THE GHOST HUNTERS returned on a dark autumn night. Their objective was the same: Make contact with Lucien Oakley, the resident spirit of the Lake Worth Playhouse.
Five months earlier, on their first visit to the old building, paranormal investigator Nicole Wood and her crew encountered mysterious orbs of light, pockets of cold air and unexplained noises. But no definite contact with “Mr. Oakley,’’ as respectful playhouse workers have referred to his presence over the years.
But now, the last Sunday evening in September, two intriguing factors seemed certain to tilt the apparitional odds in their favor.
It was just a month before Halloween, when the veil between the earthly and spiritual worlds is said to be thinnest.
And just three days after Halloween will be the 100th anniversary of the building's opening on Nov. 3, 1924, as the Oakley Theater, named after Lucien and Clarence Oakley, the brothers who built it before they met tragic ends less than 10 years later.
Surely, tonight, playhouse spirits would be stirring.
Their own spirits high, Wood and her Unveiling Paranormal co-investigator John Prink entered the empty building just before 10 p.m., accompanied by two playhouse hosts and two guests, including this reporter.
Armed with ghost-hunting gadgets said to capture apparitional voices and movements, Wood and Prink would spend the next seven hours exploring the theater’s reputed paranormal “hot spots.’’ Guided by lights from their video cameras, they went room to room, calling into the darkness for spirits to reveal themselves.
Just before midnight, a camera caught an orb flying up the stairs. The ghost hunters followed the light’s path to a dusty second-floor prop room where Wood was about to encounter a most unpleasant surprise.
“Holy (expletive)!” she shouted moments later. “Something just pulled my (expletive) hair!”
Chapter 1
'A friendly ghost'
ALL AROUND THE world, old theaters have their ghosts. For years, the Palace Theatre in London kept two seats bolted open for its resident spirits. The ghost of singer Ethel Merman is said to haunt The Imperial in New York City.
The Lake Worth Playhouse’s alleged paranormal performers are among the biggest headliners of South Florida’s reputed haunts, including the Gulfstream Hotel (opened 1925) and the oceanfront Lake Worth Beach Casino building (1913).
And the star is “Mr. Oakley,” one of at least five reported spirits, including his brother Clarence, an actress, a crew member and a dog.
Long considered the playhouse’s most active ghost, Lucien has been known to form special bonds with playhouse staff, perhaps because he knows they’re taking care of the theater that he built in 1924 before losing it in financial ruin and killing himself at home in 1931.
“He’s a friendly ghost,’’ box office manager Rosalyn Kotick told a reporter in 1985. “He’s very glad we're here.’’
He’s been known to pull pranks, too. Stories passed on tell of workers arriving to find stage curtains untied, the water cooler in the middle of the floor, or rolls of toilet paper lined up against the lobby wall.
“A lot of things are blamed on the ghost,’’ theater publicist Freda Kratka told The Palm Beach Post in 1987. “When one of the ropes un-ties or one of the flats falls down … ‘Well, Mr. Oakley was here last night.’’’
Or maybe it was the handiwork of late-night mischief makers leaving the downtown bars and finding an unlocked door at the playhouse, which has been known to happen.
But believers have reported other strange happenings that can’t be blamed on drunken intruders: Footsteps on an empty stage. The organ mysteriously playing when no one is around. Handprints suddenly appearing on walls. Shoulders of actors poked when they’re alone on stage.
“I can definitely say I've heard stuff and felt things. I definitely think the Oakley brothers have a presence,’’ said Katherine Lamb, the playhouse’s marketing director.
Believe in them or not, there’s no denying that the ghost brothers have brought publicity and revenue to the nonprofit playhouse.
They inspired the 2010 fictional short film “Lumiere Fantome” (‘’Ghost Light’’ in French), shot on location at the playhouse and narrated by the actor Burt Reynolds, who performed at the playhouse before becoming a Hollywood movie star.
They’ve been portrayed by actors leading haunted playhouse tours. And they’ve attracted paranormal investigators like Wood, who paid $375 for permission to roam the building in search of the brothers’ spirits.
“It’s good PR,’’ said former Lake Worth History Museum curator Helen Greene, noting that many theaters play up their paranormal lore. “If they don’t have a ghost,’’ she said, “someone’s not taking care of business.’’
Chapter 2
The Ghost Hunters
WOOD CAN’T SAY for sure it was “Mr. Oakley” who pulled her hair, but she’s convinced some paranormal entity is to blame.
