (an employee) coming by to scare the crap out of us. He felt something brush by him,” she said. Dawn had described it to her as feeling like she’d walked through a spider web.

Nothing was there.

Nowadays, Peterson says being alone in the building doesn’t bother her.

“I just don’t want to be known as the crazy owner. But what I’ve experienced, at least in my own mind, is very real,” Peterson said. “It’s really opened my mind to other things. I was very skeptical.”

For more information about the Southwest Paranormal Research group’s activities, visit www.swpr.org

Related article:

A reporter's quest to meet a ghost

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