In Brief
For years, the Springfield Theatre Centre in Illinois banned Noxzema from the building. The medicated cream's smell kept drifting through empty rooms with no jar in sight — the calling card of an actor named Joe Neville, dead since 1955.
The Full Story
At the old Springfield Theatre Centre on East Lawrence Avenue in Springfield, Illinois, the ghost didn't appear. He arrived as a smell. For years the company banned a single product from the building — Noxzema, the medicated cream — because its scent kept drifting through empty rooms with no jar anywhere in sight.
The smell belonged to an actor named Joe Neville. In the 1950s he carried a chronic rash on his legs that never healed, and he treated it with heavy layers of that cream. "They say that Joe had this horrible rash on his legs that never seemed to heal," a former theatre manager told paranormal historian Troy Taylor. "He used to slather layers of Noxzema on them."
In May 1955, Neville was finally cast in the lead of a play called "Mr. Barry's Etchings." He performed the dress rehearsal. He went home and killed himself that night, May 13, 1955. An audit at his workplace had turned up misappropriated funds, a co-worker had named him, and the exposure was due the next day. He took the lead role and then took himself out before opening.
A longtime guild member put it plainly to Taylor: "If there was anyone who was going to come back as a ghost, it would be Joe."
He did. Members reported doors opening on their own, props falling from the rafters, objects vanishing and turning up folded neatly behind a stairwell. People said something pushed them offstage. A few claimed a filmy white shape on the catwalk overhead.
When Taylor visited the building in early 1997, he was led down to a basement dressing room that almost no one used. He smelled the cream before anyone told him what it meant.
The company left East Lawrence Avenue in 2004 for an old Masonic temple across town. No one has said whether the smell came with them.