“I was standing still. I wasn't moving. There's no airflow in here and it felt like a tug on the back of my hair,’’ she said. “I did say to make itself known. But there's a lot of spirits in this place, so it could be anybody.’’
It wasn’t the scariest thing Wood, 39, has encountered in her four years as a ghost hunter. Late one night at the Oak Park Inn in Arcadia, she said she felt her body suddenly go cold, starting from her toes and moving to her head, as if something was attaching itself to her.
“You are more vulnerable when you're alone,’’ said Wood, an accountant from Hypoluxo. “The spirits tend to come out and communicate when you're alone, and it's not always a positive thing.’’
Prink, a former police officer from New York City and the San Francisco Bay area, said he started doing paranormal investigations after he retired to Florida in 2015. He was inspired years earlier during his law-enforcement career when he said he saw an apparition looking into the window of a morgue where the body of a car-crash victim had just been dropped off.
“I'm the kind of guy who always tries to debunk things,’’ said Prink, 62, who investigates private homes at the request of homeowners seeking answers to perceived paranormal activity.
“I know there's a lot of skeptics out there,’’ the Cocoa resident said, “but I think there's something to it. What happens after we check out? Is that it or is there something more to it? I don't think we know the answer. It's worthy of investigation.''
But when you’re a paranormal investigator, finding ghosts isn’t like the movies. You won’t necessarily “see dead people” like little Cole in The Sixth Sense. Ghost hunters try to detect paranormal energy and movement by using gadgets like REM Pods, spirit boxes and ghost lights.
Between the two of them, Wood and Prink have roamed alleged haunts from St. Augustine to Miami. The Lake Worth Playhouse building might not be as active as, say, the Gold Coast Railroad Museum in Miami, but they believe the Oakley brothers, more than 90 years after their deaths, still call it home.
“This building was their baby,’’ Wood said as she prepared to start the investigation. “If the building’s 100th birthday is coming up, I would assume that would make them more active. I really want to try to contact them.’’
Chapter 3
The Oakley Brothers
THE OAKLEYS CAME to Lake Worth from the Mississippi River village of Pleasant Hill, Illinois, where Lucien served as mayor for six years and ran a furniture store and (ready for this one?) an undertaking business. Before that, he worked as a construction foreman on the St. Louis World's Fair buildings from 1902 to 1904.
He started buying property in Lake Worth in 1913 — the year the town was incorporated — and moved there in 1919, according to a newspaper ad he placed in early 1921 announcing his candidacy for Lake Worth vice mayor in the May elections.
“L. E.,” as he was often identified in newspapers at the time, lost by 90 votes to the incumbent, V.L. McCoy. The campaign turned bitter when word got out that a McCoy supporter had called Oakley a “socialist.’’
“This Wild-West type of campaign might be all right in some places, and it is not the first time I have met it,’’ Oakley told a Lake Worth Herald reporter, “but this is too small a place for anyone to try rough stuff and expect to get away with it.’’
The article reported that Oakley, a man “of no small stature and more of a diplomat than some think,’’ confronted the McCoy supporter and “forced a retraction.”
Despite his loss at the polls, Oakley was active in town. He served a brief stint as building inspector and volunteered for a town cleanup event. He sat on the board of the First National Bank of Lake Worth, served as treasurer of the state “horseshoe pitchers association” (headquartered in Lake Worth) and ran a grocery store with Clarence, an avid horseshoe player.
With their families, the brothers shared a house at 826 N. Federal Hwy. They considered their grocery store a temporary gig, a way to save for their dream project: a new theater to play silent movies and vaudeville shows for a growing population fueled by the Florida land boom.
The brothers were confident it would be a success because they had experience working in movie houses in Illinois.
In June 1924, a Miami Herald columnist who caught up with the brothers at their Lake Worth grocery store described Lucien as “a calm-featured man in shirt sleeves and suspenders.’’ He “sat on the counter and toyed absentmindedly with the wrapping string as he told me in brief answers about the big new venture he and his brother are now promoting for Lake Worth,’’ Edgar Hay wrote in his “Rambles” column.
“I think we are spending too much on the theater,’’ Oakley said about his $65,000 investment, which included a pipe organ and cooling system of large fans, “but it will be one of the finest looking theaters in the state.’’
By the time it opened on Nov. 3, the construction price tag had more than doubled to $150,000, roughly $2.7 million today. But by all accounts, the Oakley Theater was a success in its first four years — until a hurricane destroyed it in September 1928.
