TUCSON, Ariz. — "Is there anyone up here?" Paranormal Investigator Becky Gydesen said as she opened the door to the projection booth at Fox Theatre.
Our team and Becky are the only people in the theatre.
She says the projection booth gives her a "weird feeling."
But Becky isn't scared of the ghosts she believes haunts Fox Theatre. She says they're friendly, even sometimes tricky.
"I've seen bright lights go on and off and I've seen somebody go to enter the projection room myself," Gydesen said.
The projection booth is just one of the places she says she's had personal experiences with the paranormal inside the theatre.
"I've heard footsteps on the stage myself," Gydesen said. "I witnessed the younger girl in the lobby. I saw the shadow actually move across the end of the lobby."
That experience was captured on camera during an investigation after-hours at the Fox Theatre.
The young girl Becky is talking about is one of a couple of ghosts she says haunts the Fox Theatre. Another, the panhandler who asks for money outside the doors of the theater.
"And then as soon as people were to go hand him money he would simply disappear," Gydesen said.
Online ghost forums and blogs speculate the panhandler may be a remnant of the theatre's hay-day, when business was thriving during the great depression, but Becky Gydesen says because of the decades that Fox Theatre was shuttered there's a lot her team doesn't know about who would be haunting Fox Threatre and why.
"For a while Fox Theatre was closed down the roof had caved in and the homeless community lived here," Gydesen said. "So during that time period we don't really have a lot of records of what went on here so we really don't know who was here [or] what had happened."
During our time with Gydesen she showed us how she communicates with entities she can't see using a K2 and a recorder. The K2 measures changes in electromagnetic frequency and the recorder picks up quiet sounds her team may miss during an investigation.
"If you are here I have some equipment you can use to communicate with me," Gydesen said to the open air of the projection room.
While there was no definitive proof this time, Gydesen says she's actually communicated with the spirits in this place before.
"We had asked questions and have gotten responses some of the main questions," Gydesen said. "Like 'are you here?' and we got yes. We asked things like 'do you have fun here?' and we got yes."
Becky says even though she and her team are believers they go into every investigation looking for a normal cause to a paranormal problem.
"We go in trying to look for human causes and here at Fox we tried to find a human cause before calling it paranormal but we couldn't debunk it," Gydesen said.
Each Halloween, Gydesen and her team give haunted tours of the Fox Theatre and invite the public to a lights-out investigation.
This year, the event falls on October 25th. It starts with a viewing of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, at 7:30 pm.
