♪ Intro Music ♪ (Mary) Coming up next on State of the Arts, Ghosts in the Galleries, an immersive exhibit filled with chills and a look at Haunted Bisbee.

These stories and more on this Halloween edition of State of the Arts.

Hello and thank you for joining us.

This is Halloween week and in the spirit of the season, we're about to take a tour of some rather artistic haunts.

We begin in the vast collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, which cover millennia of human history.

So maybe it's no surprise that a few spirits purportedly linger around the halls of the museum.

Let's head to its galleries to explore some of the most striking paranormal encounters had by museum staff, if you dare.

♪ Suspenseful Music ♪ (Emily) The Cincinnati Art Museum was founded in 1881 by the Women's Art Museum Association.

This was a group of leading women in the city who felt that the community needed an art museum.

And then the building here was opened in 1886.

Since then, we've added a lot of wings to it.

So we kind of joke that it's a bit of a Franken building.

My name's Emily Agricola-Hultrup I'm the director of learning and interpretation here at the Cincinnati Art Museum.

The Art Museum has over 73,000 objects in our collection and it spans about 6,000 years of human history.

We asked staff, specifically our night security staff, for any bumps that might go in the middle of the night around the museum And we got some amazing stories.

This tall case clock was made around 1810, 1815.

We're standing in what is the Cincinnati wing, which opened to the public in May of 2003.

And during the time that we were installing the wing, it was after hours and the curator and one of our art handlers were standing outside of the gallery and all of a sudden they heard a bong, bong.

If we had all of our grandfather clocks going off all the time at the museum, it would be pretty noisy.

We take the weights out of our clocks so that it can't chime.

Well, the curator and the art handler looked at each other and said, "That shouldn't be happening."

So the curator sent the art handler into the next gallery to check it out and the art handler came back not 20 seconds later and said, "We're going home now."

And has never spoken of it again.

(soft music) The gallery that we're standing in right now is all about Frank Duveneck.

And he really was a Cincinnati boy.

And he worked here and lived here for most of his life.

For a brief period, he lived overseas in Munich and then in Venice.

And this is really where Ghost Story meets Love Story.

While he was in Europe, he met Lizzie Boot and they fell in love.

And shortly after they got married, about a year or so later, she passed away.

He was devastated.

He moved back to Cincinnati.

And one of the things he did was he created this beautiful effigy of her.

We have had evening guards or guards that walk the galleries after the museum is closed and have walked through this gallery and heard just very brief and very faint, Frank.... ....Frank.

So we like to think that that's Lizzie and she has come to be with her husband and her husband's artwork at the art museum.

♪ Spooky Music ♪ Frank..... ........Frank.

We are standing in the San Bodeo Chapel, which is from 1125 to about 1150 from Spain.

One of our night security guards was walking around.

Well, they came into this gallery and saw a figure, a black shrouded figure kneeling at the altar that's right behind me.

They walked in, saw him, left.

Kind of wondered, did I just see that?

Walk back in, the figure turned and looked at him, turned back and then floated out through the ceiling.

We've never seen him again.

We are now in our 18th century British painting gallery.

And this is a story that comes to us from one of our facility support team members.

Ray worked at the museum for a really long time and he was in this gallery one day dust mopping the floor and all the lights went off.

What's something that you might not want to do if you're in a gallery and all the lights go off?

You probably don't wanna touch and figure out where you are.

Ray hit the deck.

He started crawling out of the space and all of a sudden he heard in a British accent, "Stop, it'll be okay."

And he kind of looked around, and heard it again, "Stop, it'll be okay."

And then the lights came up and he was facing our painting of Mr.

Sedgwick who was a 18th century British Lord.

And we think that Mr.

Sedgwick was making sure that Ray was gonna be safe in the gallery.

♪ Scary Music ♪ (Emily) Do I believe that the museum is haunted?

I guess I would say I don't not believe that the museum is haunted.

I've never had any experiences myself.

There's no malicious ghosts.

I'm also really cool with not coming in encounter with any of them.

But I feel really safe that if they wanna come and live here, they are not malicious and they are more than welcome to hang out in the galleries.

It's because they wanna see amazing art as well.

♪ Mysterious Music ♪ Next, a behind the scenes look at an immersive Halloween haunted house in Reno.

While guests are greeted with chills and thrills of a dark and disturbing nature, we'll meet the artists, designers and actors responsible for this frightening scene.

From a safe viewing distance, of course.

The story you are about to see may contain graphic images of blood, gore, flashing lights and sharp noises.

But hey, it's all in fun.