The brothers rebuilt and opened again in January 1929. But not long after the October stock market crash, they lost their theater.
Lucien reportedly fell into a deep depression. He “was morose, sitting for long periods at a time when he would talk to no one,’’ his family reportedly told authorities.
Around lunch time on June 30, 1931, he excused himself from the dining room, borrowed a cigarette from Clarence and walked upstairs to one of the bedrooms where he shot himself in the head. He was 62.
On June 29, 1932, one day before the anniversary of his brother’s suicide, Clarence Oakley died of a heart attack in the same house. He was 49.
Lucien’s body was taken to Illinois for internment. Clarence was buried in an unmarked grave at Pinecrest Cemetery in Lake Worth Beach.
Chapter 4
Things That Go ‘Thump’ In The Dark
IT’S CALLED A deadbell. It looks like a classic reception bell, but it’s powered by electromagnetic field sensors and supposedly rings only when triggered by the presence of paranormal energy.
When ghost hunters ask questions to the unseen, they instruct the unseen to ring the bell once for “yes” and twice for “no.’’
Wood placed the deadbell on the floor of the upstairs prop room — the same room where her hair had been pulled some 30 minutes earlier — and turned out the lights. The darkness was pierced only by a faint glow through the window from the playhouse’s marquee sign outside.
“Are you one of the Oakley brothers?’’
Ding!
Wood was skeptical about the apparent “yes.” She thought the single ding might’ve been in response to a question she’d asked moments earlier, whether the unseen was once a theater performer.
So she asked again: “Are you one of the Oakley brothers?’’
This time, there was no ding at all.
A few minutes later came a loud thump! Everyone in the room jumped.
“What was that?’’ Wood asked.
Lamb could be heard laughing in the darkness as she explained the source of the noise: “It was the timer on the theater marquee sign turning itself off.''
Undeterred, Wood and Prink picked up their arsenal of equipment and headed downstairs to the building's other paranormal “hot spots.’’
Chapter 5
Paranormal performances
THE OAKLEY NAME stayed on the movie house marquee until the 1940s, when it became the Worth Theater. By the 1960s it was the Capri Art Theater. And by the 1970s, the Playtoy, showing X-rated skin flicks before it was shut down for good in 1973 for screening Deep Throat.
The old theater sat empty for a year until it was bought by the Lake Worth Playhouse, a non-profit that had been performing at the old City Hall since it formed in 1953. After some renovations, the playhouse reopened the former Oakley Theater in 1975 for plays and musicals, launching a successful run that continues today.
Aside from showcasing affordable award-winning live performances, the former Oakley Theater boasts two historical distinctions: It’s Palm Beach County’s oldest-working theater and it's the oldest building on the Art Deco Society of the Palm Beach’s historic register.
And then there’s its paranormal distinction.
Alleged ghost sightings date to the 1930s, said Helen Greene, the former Lake Worth History Museum curator, citing stories shared with her by old-timers who’ve since passed on.
“There were people who said they heard voices and said the organ played without anyone at the organ. They really believed it,’’ said Greene, whose late husband came from a family of town pioneers.
The building’s ghost stories didn’t appear in newspaper stories for the first time until 1983, after the playhouse moved in, according to this reporter’s review of local newspaper archives in Newspapers.com and the Boynton Beach City Library's online archives of the Lake Worth Herald.
The ghost of Mr. Oakley was first identified as the culprit when the playhouse took over the building, according to a 1987 Palm Beach Post article. The article didn’t explain exactly how or why Oakley’s ghost was fingered. But over the years, his spirit made headlines.
An early article reported that two psychics hired by a national tabloid investigated the playhouse. Both agreed there was “considerable energy upstairs’’ and one felt a presence in the ladies’ dressing room that “made it difficult to breathe.”
The tabloid story reportedly inspired a group of professional exorcists to offer their services to rid the old theater of its specter. The playhouse declined.
In 1984, between scenes of a performance of “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” an actor in the dressing room reported suddenly seeing the dark imprint of a hand on the wall. The actor didn’t stick around to study the strange imprint: “I had to get back on stage,’’ he told a reporter.
Another time, a black handprint appeared on a newly paneled wall.
‘’We tried to clean it off,’’ the box office manager, Kotick, said in 1987. “We tried everything and it would not come off. It was, like, ingrained in the wood. So we left it there and about two days later it went away. He's got a great sense of humor.’’
