10-26-2022 5:14pm

More Ghost-ly Stories: Truly Scary

by Jane Stahl

When there’s no other reason or explanation for doors that inexplicably lock, then unlock,

Or when loud banging comes from unoccupied spaces,

Or when you’re suddenly trapped behind a bolted door—a door that suddenly shut behind you—with no way out and no way to contact with others,

When these kinds of things occur and there’s no other reason or explanation, you become a believer. A believer in ghosts.

Shannon Shaw, former owner of Serenity Junction, now director of The State Theatre, is a believer who has experienced some terrifying, unexplainable events.

“Yes, there are ghosts who have not only teased, but terrified me,” Shannon confesses. “In one instance, at the start of renovating the space for the opening of Serenity Junction, none of our keys to doors in the basement worked. Not mine. Not our employees’. Not even the landlord’s,” she explained.

“And so, the landlord figured out another way to get to our space through another area of the basement that had been connected at one time to ours. Problem solved. But after we finally found our way into my space and all of us tried our keys again, they worked,” she continued. Go figure!

“There was no explanation. In that case, we shrugged our shoulders—no harm, no foul—but our suspicions began.

“The next event was not so innocent or merely inconvenient; it was life-threatening,” she added. “On this occasion, I realized that we weren’t getting hot water. When I went to the basement to check, I found that the basement was flooded with several inches of water in the finished part of the basement.

“I realized that the unfinished part of the basement, however, was dry. Then the hot water heater burst. When I reentered the flooded part, the door locked behind me; I couldn’t leave; I didn’t have my phone with me but was now standing in water in a dark, dreary flooding place with water rising to the electrical sockets.

“Fearing electrocution, I took a run at the locked door; I tackled it and, surprised and relieved, it opened and I managed to get out.

“But it happened again. The second time, however, I really couldn’t get out. The basement door, again, locked behind me. You have to understand that this was a dead bolt lock. Again, I had no phone on me. Fortunately, a gentleman had come into the studio to buy a gift certificate for his wife, heard my screaming for help, and rescued me.”

“And, yes, I never went to the basement again without my phone,” she laughed. “And I was happy to relocate the business and leave the building for someone else to evaluate the existence of those spirits.”

Other signs of otherworldly activities include a time when she smelled sulfur under her nose—the smell a lighted match makes. She recalls that the smell consumed the entire building.

She recalls that after she broke her leg, and her mother covered for her absence, there was constant banging on the doors leading to the basement. “The ghosts hated my mother,” she shares. “No one was in the building; there was no plausible explanation for the banging. She was terrified. ”

Some say that the corpses from Boyertown’s tragic Opera House fire in January 1913, were housed in nearby buildings and that some of the spirits never "crossed over." Serenity Junction was located almost directly across the street from where the historic fire took place.

Perhaps those same spirits wanted others to remember what it was like to be trapped, unable to escape certain death, and perhaps, in sharing their terror with Shannon, they felt acknowledged.

But did they finally leave? The current owners may have their own stories to tell. Stay tuned.