ST. LOUIS — It is the season of Halloween, and many people are turning their attention toward ghosts, apparitions and other phenomena that have no explanation.
“So, this is a ghost light,” said Stifel Theatre Senior Public Safety Manager Eric Cornman, while standing by himself next to a lamp on stage. “When this is the only light on, it will prevent you from falling off the edge. It’s so you can always see the edge of the stage.”
But things you’re not supposed to see are what’s causing discussion among staffers at the Stifel Theatre.
“It’s comforting knowing you’re never alone,” said Cornman. “It can be little unnerving knowing you’re never alone.”
“But yeah, they’re here,” he said.
“They” are shadow-like figures – ghosts – Cornman and others have witnessed inside the theater. A cornerstone indicates the building was built in 1932. Cornman gave 5 On Your Side a “ghost tour” of four areas where he, personally, has seen apparitions.
“I came from this way,” he said, leading us down a back hallway. “This is part of the old serpentine ramp to get out of the building. I had my hand on the wall because it was pitch black. You couldn’t see anything. When I get to this point, there was a man standing right here, underneath this curtain.”
Cornman was standing with the darkness of the tunnel behind him, and the bright red and gold motif of the theater’s interior in front of him.
“It was a shadow man,” said Cornman. “He was wearing a top hat. He had no facial definition at all. It was just a complete shadow. I took a half a step forward, he moved to my right. I stepped up, and there was nothing here. He was just completely gone.”
Cornman spoke to whatever it was he had just witnessed.
“I told him, ‘I’ll be back in a minute, I have to go get something.’ When I came back upstairs, I did not see him again, but when I got to this point, I was covered head-to-toe in goosebumps. You could just feel the energy of something that was here,” he said.
That’s only the beginning. The stories Cornman shared with 5 On Your Side are enough to make you wonder if there’s not a phantom in this opera.
He continued the ghost tour in a foyer outside of a main ballroom.
“Myself and a co-worker were standing here watching a training session that was going on. As we’re standing here, a voice from that room and called out to the gentleman that was with me,” he said.
Cornman pointed to a coat room on the side of the foyer.
“It called him by name, specifically. It was loud enough that we both turned and looked. It was clear as day. He asked if I heard it, and I said, ‘You mean the ghost that called your name? Yeah, I heard it.’ I walked into the coat room and turned the lights on. There’s nobody in there, at all,” he said.
“It was a man’s voice,” he said. “It was subtle. All it said was, ‘Dave.’”
Corman said hearing the voice was interesting and wasn’t frightened by it.
“No, it hasn’t been frightening, at all,” he said. “We haven’t had anything that’s been malicious in intent, or anything like that. They’re just residual things that happen.”
Cornman put things into perspective.
“I’ve become calloused to it,” Cornman replied. “The first one was… It made the hair stand up on the back of your neck. But it was just like, ‘Well, okay, it didn’t hurt me.’”
There’s more. Our ghost tour took us to a different level within the Stifel Theatre.
“Alright, this is my old office space,” said Cornman. “This is where my direct boss was sitting on the couch in this room, and as he was sitting there, he watched a man walk through this exterior wall and toward that door.”
While standing in the office adjacent to his former office, Cornman gestured and modeled the path taken by the unexplained apparition.
“When the figure gets close to this door, it’s got an automatic eye that releases the door so you can open it. I could hear the click from my office, but the door never opened. Meanwhile, my boss was telling me, ‘I just seen a guy walk out of that wall. This is crazy.’ I said, ‘Well, I heard the door click.’ About two minutes later, the door clicked again, and the man returned and disappeared back through that wall.”
He described another scenario in that same space.
“So, my desk was right here,” he said. “I was sitting behind my desk. My boss was sitting in a chair across from my desk. We were having a conversation when someone whistled from the seat sitting right next to him. It was loud enough that we both heard it. It caught his attention. He immediately looked to his right.”
“My boss said, “’Did you hear that?’ ‘Yep, I heard it’ I told him. We kept going with the conversation we were having.”
Cornman said he isn’t rattled by these things, anymore.
“No sir,” he said. “They could whistle, right now, and it wouldn’t faze me a bit.”