Harper Joy Theater has seen countless plays, stories, actors, sets and props. It has been burnt down, rebuilt and remodeled. All this accumulated history brings a lot of stories to the theater: and, some would tell you, a couple of ghosts.
“Several weeks ago,” said senior Devin Petersen, “I was in the props vault, alone, pulling items for the set of ‘Government Inspector.’ I was at the far end and I heard a loud crash towards the door.”
Walking out to investigate, Petersen discovered the floor was covered in glass. A large light casing, sitting securely on the top shelf about eight feet above the ground, had fallen and shattered.
“[It] had not been on the edge, I hadn’t touched the shelves, and the shelves are resistant to shaking . . . there was nothing that should make it break, and I was completely alone at the time . . . that piece of glass had been there since last spring.”
Petersen explained that, according to the legends at Harper Joy, one of the ghosts was sending him a relatively mild message.
“One of the ghosts wanted me out of the theater because I had been spending too much time there. It’s a reoccurring theme in our history,” he said.
Several myths point to two main ghosts haunting Harper Joy. The first, a girl, is seen as a sort of guardian. Senior Trevor Cushman described her as a “benevolent ghost.”
“An alumni girl, on her way back . . . died in a car crash on her way here,” he said, “. . . [she] makes a fuss when people are here too much or she needs to alert them of something.”
Both Cushman and Petersen point to another story involving the female ghost of Harper Joy theatre. Alumni Burke Gardener, while still a student at Whitman College, was hanging lights by himself one night when he saw a girl in the balcony. Within seconds, a light had fallen from the ceiling onto his head. The light coming loose was just as strange as the girl he saw; Harper Joy lights are secured with safety chains precisely so they don’t fall on people’s heads. When Burke was rushed to the hospital to check for head trauma, however, the MRI revealed something much worse: a malignant brain tumor.
“Had the light not fallen on his head,” said Petersen, “he would have been dead within three months.”
The girl, however, isn’t the only ghost who is rumored to haunt Harper Joy. There’s a male ghost, as well: and he isn’t necessarily there to help.
“A visiting professor was directing a show and she and the cast noticed a pool of what looked like blood on the stage,” said Petersen. “There was a body in our fly loft. They went to investigate, and when they got up there, the body was gone. But the pool of blood remained.”
Another malevolent force is said to have scared off another student from the theater permanently.
“By the concessions booth, there’s like a little closet,” said Cushman. “A girl [was] going in there to get some item . . . and the door closed on her and she was stuck there for a while.”
When the girl was rescued from the closet, she was gibbering and covered in scratches: and, as the story goes, she left school immediately after.
“Not a terribly unusual type of ghost story,” said Cushman.
Seeing as theaters are naturally spooky places, it is not uncommon for such stories to come about. Whether true or not, students and professors at Harper Joy have fun telling these stories, adding to and continuing the legacy of the theater.