Hi there, my name is Guinevere Clark and I'm a PBS Reno content creator.

I'm about to go inside the Dark Corner Haunt in downtown Reno at the National Bowling Stadium.

As a scare actor for this haunt, I get to take you behind the scenes with me.

So come on, let's go.

(Guinivere) So we just got a tour of the place, walking around now getting a feel for it.

It's gonna be really cool.

Like they put a ton of work into this place, it's gonna be awesome.

I'm really looking forward to opening night when we get to scare some people.

But in the meantime, let's meet the artists who organized this whole thing and put it all together.

(Holly) I'm an artist.

I went to art school at Savannah College of Art and Design for fine art sculpture.

And during college, I got involved in Netherworld Haunted House.

Little did I know I was working for one of the most wonderful and elaborate productions in the haunt industry.

This form of creativity and the people I met and the family that I got out of it and the way it helped me push my creative endeavors has always affected me as an artist.

The people you can meet and the friendships you can make and really the family environment that I have had working in the haunt industry is something I want to bring to Reno.

(Holly) Junkie's Dark Corner Haunt is an elaborate, immersive walkthrough experience for Halloween lovers.

It will be a theatrical production where you walk through sets and fabricated environments where you will encounter theatrical trained actors and monsters jumping out at every corner to give you a thrill and a Halloween experience.

(Jonathan) This year, we will be located in the National Bowling Stadium, downtown Reno.

It's a great location.

It's in a building that a lot of people know about but drive by and have never been in.

(Holly) The plot of Junkie's Dark Corner Haunt takes place in a haunted antique mall.

So the audience will go through an antique mall, reach some tragedy in the storyline and wake up in the hospital where Dr.

Stain will bring them back to life and the audience will escape the hospital to get out of the haunted house.

In this show, everything you're gonna see was created or fabricated by us.

We made the walls, we've fabricated the props, we've built the pneumatics, we've distressed the deco.

I think we decided to do it in February of 2022 and we hit the gas pedal in March.

(Jonathan) I've been hard at this since June with them, nonstop, pretty much every weekend, every available time that I get.

I've helped out with building, fabricating.

I've helped design one of the major scenes here.

I've also helped with wiring, electronic, speakers, yeah, everything.

(Holly) Guin, who's gonna edit this video has been on the team since the middle of the summer as well and as a scare actor, you're gonna see her implanting some of the storyline into your head at the beginning of the haunt.

We learned from Hollywood set design how to make walls.

So they're built in a panel construction that's lightweight and bolted together where they can move in any placement we need them to.

So in following years, we could redesign this haunt with a different wall layout.

Since spring, we've been working on fabricating props that we could decorate in between the walls.

And quickly after that, we knew because we wanted to be an actor driven show, we would need an amazing cast.

So we quickly started calling out for anyone interested in being a scare actor.

(Guinevere) Well, downtown Reno is literally buzzing with street vibrations.

We are at the National Bowling Stadium today for the first official day of training.

Very exciting, very excited to see how the haunt goes.

Yeah, should be fun.

(Jonathan) What makes a good scare actor is somebody who's willing to just wait for the perfect moment, who's willing to sit there and watch the crowds and learn from the reactions and know that, oh, I scared the front of the group this time, didn't quite work.

And wait, scares the middle of the group next time.

Oh, that worked a little better.

Learns and grows and adapts.

At the end of season, that final walkthrough when you go through and you see it all together, it's really magical.

You can transport people and take them to a different place.

You can suspend their disbelief for 20 minutes and scare the crap out of them.

♪ Uplifting Music ♪ (Jonathan) Some people haunt one day a year and some of us, we haunt 365 days a year, just one day a little bit more.

Getting a bunch of people who come together and they have a collective goal to make something cool and fun and an experience for other people and watching all of these people come together to make this is just absolutely the best part to me.

Being here, I want it to be a safe place and a family environment and where people that feel like maybe their weirdos or outcasts or artists or just not like everyone else can come and meet people the same and different as them and be accepted.

(Jonathan) Some people are more actors, some people are more makeup, some people are more design and build, some people are more deco.

There's all these different facets though that bring everybody together and by the end of the season, you always walk away with a friend or two, if not a family of a whole bunch of people who love you for the creativeness that you are or the acting that you do or the something that makes you you.

I want everybody to know that like this is just year one and it only gets better from here.

So I have high hopes that all of us in the future are gonna keep scaring Reno's pants off.

It's really incredible what we've pulled off this year.

We've all worked so hard and I can't say thank you enough to my team who's helped me put this together and has really seen the vision and helped make it a reality.

