Touch me, Tex

I’ve already covered a few of my paranormal experiences with audio and scent…which leads me to touch. I haven’t experienced a whole lot of touch that I can attribute to supernatural occurrences because I was able to either debunk for sure or there were too many other possibilities. But there was one time, with a ghost in the first theater I worked in. His name was Tex.

He was not an actor or a stagehand nor did he have anything to do with the theater…except that he’d helped build it.

The theater building was erected in 1978 or so. I worked there from 1992-1996 while attending classes. It houses two main traditional theaters, a black box theater, a green room, some dressing rooms, a costume shop, a huuuuuuuuge scene shop and various necessary storage spaces in the basement and on the three stories above.

Tex was a construction worker from…you guessed it…Texas. He was working on the second floor one day. There are two main staircases, one at either end of the building plus another secondary one that hadn’t been built yet. It was time for lunch and rather than walk all the way to the other side of the building to go down the completed stairs, Tex wanted to use the stairwell he was nearest. The building was barely framed at the time. I don’t know if much of the third floor had even been constructed yet.

The nearest stairwell didn’t have stairs yet, only a platform at the next landing. Tex figured he could just jump down the 15 or so feet.

Poor guy…he somehow tripped and skewered himself up through the crotch on a piece of rebar. He did not die immediately, but he was in such a difficult place to get to that eventually he suffocated on his own blood before rescuers could get him down.

When I heard that story, it had only been about fifteen years since the incident had happened. I’d always felt a little odd in that particular stairwell, but I was never afraid.

As part of my introduction when I first started working in the scene shop, the foreman told me that if I ever use the freight elevator, make sure I turn the key off after I was done…because Tex likes to make the elevator go up and down. He sometimes did it when the key was turned off and removed from the elevator altogether! In other words, Tex was part of the family there in the theater building. He did no harm, just a little bit of mischief.

I know a few other people who encountered him. I’m guessing that because of the nature of his demise, he was really big on safety. Now, in theaters, we do the unthinkable sometimes: we stand on the top rung of ladders–the one where the stickers warn you not to. It’s just something we all do at one time or another. It’s not good practice, it is unsafe, but sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do.

A friend of mine was working very late one night painting a set. She was all the way at the top of the ladder, stretching to reach a corner when she felt the ladder start to tip. She prepared to grab on to the scenery in case the ladder fell all the way over, but suddenly, the ladder righted itself. She looked down and there was a man in overalls and with a Texan accent telling her to be more careful. She thanked him and turned back to her work before realizing that she hadn’t heard any of the stage doors open or close before the man was there, nor had she heard his footsteps even though he was wearing work boots. She also heard neither of those sounds after he’d steadied her ladder.

Another friend of mine had found a door to the big theater unlocked one night. He was about twelve years old at the time, waiting for a ride after a school program had ended, and curious. So, he went inside the theater. For one reason or another, the ghost light wasn’t working (That’s generally a single light bulb on a stand placed near the front of the stage so that if there’s scenery or whatever, anyone who goes in there in the dark can make their way around. Theaters can be very, very dangerous places.) but he walked out onto the stage anyway. The illuminated Exit signs provided enough light for him to see that the stage was empty, but he couldn’t really see much detail out toward the middle. The floor is black, too.

He walked out from stage right, intent upon going to the front of the stage in the middle and look out into the audience. The space was magnificent. The proscenium opening was 60 feet wide and the house seated 1400 in bright red velvety seats. He got to a certain point and just stopped. ’Something’ prevented him from going further. He was a little scared, but more curious than anything. He backed up and stepped forward again, but something made him stop. Pulling a coin from his pocket, he flicked it out in front of him, wondering why he couldn’t go further.

It took awhile to finally hit something.

The orchestra pit was at basement level…about a twenty-foot drop. One more step and he would’ve fallen. In fact, his toes were right at the edge. Shocked at whatever force was holding him and even more shocked that it was a damn good thing the force had stopped him, he was frozen right there, trying to make sense of it all.

Then the temperature dropped and wind picked up, swirling around him, blowing his hair, scaring him and he ran out the way he’d come.

Yes, the air-conditioner was always on, but no, it never swirled with the force of wind–especially front and center stage–the entire three years I worked day and night in that particular space. The only time the air-conditioning freaked me out was in the basement because the ceiling was low and the vent was right at head height and the cold air would be surprising as I came around one of the lighting racks. My friend and I believe he had likely been ’saved’ by Tex.

There are numerous other stories about him, but those are my two favorites. My experience with him was somewhat less dramatic.

I’d gone down by myself into one of the storage rooms under the smaller stage in search of a cardboard tube for a project I was building upstairs in the scene shop. I knew where they were. I just needed to retrieve one. I always felt Tex’s presence strongest in the basement and this day was no different. When I got the storage room open, I discovered that some wooden chairs and another box of tubes had been placed in front of the ones I needed to get at.

Great. Well, I could either wrestle everything out of the way or lean way far over in order to get what I needed. Being lazy, I leaned…and as I looked at my target tube, I thought to myself, “Gee, it would really suck if I fell.”

I felt two fingers jab against my upper back and sure enough, it sucked to fall into that other box of cardboard tubes. And then I felt laughter. Tex was laughing at me…but he’d also taught me a lesson. I was uninjured in my fall except for a tiny scratch on the underside of my chin. But Tex–Mr. Safety–was laughing his ass off at my expense.

It’s because of him that I believe there are some good spirits out there. Not all are mean or in despair. I hope to go back and visit him one day. I don’t even know if he’s still there. If he is, I hope he’s still helping people, keeping them safe–or at least teaching them how important safety really is!

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