- WINDHAM Conn. (AP) - The
couple backstage heard the sound clearly - a woman's voice, mumbling low
unintelligible sounds, the sounds coming closer.
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- "Are you expecting someone?" Robin Rice asked
Jim Baron.
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- It was an early October evening just before Halloween
1999. Rice and Baron, members of the Capitol Theater Development Corp.
were checking safe areas in the theater for visitors to tour during their
Halloween fund-raiser. The Capitol Theater Development Corp. is working
to develop an arts magnet school in the old building,
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- Baron assured Rice that he was not expecting anyone.
They peeked out into the orchestra area and saw nothing. But the circa
1927 vaudeville and movie palace on Willimantic's Main Street is full of
eerie creaks and groans - especially on a dark October evening.
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- "Jim began testing a step to see if it was safe,
when we heard the mumbling again," Rice said. "We freaked - it
sounded as though she were walking down the aisle, toward us."
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- Both knew the legend of the Capitol Theater ghost and
Rice became a believer that night.
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- Three Eastern Connecticut State University students,
who heard the ghost tale, had one month to complete an Inter-session parapsychology
course. That was in December 2000.
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- Since insurance prevented them from spending more than
a short time in the closed building with a member of the corporation, the
students shot a series of photos, set up recording equipment and left for
the night.
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- "One of the photos definitely had a streak of some
sort," Rice said. "There were strange noises on the tape, but
the equipment was not the best and the theater creaks anyway."
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- Not a stitch of documentation exists concerning the lover's
triangle that led to a murder which, allegedly, led to a woman's spirit
haunting the theater.
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- According to the oft-told tale, in the late 1920s or
early 1930s, when vaudeville troupes came to Willimantic as they toured
the New England circuit, two actors and the actress they both loved were
in the balcony. The spurned lover pulled a gun to shoot his rival. Instead,
the bullet struck and killed the woman.
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- "I have researched every newspaper article from
the period," Windham Town Historian Tom Beardsley said. "There
is absolutely no account of any murder in the Capitol Theater."
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- Perhaps, over the years, the lover's triangle has become
intertwined with the shooting death in 1924 of a Windham County inspector
- the equivalent of today's major-case squad detective - whose wife and
daughter were both involved with the same man.
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- Mother and daughter owned and operated a dress shop and
millinery next door to the theater.
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- According to former Willimantic police officer Peter
Bolduc, the inspector, William Jackson, knew his daughter was seeing a
deputy sheriff who had recently separated from his wife.
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- "But he was still a married man, so Jackson forbade
his daughter, Juanita, from seeing him," Bolduc said. "One day
the sheriff, whose last name was Rice, came to the Jacksons' Quarry Street
house."
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- It was at that point the inspector realized his wife
and daughter were involved with this man. Jackson ordered him off the property.
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- When Jackson was found shot to death in his house, suspicion
fell on Rice. Two days later, Mrs. Jackson committed suicide in her bedroom.
Rice was jailed at the Brooklyn Correctional Institution for four or five
years, but no charges were ever brought against him and he was freed. No
proof existed that Rice killed Jackson or that Mrs. Jackson was a killer.
No murder weapon was ever found.
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- "That's one of three unsolved Willimantic murders,"
said Bolduc, who owns a vast collection of police memorabilia and is known
as a police historian.
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- He knows of no shooting in the Capitol Theater. There
is nothing in the police files, but, he said, a woman fell from the balcony
and died in the hospital a few days later.
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- But what about the ghost story?
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- "It's a spooky building and it could be true,"
he said. "I've been in the building - it's cold, wet and damp and
it gave me a strange feeling. I did not want to hang around."
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