Paranormal?

I found the following while doing some research into our theatre’s history.
Original source: http://paranormal.about.com/library/blstory_november99.htm


The Haunted Theatre by Kristin H.

I live in Kansas City, Missouri. I used to work at the American Heartland Theatre, which is located in Crown Center, a large hotel/mall/tourist attraction in K.C. The theater has been open for about 12 years now. It's only about 20 years old and, to the best of my knowledge, there have been any tragedies inside the theater itself. However, the place has an eerie tradition. The founder was a man named Jim Assad. He poured his life savings into making the theater a commercial success. In 1992, he died from cancer. Not long after, strange things began happening.

In 1994, four women were rehearsing for a musical called "The Taffetas." Suddenly, one of the actresses ran offstage and up into the audience. She began searching the rows, looking for something. When they asked her what was wrong, she insisted that a man had been sitting in the seat and then suddenly disappeared. She was trying to figure out just where he had gone. My own personal experience happened during the run of a musical called "Forbidden Hollywood" in the late Spring of 1996. I was working backstage on the show as a dresser. At the same time, my grandmother was in the hospital in Wichita, Kan., which meant my mother was spending weekends away from home. At the time, we only had one working car, so it created a problem. I needed to be at the performances. The first time, the theater put me up at the Westin Crown Center Hotel. The second time, the hotel was booked up, so I had to spend the night in the theater practice hall. The show ended at 10 p.m. and by 11 o'clock everyone had packed up and left.

The theater is on the fourth floor of the mall and there are no other shops or offices on that level. At night, after the custodian leaves, the elevator and stairwell are locked and the escalator is blocked off. Mall security does not even have access to this level at night. I was in the greenroom (a room backstage where actors wait for their entrances) watching TV. It was around midnight and I had just gotten off the phone with my brother. The backstage area is an L shape. There is a door at one end that opens onto the lobby. If you enter through that door, you walk back through a scene shop, then you turn left, pass the greenroom door and walk up a few stairs to the actual backstage area. To see the TV, I had to sit with my back to the door. The TV was rather loud, because it was on top of a refrigerator and I couldn't reach the controls to turn it down.

Suddenly, the distinct sound of heavy footsteps moved through the scene shop, past the greenroom door, and walked up the first few steps before disappearing. When I turned to look out the door, I didn't see anyone, but there was a faint afterimage, like when you catch a person moving out of the corner of your eye. I know for a fact that I was alone in this theater. I also know for a fact that these footsteps were not my imagination. They were evenly paced, deliberate, and loud enough to make me turn around. I spent many hours in that theater and I never heard any other sound that would be similar to this. My theory is that Jim Assad still makes his rounds of the theater to be sure that everything is in order.