This experience has been way more creative than I ever would have imagined.

I hope the special behind the scenes look has made you want to check it out for yourself.

Thank you Dark Corner Hunt for the spooky time and here's to a spooky future.

Now a peek into the AZPM vaults as we take a trip to Bisbee where the town's haunted history comes to life at night through ghost tours, seances, and perhaps even a little magic.

We're in Bisbee, Arizona.

Most haunted town in America.

(Interviewer) Is it really the m town in America?

According to me.

♪ Somber Music ♪ (Renee) I always tell people that Bisbee was a mining town, we mostly mined copper.

Copper is a conductor of electricity.

Ghosts are energy.

(Renee) That's why I believe it's an active location.

(Kenny) There is almost an electric current here that sometimes I feel and I see the town on it.

(Renee) Every other building was a bar.

There were brothels.

Of course you're gonna get people that are gonna get drunk and stupid and shoot each other.

(Kenny) All these buildings are original.

They not just hold the charm, they hold a certain energy of people that once walked this earth.

So we've done some research here.

We realized that in the year 1919, Houdini came to Bisbee, Arizona and he performed at a tiny little theater called the Lyric Theater.

We found out that that same Saturday night, he spent the night here at the Copper Queen Room.

This is why we've officially unveiled the Houdini Room.

They say the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest the month of October.

So in channeling the spirit of Houdini, I have some very old shackles.

And I'm gonna have Renee do the honors of shackling my wrists together.

(soft music) As tight as you can.

He's the godfather of magicians, really.

Here I'm a full-time magician doing magic shows every single weekend.

So that to me is really what's just, like it was fate that I ended up here.

Melt right off my wrists, ladies and gentlemen.

(Renee) Anybody else like a flashlight?

It's a different town at night than versus the day.

Feel free to take as many photographs as you like.

We have had what we believe are ghosts photographed on the tour.

I run the old Bisbee Ghost Tour.

So are you guys ready?

[ CHEERING ] (Renee) Wow.

I am one of the tour guides, so I'm the one that guides the guests around Bisbee and tells them the ghost stories and the folklore regarding the ghosts which haunt the buildings.

(Kenny) Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining me in the Bisbee seance room.

Bisbee is considered one of the most haunted towns in America, and there is a reason for this.

You're well aware of the copper, gold and silver that were extracted from the mines, what most people do not realize, that this entire town was built on top of one of the single largest quartz crystal mineral deposits anywhere in the world.

And quartz crystal in large quantities acts as a battery for letting certain energies come and go as they please.

Now the Grand is the only hotel where I have heard stories of people running out in the middle of the night never to return because of the paranormal activity.

She got scared, went behind the bar to start cleaning glasses.

When she felt Jeremiah massaging her back, my type of ghost.

[ LAUGHING ] (Renee) We try to tie in all the stories to the history of the buildings.

The other embalming room is in the shop that's vacant next door.

Coincidence?

I think not.

So we don't just tell ghost stories, we try to kind of link them all together, like a quilt.

I think we are so complimentary to each other.

You're both getting a haunted history lesson, but in different venues.

First spot in our little tour is non other than the Copper Queen.

There are 52 rooms, 16 different ghosts.

The very first magic trick that was shown to me was close up magic.

I saw it right in front of my eyes.

My grandfather was my biggest inspiration in my life.

I just was awestruck.

I wanna give everyone, adults and children, that same experience.

And to this day when I get upset, I sense his presence.

Either that or I'm crazy.

When a lot of people come up to me and they're like, well, how can you prove that there's a ghost?

I go, well, how can you prove there's not?

I'm more interested in giving people who visit Bisbee a good time.

Something to tell their friends about, to bring them back to Bisbee.

And Mr.

Bone says, I was diagnosed with a Halloweeny.

[ LAUGHING ] (Audience Member) I'm gonna use that!

(Kenny) I wanna leave you with a final thoughts.

We're merely spirits having a human experience, not humans having a spiritual experience.

And those deceased are always with us.

Thanks for joining me in the Bisbee Seance room.

[ CLAPPING ] And finally, we close out this week's spooky tour of the art world in Dayton, Ohio, where the historic Victoria Theater has welcomed performers for more than a century.

But if stories are to be believed, some of its past performers may have never left.

(Kristina) It started on 1866 as the Turner Opera House, and it has gone through quite a few changes since then.

There have been fires, we've had a few of those over the years.

At one point burning down to the facade, but the original facade was still here, built back up again.

Of course, part of the Great Flood in 1913.

You could actually see on the light poles outside how high the levels got.

