Bay Street Theatre

Eustis's 518-seat State Theatre opened as a vaudeville house in 1922, with one of the largest photo-play pipe organs in the Southeast, and later ran movies under a Paramount Pictures subsidiary into the 1960s before falling into disrepair. A group of theater lovers rediscovered the vacant building in 1974, restored it, and opened their first production, Hello, Dolly!, in July 1975; the Bay Street Players bought the theater outright in 1977 and still stage productions there today. Cast and crew have long reported screams from the upstairs costume and prop rooms, orbs, and an unmanned lighting switchboard on the balcony that turns lights on and off on its own — on one occasion the main spotlight dimmed and pulsed like a heartbeat, unaffected by attempts to fix it. Some also describe seeing the apparition of a man hanging from the balcony ceiling, and few will go beneath the stage, in the area crew call "the hole," because of a strong sense of a presence there.