I never believed in ghosts until I worked at the old theater.
The Orpheum had been built in 1889, all velvet and gilt and impossible acoustics. The kind of place where the balconies curved like cupped hands and the proscenium arch was carved with weeping muses. I started as a stagehand during my junior year—theater tech major, naturally—and fell in love with the building before I ever loved the work. The way dust motes spiraled in the fly loft. The smell of old rope and older wood. The green room's water-stained ceiling that looked like a map of somewhere that had never existed.
Big Ben introduced himself my second week.
I was resetting furniture after a matinee of A Doll's House when I felt him—a thickness in the air, like humidity before a storm. Then the temperature dropped, and I turned to find a man in nineteenth-century evening clothes standing stage left, one hand pressed to his chest in theatrical agony.
"Benjamin McFadden," said Rita, the stage manager, not looking up from her clipboard even when I jumped and yelped. "Died 1923. Cardiac arrest during the Scottish play. Don't say the name or he'll act out the whole death scene. We've got The Importance of Being Earnest starting in forty minutes, and I don't have time for that today."
Big Ben—as everyone called him—gave a small, courtly bow and faded.
He was harmless. They all were, at first.
The ghost light was next. Every theater has one—the bare bulb on a stand that stays lit when the building goes dark, supposedly so spirits can perform. Ours predated electricity, somehow, agas lamp that had been retrofitted and now hummed with LED efficiency. Except when she didn't want it to.
The electrics crew had a name for her: Lady Spark. She'd make the board lights flicker during dress rehearsals, blow bulbs during Romeo and Juliet kiss scenes, once dropped every lamp to 10% during Blanche DuBois's final exit in Streetcar. Technical haunting. Moody, but never dangerous.
"She's got opinions," the master electrician told me. "Respect the art, she leaves you alone."
Then there was Esther.
Esther Whitmore had held season tickets from 1954 until her death in 2003. Row H, seat 12, center orchestra. She still attended every preview performance, a shimmer of lavender perfume and the faintest impression of applause that came half a beat before the living audience. Actors loved her. She laughed at all the right moments in Wilde, wept during Chekhov, sat in rapt silence through Beckett.
"Esther's here," someone would whisper opening night, and we'd all relax. If Esther came, the show would be good.
I grew comfortable with them. More than comfortable—I preferred their company. Big Ben would watch me work, occasionally gesturing to correct a period-accurate chair placement. Lady Spark kept me company during long tech rehearsals, making the work lights pulse in rhythm with whatever music I hummed. Esther's presence in the house meant I was part of something consecrated, something that mattered.
The living world felt harder to navigate. My roommates threw parties I didn't understand how to exist in. Job applications for after graduation sat unanswered in my inbox. My parents kept asking what I was going to do with a theater degree, and I had no answer except: this. Just this. The constructed worlds that made sense because someone had written all the lines, blocked all the movement, designed all the lights.
In the theater, I knew where to stand.
It was a Wednesday in April when I met the fourth ghost.
I was alone, sweeping the stage after a preview of The Seagull. The cast and crew had left an hour ago, but I'd stayed to reset for the next day. I liked the building empty. Liked the vastness of the house, all those seats waiting like held breath.
Lady Spark's bulb flickered. Once, twice, then steady.
Then all the lights went out.
Not unusual. I waited for them to surge back, for Lady Spark's usual games. But the darkness held. The kind of darkness you only get in a windowless room, complete and disorienting. I fumbled for my phone.
Before I could find it, the work lights slammed back on—too bright, surgical. And I heard the voice.
Not Big Ben's baritone. Not Esther's genteel murmur. This was different. Genderless. Sourceless. Coming from everywhere and inside my own head simultaneously.
"You understand, don't you?"
I spun. Empty stage. Empty house.
"You understand why this is the only real place."
My hands tightened on the broom. "Who—"
"The boards beneath your feet have held a thousand realities. Elsinore and Yasnaya Polyana and the Prozorov house. More real than the streets outside because they admit what they are. Constructed. Intentional. True because they're false."
I backed toward the wings. The voice didn't follow—it was already with me.
"Out there," it continued, conversational, intimate, "people pretend the world is solid. That their lives mean something without an author. That the chaos has shape. But you know better. You've always known. That's why you're here."
"Stop."
"The sets get struck. The lights go dark. But the stage remains. Always ready for the next truth. The next beautiful lie. Isn't that better than the formless void outside? The place where nothing means anything because there's no one to write the meaning?"
My back hit the brick wall of the wings. The voice was so reasonable. So kind.
"You could stay," it said. "People do. Not like Ben—he died here, poor thing, that's different. But you could be like the building itself. Like the boards and the ropes and the seats. Part of the permanence. No more uncertainty. No more improvisation. Just the plays, forever, and you holding them up."
I thought about it. God help me, I thought about it.
I thought about my resume, blank and terrible. About the real world, where people didn't have blocking and you could say the wrong thing with no script supervisor to catch it. About how I'd been eating less, sleeping less, spending sixteen hours a day in the theater because it was the only place my hands stopped shaking.
I thought about becoming architecture.
"No," I whispered.
The lights went out again.
When they came back, I was alone. Actually alone. Big Ben wasn't watching from the wings. Lady Spark's bulb glowed steady and uninterested. The house felt empty in a way it never had before.
I left my broom on the stage.
I submitted my resignation the next morning.
Rita was sorry to see me go, said I had good instincts, said the Orpheum would miss me. I didn't tell her why I was leaving. How could I explain that the building had tried to keep me? That it had offered me exactly what I wanted, and that was the most terrifying thing of all?
I work at a commercial haunted house now. Six weeks a year, October through early November. I operate a fog machine and reset props between groups. The monsters are teenagers in latex masks. The blood is corn syrup. The screams are delighted.
Everything is fake, and everyone knows it, and that's the whole point.
The chaos is controlled. The fear has an exit. And when the lights come up, everyone goes home.
I never think about the fourth ghost's offer. Never wonder what I would have become if I'd stayed. Never dream about standing in the wings forever, watching play after play after play, my consciousness slowly diffusing into the architecture until I was just another story the stagehands told.
I never think about it at all.
The fog machine hisses, right on cue, and I go to reset the tombstones.