A few years ago, ghost hunters standing on the stage reported seeing an apparition in one of the seats. A check of the playhouse’s subscription records showed the seat belonged to a longtime subscriber who’d recently passed away.
"One night while I was up here alone to do some copying, I suddenly heard a noise, like bump, bump, bump," director Angus MacPherson told The Palm Beach Post in 2002. "I walked into the rehearsal room and a big armchair that had been at one side of the room was now on the other side."
Russ Brailey reported strange occurrences not long after taking over as the playhouse’s executive director in August 2002. "I swear I have heard voices, and footsteps come down that long hallway by my office late at night," he told The Post. "I have even heard sounds in the theater like laughter while I'm alone at night."
In 1987, Robin Beale, at the time the playhouse’s lighting tech, claimed that Mr. Oakley would stand behind her left shoulder every time she was doing a show “until he figured out I knew what I was doing.’’ She also credited Mr. Oakley for jabbing her in the shoulder when she nearly missed her cue to appear on stage.
‘’There were some weird occurrences going on in the wee hours when I was programming lights there,’’ said Scotty Fusion, who incorporated his spooky encounters in the film he directed, Lumiere Fantome, which debuted at the first L-Dub Film Festival in 2010.
‘’Almost everything in the film was an actual thing I witnessed: Pictures falling off walls, seeing shadows, reflections in glass and having no one be there,’’ he said. “I've never seen apparitions or anybody floating, but I've never felt comfortable being in there alone.’’
A water cooler’s move to the middle of the floor one day more than 35 years ago was attributed to the vibrations from road construction outside. It took three men to move it back into place. An hour later the water cooler was back in the middle of the room.
“I said, 'Leave it there,’’’ Kotick recalled in 1987. “‘If that's where Mr. Oakley wants it to stay, let it.’’’
“Mr. Oakley” isn’t always in a playful mood.
“If he gives us the feeling that he does not want us here, then we don’t mess with him. We leave,’’ Kotick said at the time. “It’s always after most of the people have gone. It’s when people are tired and we assume Mr. Oakley is tired also and just wants to be left alone.’’
EPILOGUE
Celebrating in Spirit
BY 4:30 A.M., the two Unveiling Paranormal ghost hunters gave up.
They’d searched all the building’s reputed “hot spots,” including the ladies’ dressing room, the prop rooms by the stage and the adjoining Stonzek Theater, before conceding their search for “Mr. Oakley” a ghost bust.
“I didn't see anything. No apparitions. There was just the sense that there was something there,’’ Prink said. “The playhouse was a pretty cool location to go to. I wouldn't mind going back again.’’
Oakley lore is as much of a relic from the building’s earliest days as the original pecky cypress ceiling beams that still bear the initials first painted in the 1920s: “O T” for Oakley Theater.
Wood said spirits don’t always like or want to be seen. In other words, you never know when Mr. Oakley might make his presence known.
“They're more active around shows,’’ Lamb said during the late September ghost hunt, a week before the opening of the musical “The Prom.”
But it’s safe to say that Lucien and Clarence will be there in spirit for three upcoming events celebrating the building’s centennial.
On Oct. 31, the playhouse will host a free family Halloween party with trick-or-treat stations, arts and crafts and a showing of the animated movie It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
Two days later, the playhouse will host a free 100th birthday party for the Oakley Theater with birthday cake and a lecture by playhouse board president Michael McKeich about the building’s history.
And on Dec. 3, the playhouse will host a Roaring ‘20s-style centennial celebration with hors d'oeuvres, desserts and drinks from a password-only speakeasy. There will be a band, a showing of silent movies with live piano accompaniment, birthday cake and a silent auction. Attendees are encouraged to dress up in their best ’20s attire. Tickets are $100 per couple and $60 for singles, with the proceeds going to playhouse renovations.
The bulk of the donations will help pay for the installation next summer of 300 new auditorium seats, custom-made with red cloth and wrought iron sides to replicate the style of 1924.
“If the ghosts are still there,’’ Greene said, “I hope they find those new seats they are getting comfortable.’’
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About the author
Joe Capozzi is an award-winning reporter based in Lake Worth Beach. He spent more than 30 years writing for newspapers, mostly at The Palm Beach Post, where he wrote about the opioid scourge, invasive pythons, the birth of the Ballpark of the Palm Beaches and Palm Beach County government. For 15 years, he covered the Miami Marlins baseball team. Joe left The Post in December 2020. View all posts by Joe Capozzi.