Forum Theatre

The Forum Theatre in Jonesboro, Arkansas opened as a movie house in 1927, and it's the town's community stage today. For nearly a hundred years, the building has also kept a projectionist named Charley.

No one who works there has ever seen him. He doesn't cross the lobby or pass you on the stairs — he shows up later, in the photographs. Take a group picture inside the theater, and the story goes that a face turns up in the back of the frame, a shape that wasn't standing there when the shutter clicked. He keeps to the second-floor balcony, they say, where the projection booth used to be. That was his post, back in the 1950s, when the place was a movie house called the Strand and Charley ran the reels.

The movie house went dark in 1974. The city bought the building, restored it, and renamed it the Forum — and Charley, by every account, stayed.

How he died, when, why he stayed — none of it is written down. No fire, no fall, no name in any record. Just a man nobody can prove was ever here, turning up in the backs of other people's photographs.

There was, once, something close to evidence. A paranormal investigator named Ed Underwood brought an EMF meter into the building. "We had some really extraordinary readings," he told a local TV crew — "an amount of just pegging the meter, which rarely ever happens." He never published anything to back it up. The reading was enough on its own to keep the story going.

The people who run the place don't believe it. The director calls it plain rumor — the creaks, the wind, an old building working on your imagination. The staff will tell you they've never seen him.

And then, every October, when they turn the theater into a Halloween walk-through, those same people set aside a room for Charley.

They call him a rumor. Then they give the rumor a room.