The Capitol Theatre Haunting | Campfire Stories with MrBallen

MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories - Ballen Studios

A police officer named Dave Murphy begins his first job as a security guard at the historic Capital Theatre in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2006. Assigned to train under veteran Officer Morgan Matthews, he quickly notices Morgan's cold and

Key takeaways

• The Capitol Theatre has a long history of reported paranormal activity involving multiple independent witnesses.

Main topics

• Haunted locations
• Unexplained auditory phenomena

Notable quotes

"There's no way that sound just happened on its own. Someone's here."

Conclusion

The Capitol Theatre remains a place shrouded in mystery, where multiple individuals across years have reported

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome back to the campfire where it is raining and also a minute ago I was situated much closer to the fire and it was excruciatingly hot so we had to stop everything and move me back so I was just pouring sweat. But we're all set up now and I have a great story to tell. So it is a it's a classic ghost story But what really makes it stand out is that not only are the elements in the story really quite unnerving but also it's got a high degree of Believability there are quite a few people in the story who independently witnessed and experienced The events of the story that I'm about to share with you right now But before we get into tonight's story, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload two, three, even four times every week. So if that's of interest to you, the next time the follow button is at work, go ahead and sneak into their house and fill all their clean socks with beach sand. Also, please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads. Okay, let's get into tonight's story. Speaker 1 (1:33) In 2006, there was a brand new police officer named Dave Murphy who was living in Salt Lake City, Utah. And his first role was as a protective service officer, which meant he was responsible for physical security at several county facilities. And his first post was the Capital City Theater, which is this landmark icon in Salt Lake City. It's this beautiful theater. It was built in the early 1900s and, you know, around the clock it required physical protection because it was, you know, a historic landmark. And so on his first day of work in early August of that same year, Dave goes to the theater. And when he gets there, he's met by Officer Morgan Matthews, who is also a police officer who had been up to that point the most recent security guard at the theater. Basically, Dave was going to be taking over for Morgan and Morgan was going to move on and do something else. But there was going to be a period of time where Morgan needed to train Dave on how to go about, you know, being security at this theater. And so Dave, he's a pretty friendly guy. You know, he's he knows he's new. He knows he's green and he shows up to the theater ready to to not only learn the job, but also get to know Morgan, who was who was older than him. You know, he's his boss, but he's also more senior than him. And so he meets Morgan and pretty much right away, Dave picked up that Morgan was really not interested in getting to know Dave. In fact, really, as soon as Dave walked through the doors of this theater, Morgan was like straight to business. There was no small talk. It was like, all right, let's go. I'm going to show you around and I'm going to teach you how to do this job. Speaker 1 (3:16) Dave doesn't know Morgan and again he's the new guy and he's not going to protest and so he said okay like show me how to do this. So the theater was three floors and then in addition to the three floors there was also a basement level down below and the actual theater was on the first floor but there was also some offices on the first floor and the second floor and the third floor as well had some offices and administrative rooms and then down in the basement was storage, there was some rehearsal rooms and some other things like that down there. And so generally speaking Dave's role or really like the role of a security guard at this theater was You get to the theater and the first thing you do is you secure it You literally check every single space you start in the basement you secure that you check every room lock every door turn off every light You go to the first floor you do the same thing second floor same thing third floor same thing And then when you've secured every room everything is locked all lights are off. You know, the whole place is locked down Presumably, this is the beginning of your shift You go back to the first floor where the control room is, which is just a small room for security. And inside there's all these monitors that, you know, show the different cameras that are all around the inside and the outside of the theater. And you just basically sit there and watch the cameras. You pretty much just wait and make sure nobody breaks in or any other sort of emergency, like a fire or whatever. And then at the end of your shift, somebody else will relieve you. And you go through the same process with them of go to the basement, secure every floor up to the third. And then you would depart and the new person takes over. And so basically Dave goes in and Morgan explains this to him. And then they go about securing the whole theater. And when they're done doing that, they just go to this control room, which is again, just this small room with cameras, or I should say monitors that are attached to the cameras. And like, there's no small talk. There's nothing. It's just two dudes just sitting there for hours, just watching these, these silent screens. And so Dave is thinking like, this is weird. I get it that maybe this guy's not very, you know, into small talk or whatever, but it's just odd that you wouldn't even talk to me at all. And so he just sensed there was something going on with Morgan, but you know, hey, he's new. He's not going to question it. So that was day one. It was day one of the job. At the end of it, you know, Dave leaves and that's that. The next day, Dave comes back, same routine. Again, he does the opening and closing sort of rounds of the theater with Morgan. So when they're securing the theater, they're doing it together. They barely talk during the second day as well. Dave leaves that night and he's like, okay, you know, I kind of got the hang of it. This is going to be an awkward couple of weeks hanging out with Morgan here who just... does not appear in any way interested in interacting with me at all beyond just professionally. So on the third day, this is the third day on the job, Dave, when he gets to the theater, He just really doesn't feel like doing the rounds with Morgan. I mean, it's already just