Paranormal researchers: Panida is 'definitely haunted'

SANDPOINT — There is a nightly show at the Panida Theater, one that is acted out long after everyone else goes home and the place is locked up for the night.

When stage lights dim and the marquee blinks its last, ghosts that lurk in dark corners and at the top of narrow flights of stairs are free at last to roam around in the inky blackness of the old theater.

At least, that’s the official finding of a paranormal research team who spent the night in the Panida on Sept. 9. Four investigators devoted the early evening hours to wiring the Panida with ghost-hunting technology.

Once the equipment was in place, they were locked in to spend the next eight hours combing every corner of the building in hopes of an otherworldly encounter.

Watcher in the Dark

It was sometime around midnight when the first spectral visitor appeared, according to Jenn Deer, who operates Inland Northwest Paranormal Research with her husband, Mike.

“There was an apparition in the audience — a guy,” she said. “He was standing in the far corner of the auditorium. He was a larger gentleman with a round face. It was almost like he had a beard or a moustache. He just stood there and watched, like he was taking an interest in what we were doing.”

With digital recorders in hand, the researchers attempted to make verbal contact with the mysterious man in the corner, but to no avail. When anyone came to close, they said, he simply faded to black.

Another recorder, however, did pick up audio that was later analyzed and transcribed by the team. Stationed in the upstairs office, this digital device captured a conversation that, apparently, has been going on for a very long time.

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Echoes from Beyond

For years, theater management and staff have spoken of hearing voices as they climbed the steps to the theater office. At first, these individuals would open the door, expecting to find someone on the phone or in the middle of a meeting. The rattle of the doorknob and the creak of a hinge, they soon learned, always stopped the conversation short.

“So we put a digital recorder in the office as part of the investigation and we caught the conversation,” Mike Deer said. “We got audio where the first voice says, ‘Get out of here’ and a second voice says, ‘Fine — just let her have it then.’

“It’s two women’s voices in what sounds like a heated discussion,” he added.

The agitated words might have been hissed back and forth at the top of these stairs for much of the theater’s 80-plus-year history.

Given that this is a disembodied disagreement, the exchange could well go on forever.

“It’s what we call a ‘residual,’” Mike explained. “It’s something that happened in the past that just plays itself over and over again.”

Two Kinds of Hauntings

“There are both ‘intelligent’ and ‘residual’ hauntings at the Panida,” Jenn said. “An intelligent haunting interacts with the visitor. A residual repeats itself like a tape loop.”

She had her own brush with the intelligent aspect of the other side while attempting to make contact during a sweep through the theater’s second-floor meeting room.

“I had dropped my pen in the dark and said, ‘Where’d my pen go?’” the paranormal investigator said. “I didn’t hear anything at the time, but when we reviewed our recording, there was a lady’s voice — fairly loud — that replied, ‘On the floor.’

“We actually saw a couple of apparitions,” she went on. “Along with the one in the audience, there as one in the dressing room.”

Poltergeist in Pantaloons

If Mike Deer had been alone, it would have been understandable if descending into the theater basement in the wee hours of the morning played tricks on his mind. But he was accompanied by another team member who, sitting with him in the windowless dressing room, shared a “What was that?” moment in the dark.

“We both thought we saw movement,” Mike said. “It would be there and then it was gone, in regular intervals.”

The night visitor appeared to be stepping in and out of the doorway that separated the dressing room from an adjoining restroom. When Mike crept over to have a closer look, he got an eyeful.

“There was a woman with dark hair standing there dressed in something like bloomers,” he said. “She looked at me for a couple of seconds and then disappeared. I asked, ‘Where are you?  Where did you go?’  After that, I felt something push on my flashlight from behind.

“I turned around and nothing was there.”

Scary

Similarity

The team from Inland Northwest Paranormal Research came loaded for, well, ghosts, when it showed up to investigate the Panida Theater. A total of six cameras — four of them infrared — were set up in hot spots around the building.

“We placed them anywhere people had told us they might have felt something or experienced something in the past,” said Mike.

“The infrared camera system is kind of like a home security system that sees in the dark.”

Along with several digital audio recorders, the researchers swept the theater with a hand-held electromagnetic field detector, looking for spikes in electromagnetic activity. A digital ambient thermometer monitored the main auditorium to determine whether there were any sudden changes in room temperature.

Two years earlier, a psychic was asked to visit the theater and share any images and impressions that arose. That individual came equipped with only the natural instincts and heightened awareness that helped her on the job.

“We’re not alone,” she said after several minutes of standing silently in the dark. “There is an entity here that associated so much of what they did with who they are that even death could not break that.”

She sensed the presence of a younger woman, the psychic revealed, but there was a much bolder spirit in attendance.

“There is a very definite male energy here,” she said.

“Very strong. My sense is that in life, he was a good-sized man. Hardy. He loved to play act and he became the character he played.”

A big guy who loves to play act. A larger gentleman who looked like he might have had a beard.

Old-timers around Sandpoint would tell you those descriptions sound an awful lot like former Panida manager and, eventually, theater owner Floyd Gray, who played to packed houses when he climbed into overalls and glued on a fake beard to entertain them as variety show host Farmer Gray.

Jenn Deer was only vaguely familiar with the Farmer Gray years and hadn’t heard that someone else previously had registered the psychic reverberations of both male and female spirits in the classic downtown movie house.

“But if that’s what she experienced, she was pretty much right on,” the researcher said.

‘Definitely Haunted’

Paranormal researchers and psychic investigators alike agree that the Panida is populated with genial ghosts. The big guy in the corner of the theater seems to have a special fondness for visitors.

“He could feel like a threatening presence, but truth is, never hurt a soul,” the psychic reported in 2007. “He has fun with the people who come here now.” 

“It was very welcoming — they seemed to enjoy having us there,” said Jenn Deer.

“It felt like they were friendly,” her husband added. “They were still hanging around the theater, just like they did in life.”

Inland Northwest Paranormal Research finally left the theater a little before dawn on Sept. 10, carrying out a load of equipment and taking home hours of audio and video material to review. This past week, the team closed the book on its ghostly sojourn and made its findings public.

“My report states that the Panida Theater does have paranormal activity,” Mike said.

“That was our final conclusion,” Jenn agreed. “We wrote: ‘This place is definitely haunted.’”