Market Street Cinema Coverup?

This is a followup to a short piece I posted several days ago about the Market Street Cinema abruptly closing because the dancers and staff refused to continue working there because the place was so haunted that is was dangerous. I live in the neighborhood and have been keeping an eye on the place, trying to find out more. The dancers I know have not been around the neighborhood for days.

I was walking down Stevenson Alley, which goes behind the theater, yesterday and saw several guys unloading a truck at the back door of the theater. It looked like they were taking tables and chairs into the back of the building. I asked one of the guys what was going on and why the theater closed. He said it closed for renovation. I told him what the dancers had told me about the place becoming so haunted that everybody was afraid to work there and he just laughed it off. The two guys with him laughed it off too as dancers bull____. Said the girls who told me that had probably been fired.

I noticed an old homeless woman, who I’d seen around the neighborhood off and on for years, standing down the street watching. The guys got in the truck and drove off. I walked over to the woman. She asked me if I knew the men and I said no. I asked her if she had heard anything about what was going on at the theater. She looked me up and down and decided that it was OK to talk to me and told me that she had been sleeping in the basement of the theater for several months. She said that at 2am every morning someone inside would leave the alley door of the building cracked open. She would sneak inside and make her way into the basment passageways underneath the theater. Even when it was open, she was never caught. Since the theater closed, the back door has still been left open at 2am.

I asked her if she knew who was leaving the door open for her and she said it was “The Caretaker”. She said I would probably think she was crazy, but that this Caretaker was a guy who had died in the theater years before and still lived there. She knew him and hung out with him and thought nothing of it. She then told me she was schizophrenic and hung out with other people who were her hallucinations during the daytime as well. But the Caretaker was different. He was real. He left the door cracked open for her every night. A hallucination couldn’t do that.

I asked if I could come into the theater with her and meet the Caretaker since I was a paranormal investigator and she pulled away in disgust. “You’re the people who screwed everything up!”, she blurted out. “You’re the people who caused all the trouble with your lights and cameras.”

“Go away and leave us alone!”

The old woman hurried off down Stevenson Alley. I plan to be here at 2am and she if she gets into the theater.

To be continued.