Tampa Theatre offers spooky tours during Halloween season

TAMPA, Fla. - The Tampa Theatre is regarded as one of the most haunted buildings in the city.

Open since 1926, it has a colorful history, with nearly 100 years of workers and visitors, some whom theater staff say may have never left.

The stories of ghosts still seen and felt at Tampa Theatre are now shared, only during Halloween season, with brave guests.

"I saw it on kindred spirits like those ghost shows. They came over here and did some ghost hunting, and they saw a couple of ghosts here," said Mari Pummer, a ghost tour-taker. "This is my first time doing this, so I'm going to try it out. Let's see if there is a ghost."

Tampa Theatre’s Vice President and Director of Community Relations, Jill Witecki, leads the haunted tours. She herself has had experiences with the paranormal inside the building.

"If we believe the psychics and the investigators that have been in the building, we actually have dozens of entities in Tampa Theatre. But on our ghost tours, we talk about six," explained Witecki.

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Throughout the tour, those stories include a ticket-take from the 1950s, who died in the main hall of the theatre, on tile flooring that still exists today. There's also a story of a projectionist from the 1930s, who may still hangout in the upper gallery.

The story of a ticket-taker from the 1950s is part of the ghost tour.

The Tampa Theatre also has a trickster in the basement who loves to pull pranks on non-believers.

Witecki describes all kinds of interactions with the spirits, who can be experienced by more than just the eye. There are stories of keys jingling, doors slamming, taps on the shoulder, and the smell of coffee and shaving cream used by the projectionist.

"Every projectionist we’ve had has told us that they think Fink Finley is still coming to work, still trying to help out up in the projection room," said Witecki on the tour.

"I get the question on tours a lot about if I've ever had a personal experience and I have. And it happened up in the projection booth," recalled Witecki.

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She said three different sets of lights turned on, operated by three different switches, all at once, when a team of experts asked if a spirit was present.

Guests on the tours even use ghost radar to track paranormal energies and temperature, many times catching abnormal blips.

Visitors use ghost radar on tours.

"A couple of times I started to feel where you have hairs stand up on your arms," said Lacie Armstrong, a tour guest.

Theatre staff said the ghosts don’t cause visitors any harm, but they can have experiences on the tour.

"We've had people tapped on the shoulder. We've had people see shadows. We get orbs on our cameras. We all know that we work in a haunted building," shared staff. "But none of it's scary. None of it's bad. It's just that kind of elevated level of weird that's normal here at Tampa Theatre."

Still, a light always shines on the Tampa Theatre stage overnight, according to staff, so that the spirits can see.

"The legend behind the ghost light is that it's bad luck to leave a theater dark at night. You always want to leave a light on for the ghosts to play by, because it's believed that if you don't give them the stage at night, they're not going to give you back the stage during the day, and they're going to wreak havoc on your productions," explained Witecki.