In search of the NCHS auditorium ghost

By MEGAN LEE
Star-Tribune staff writer

Hey Answer Girl --

Is the Natrona County High School auditorium really haunted?

--Shelby from Casper

To answer this question, I spent a night in the auditorium -- in the dark -- with a group of paranormal investigators and some fancy ghost-hunting equipment.

But first, I had some legend hunting to do. When first researching rumors about the auditorium ghost, I found most people agreed on certain haunting details:

1. Seat 107, a front-row seat near center stage, is reputed to be the ghost's favorite seat. Rumor holds that 107, though designed to fold up when empty, stays down no matter how many times the seat is replaced. 2. The ghost is female, and most probably an NCHS student.

3. A death occurred in the auditorium in the early '40s. This story varies. Sometimes a female stage hand falls to her death from the catwalk. Sometimes a girl forgets her backpack under seat 107, crawls through a window to retrieve it and breaks her neck. Sometimes a girl who loves performing dies from injuries sustained in a fall into the orchestra pit.

I enlisted the help of Kevin Anderson, archivist at the Casper College Western History Center. Eventually my inquiries led to the family of Annabelle Lee Shepperson, an NCHS senior who died in 1943.

Annabell loved theater. So she became the prime suspect when the ghost hunting went down Saturday night.

Beginning at 10 p.m., investigators from the Paranormal Research Society of Casper, a helpful school employee (thank you, Myron Miller!) and a few Star-Tribune staff members set up night-vision cameras, digital audio recorders and electromagnetic field detectors in creepy and reportedly haunted areas of the auditorium. Then we went "lights out."

Splitting into teams of two or three, we spent time in seat 107, on the balcony, on the catwalk, in the basement dressing rooms (my least favorite) and on the stage. We tried to communicate with whoever was there, sometimes calling Annabelle by name, other times referring to unfinished business and asking if the ghost was angry we were there. We even played a Tommy Dorsey record.

I spent most of the time trying not to cry. I prefer to meet people in their corporeal form, and waiting in the dark in seat 107 seriously creeped me out. Lisa Lauderdale, one of the paranormal investigators, held my hand.

But after watching hours of footage from the ghost hunt and listening to several audio recorders used during our investigation, we found absolutely no trace of a ghost anywhere in the auditorium.

So let's do a little debunking:

1. Seat 107 does not perpetually stay down. In fact, it stays up quite nicely, though you do need to push it up after sitting in it. This, by the way, is true for all seats in the first two rows, not just seat 107.

2. Annabelle Lee Shepperson was the only NCHS actress to die in the 1930s, '40s, or '50s. According to death records, Shepperson died from generalized perotinitis (appendicitis) after spending four days in the hospital.

3. No one has ever died in the NCHS auditorium. Also, students didn't carry backpacks in the 1940s.

As far as paranormal science can determine, no ghosts inhabit the auditorium. But I wouldn't recommend hanging out there alone in the middle of the night. It's pretty scary -- and, if you don't have permission, it's also trespassing.