so awful sitting there with Morgan because Morgan just, again, does not seem interested in talking to him. And also remember, Dave is here to learn and sort of, you know, take the torch from Morgan and take over the security of the theater. And so when Dave went in on this third day, he goes to Morgan and he's like, hey, I'm going to do the security rounds on my own. You can just stay here in the control room. I'll do it. Like, I'll go do it for the first time. I know what I'm doing. And Morgan kind of looked at him and he's like, all right, yeah, go ahead. You know, when you're done, come back here and just let me know what happened. And so Dave is like, great. I get like, you know, 20, 30 minutes away from Morgan. And so he goes to the basement and the basement, it was really creepy. It's like this huge space. In fact, I'm pretty sure the basement extended beyond the width and the depth of the theater. It's like the sprawling basement with all these different like tunnels. It almost seemed like it was the sprawling layout in the basement. And many of the rooms were just not really in use. So they're like these abandoned dark rooms. There's no windows or anything that leads outside. It's like a cave down there. And also in the hallway, when you'd go down, there was two sets of stairs that went down into the basement. There was the west and the east stairs on either side of the theater. And you'd go down and they'd be on the side of the building. And there's this main central hallway in the basement that spanned the length of the theater. And in the middle of that hallway was this old grand piano that didn't get used at all. And so when you'd be patrolling in the basement, it's dark and dingy, and you'd have to walk this hall with this creepy piano down there. And so that's the basement, and Dave goes down there, and he's sort of like a little creeped out down there, but he goes in all the rooms. You know, he's done this for a couple of days now, and, you know, nothing happens. There's nobody there. Also, it's worth noting that despite the fact that they had this security for this theater to prevent break-ins, break-ins were not common. This is not like we have security because there are lots of break-ins. Like nothing ever happened at this theater. So, you know, Dave, he's doing the check of the basement. Nothing's here. Nothing's going on. Secures the basement, which means everything's shut. All lights are off. He goes up to the first floor because that was the basement. Does the same thing. Shuts off all the lights. Everything's locked. Goes up to the second floor. Same thing. Everything's locked. All lights are off. Goes up to the third floor and he checks everywhere. All the rooms have been secured. All the lights are off. There's only one room left and it's at the end of the hallway and it's the rehearsal room and it's the only room on the third floor that didn't have a door. It was just an open doorway and basically you'd poke your head in and you would just see like mirrors against the wall and it's like a pretty big room. And so Dave, this is his last room. He just needs to check this one room and make sure no one's in there and then he's done. And so he walks to the doorway and he pokes his head into this rehearsal room. He's looking around and he doesn't see anything. And as he steps out of the room, so his back is to the hallway where he's just been, as he steps back into the hall, he hears this loud slam right behind him. It's the bathroom door that's right behind him. He whips around and he looks at the bathroom door and right away, like a series of thoughts run through his mind. Number one, he's thinking break-in. Like there's no way that sound just happened on its own. Someone's here. Someone has either slammed the door and gone in the bathroom or they have slammed the bathroom door and they're running down the hallway. Like they're making an exit. They're making a run for it. And so right away, you know, with this first thought, Dave, he's looking at the door. He's looking down the hallway. He doesn't see anyone. He is armed, but he's like, I got to tell Morgan. I got to tell him there's a potential break-in. And so he pulls out his radio. He calls to Morgan, who's down on the first floor in the control room. And he tells him, I suspect a break-in. Like, I just heard a door slamming up here. Get up here. And so Morgan, down in the control room, he quickly scans the cameras, which it's worth pointing out these cameras. they didn't really work that well unless a light was on in the room it was watching at least for the cameras that were like inside the the theater they only worked if the room was well lit so he's looking at the cameras and really he can't see anything at all and so he just abandons the camera and he starts running upstairs to go meet with the dave and figure out what's going on and so dave he draws his gun he's holding it in front of him just sort of waiting he's standing in the hallway he's looking at the bathroom door he's just like waiting because he doesn't really know what to do he's gonna wait for backup And the second thought runs through his mind about the slamming of the door. On the outside of the door was this pretty pronounced hydraulic hinge on the bathroom door. So this bathroom door was a pretty heavy door. You could open it, but if you tried to slam it, there's that last bit of it closing where the hydraulic hinge catches and it goes like as the air comes out of it and it slows the shutting of the door. It's like you can't slam this door. There is literally a hydraulic hinge that prevents the slamming of this door. And Dave's thinking, like, the door slammed so loud he practically jumped. You know, it was right there. Like, he didn't mishear it. How could that door have slammed? And so he's thinking about that, and Morgan, he comes charging up the stairs. He sees Dave, and Dave sort of fills him in. And Morgan's like, we got to go in the bathroom. Like, that's where this intruder must be. And so the two of them, guns drawn, they open up the bathroom door, they go inside, they flip the light on because it was dark in there, and there's nobody in there. I mean, they search the whole bathroom. There's nobody there. They check all the stalls because for a second they thought maybe somebody's standing on one of the toilet seats and we can't see them. So they open up all the stalls. Nobody's in this bathroom. But they're like, okay, whoever it was, they must have made a run for it. Like, Dave, you must not have seen where they went. Maybe they're hiding in one of the rooms upstairs. or maybe they ran down like the east stairwell or something and so the two officers they leave the bathroom and they make their way down the hall poking their heads in each of the rooms as they go like looking for this potential intruder there's nobody on the