Hill Theater

The Truth?

It is said that the ghosts of two people killed in a car accident, a driver and his passenger, haunt the Hill Theater. The accident supposedly took place before the theater was built in 1937, but, according to old maps, there was never a road on that spot.

The Tales

Fred Drogula '92 always heard that thirty or forty years before his time at Kenyon, the cleaning crew was on the Hill stage one summer day, when two students walked in and asked an odd question: "What year is this?" (Some versions have them asking the day or the month.) The custodians answered and then, realizing that the students weren't supposed to be in the building, one custodian followed them into the lobby to make sure they were leaving. Nobody was there.

When Fred was a drama student, he was once working in the theater at 3:00 a.m. The student lighting designer stood on the stage below while he and another crew member stood on ladders, checking the lights hanging from the grid. As they came to the next instrument, the designer would ask them to "flag the light"--to pass their hand between the lens and the grate that covered the lighting instruments, so that she might see the shadow and figure out where each light was focused.

Fred, finishing up for the night, climbed down the ladder and began to clean up. When the designer called up a final "Flag the light," she and Fred both saw the shadow of a hand pass over the light. Then the other crew member walked in from the wings.

He was already down from the grid. Who had flagged the light?

Campus safety officers routinely find the "ghost light" unscrewed on the Hill stage, and then, although they turn it back on and lock the building on their way out, they find it unscrewed again on their next pass through. In the early hours of the morning, long after the student rehearsals are over, they find the stage curtains open, and then, the next time through, closed. Professor of Drama Tom Turgeon suggests the closed curtains and extinguished lights might have more to do with "carnal experiences than ghostly ones."

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