There's a marker out there to show you that the entire first floor, the first lobby here of the Victoria Theater was completely underwater.

So we got through that.

We were the Victory Theater after the war.

Went through a time as a movie house in different productions throughout the years.

In the 1980s, we actually saved from the wrecking ball.

This was a big moment for the Victoria Theater, which later became again the Victoria Theater, but it was a group of citizens that came from across the region to save the Victoria Theater.

Dayton Live is home of the Schuster Performing Arts Center, the Victoria Theater, the Metropolitan Arts Center, the PNC Arts Annex.

A lot of tours that will come through from across the country.

And we have our education program, which we have performances here for children, school children during the day.

It was the last theater here in downtown Dayton.

And the community said, "We're not gonna let it happen here."

They organized, came together, even bake sales, different things to make it happen.

It wanted more of the citizens that saved it.

So the Victoria Theater Association was then formed and came together to make sure that this was restored.

It's a beautiful, historic building.

Bringing touring Broadway through here, and when it opened back again in the early 1990s.

It was once again the Victoria Theater and then it just outgrew from there.

So it's been a long storied history we're very proud of.

We've had so many throughout a great history from 1866.

I know Harry Houdini was here several times.

We had Wild Bill Hickott coming through, a lot of the Wild West shows.

Katherine Hepburn was here.

And James Cotton in, I believe it was the 1940s, just before I think the Philadelphia story was a movie.

They were here in the play itself.

Leonard Nimoy was here, I thought that was kind of cool.

Miss Vicki, the origin of the story is to take you back to the early 1920s.

There is a young touring actress.

She's standing in the wings at the Victoria Theater and waiting to go on for her cue.

She's standing there in her black taffeta gown and she realizes she's forgotten something.

She's supposed to have a prop for the scene.

It's a black lace fan.

She thinks, okay, think about enough time just to run up there to the dressing room to grab it and come back down on stage.

Now her cue comes and goes.

She misses it.

So everyone's looking around for her.

They can't find her.

So they hurry to get her understudy out there because the show must go on.

They continue to look for her.

And even after the production, they can't find her.

So they looked in the dressing room and they did find her street clothes.

But again, she's nowhere to be found.

And in fact, she was never seen again.

It was just as if she vanished into the night.

We've had performers, I know specifically some ballet dancers have reported seeing glimpses of Vicky in the dressing room mirrors.

So you might see her just pop up in the mirror really quickly or just a glimpse of her in the corner of your eyes.

So we've heard that from different performers.

We've heard of catching the scent of a rose scented perfume.

Just a hint of it, just for a moment, that's been in different areas of the theater, it's there and it is gone.

But that's happened in the time since Vicky.

So we attribute all this to maybe Miss Vicky, but especially, and there's a lot of reports here of people just as they're on the stairs, hearing the sound of footsteps rushing past them and rustling fabric.

Almost maybe the rustling of a taffeta gown.

But that's been reported on the stairways in different areas.

I've had a couple of moments with Vicky.

I feel like what describes her pretty well, I think, is having a sense of humor.

If you've ever worked here very late at night, you know you're the last one here.

Everyone has signed out of the building and you're finishing up, and then all of a sudden you hear the elevator start.

And you know what's going to happen next.

It's going to go all the way to the fourth floor.

The doors will open and it will just sit there.

And you just think, "Oh, Miss Vicky."

It's just her saying hello.

I feel my favorite though, I will say, was probably the time I was giving a tour.

And I had just given a tour to some new team members.

We had gone through the orchestra, looked at the different seating areas, and we're making our way up to the balcony.

And on the way to the balcony, I'm telling them the story about Miss Vicky.

I was asked, and I had just finished talking about her black lace fan, her going back to get it.

And when you walk into the balcony, to the right is the loge, and to the left is the rest of the balcony.

And there's a walkway and there's a ledge.

And as I'm looking about halfway down the walkway, I see a dark shape on the ledge.

And I start to walk toward it, and as I get closer, I see it's a, there's a piece of cloth there sitting there.

So I pick it up in 100% serious.

This was a small jacket, like a little bolero.

The perfect thing to go with a black taffeta gown and a black lace fan.

So I laugh because I know that's just Miss Vicky going, Hello!

Just kind of her, just fun sense of humor.

Maybe not everyone thought it was funny as I did, but I just, you know, it was just for being Vicky.

Thank you for joining us this week.

I hope our ghostly locales gave you just enough of a jolt to get you into the spirit of the season.

Until next time, what?

♪ Scary Music ♪ Until next time, I'm Mary Paul.

Happy Halloween!

♪ Suspenseful Music ♪