The Mystery Man of the Theater

Years after a beloved small-town movie theater is renovated and reopened, a man returns to find that something strange still lingers inside. As he reconnects with old memories and half-forgotten stories, he begins to suspect the past never really left... and something else never did either.
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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. We're visiting an old movie
theater in his town. A guy realizes that even though
things change, some terrifying stories don't go away. My name
is Edwin, and here is a scary story. I didn't

(00:22):
even recognize it at first. The old Silver Saver's Theater
he used to be this crumbling brown brick box cat
sun faded movie posters in cracked plastic cases, a marquee
that hadn't lit up properly since maybe two thousand and four.
For years, that just sat there, boarded up graffiti tagged

(00:44):
the place people joked about being haunted but never took
seriously enough to avoid. And now it's one of those
clean white facades, big glowing letters, and a polished glass
entrance that reflects the neon glow from the Smoothie Place
right across the street. The whole block looks like it's
trying to be la And even though I hadn't thought

(01:06):
about it in years, something about seeing it brought back
this weird mix of warmth and unease, like running into
someone you used to be close to but are too
shy to just dm them first. Inside, everything smelled like
lemon scented, cleaner, new carpet. They had redone. The lobby
in this sleek, minimal style self checkout kiosks, led menus, everything, touchscreen,

(01:32):
no more ticket counter, no more boared teenagers ripping stubs
and barely looking at your face. The candy was in
those weird bins now, like one of those upscale convenience stores.
Even the soda machines were those fancy digital ones where
you pick from a hundred flavors and none of them
taste quite right, you know the kind. Anyway, I walked

(01:55):
in alone. It felt weird not coming with friends, but
I didn't tell anyone I was going. I wasn't even
sure I was going to stay. I just wanted to
see it, you know how. They changed it, but they kept.
If anything, it turns out not much. The old red carpet,
the one with the faded sorrel pattern that always smelled
like syrup and feet, it was gone, the walls painted over.

(02:19):
Even the snack counter was in a new spot. The
only thing that looked remotely familiar was the big theater
room to the right of the lobby, theater one, and
even that had new seats, reclining once with built in
tray tables. It was clean, it was quiet, and it
was freaking weird. I sat near the back just to

(02:41):
get a better look. Only a few people trickled in,
mostly college kids, and a couple with the toddler was
already halfway through a box of raisins before the previews
even started. As I sat there waiting for the lights
to dim, I kept thinking about how different everything looked now,
like they were trying to erase what it used to be.

(03:01):
And maybe that's what got me thinking about him, The
man in the theater. You see, that was a story.
Everyone had heard it. Every kid in town swore they
knew someone whose cousin or older brother or neighbor saw him,
the man who supposedly lived in the theater. No one

(03:22):
never saw him in person. It was always a shadow,
a shape, a sound. He was just kind of there,
supposedly lived off of leftover popcorn, candy people dropped under
the seats, and sodas kids forgot to take with him.
People used to joke that if you left your milk
dud's behind, the theater man would thank you. Back then,

(03:44):
we thought it was just a funny ghost story, something
to whisper about. During boring movies. But as I sat
there in that shiny new room, something about the whole
thing felt heavier than I remembered, like maybe there was
more to it, like maybe we had all laughed it
off too easily. And then I kid you not. Right
before the trailer started, the lights flickered just once, barely

(04:09):
a second, and everyone brushed it off. Nobody said anything,
but I felt it, that tiny twist in my stomach,
and I thought, he's still here. Of course, I told
myself I was just being dramatic, letting old stories get
into my head. But I couldn't shake that thought away.

(04:30):
Back when I was a kid, the Silver Savers wasn't fancy,
it wasn't even nice, But it was ours. Fridays after school,
My friends and I would ride our bikes straight there,
sometimes without even going home first. They would pull our
crumpled up dollar bills and sticky coins to buy a
ticket to whatever PG. Thirteen movie were barely old enough

(04:50):
to see. Most of the time, we didn't even care
what was playing. It was a theater that was a
whole draw, the ritual of it, the cold blast of
air when the doors opened, the smell of popcorn that
hit you like a wave, the way your sneakers stuck
to the floor. It always felt it a little dark
in there, even in the lobby, like the lights were tired.

(05:14):
Some of the seat cushions had duct taped patches that
peeled up when you shifted around too much. In the bathrooms,
well if they were a horror movie all of their own.
We didn't even care, though That theater was the backdrop
of our entire summers. Of course, there was the man,
and there wasn't a single kid in town who hadn't
heard about him. We called him the theater Man. Some

(05:38):
called him the popcorn ghost, or just him like he
was a given. Everyone had their own version of the story.
That he lived in the building, they said, slept somewhere
behind the screen or up in the projection room. They
came out at night to eat the food people left behind,
never hurt anyone, never spoke. That was the part that

(05:58):
always gave me chills, the idea that he was always watching.
I remember standing in line one summer afternoon, it had
to be the fourth or fifth time we were seeing
men in black two and my friend Jordan pointed out
to the little grating thing high up in the ceiling.
That's where he breathes through. He said, dead serious, he

(06:19):
lives up there. My cousin's friend said he saw a
hand come out once. We all laughed, but we looked.
There were spots in that theater that gave us a
creeps even in daylight. The hallway near Theater three, the
floors was slanted weird there, and light bulbs buzzed constantly.

(06:39):
The door marked staff only that never seemed locked. The
back row of Theater five always just a little too cold.
But the projection room was the real deal. Nobody ever
saw inside it. The door was metal with a sliding bolt,
and this weird little rectangular window right at the top
that was always dark. We used to dare each other

(07:00):
to knock on it after the movie ended. Nobody ever
lasted more than a second or two before running away.
One time, after a midnight showing, someone swore they heard
a voice say thank you when they left the popcorn behind.
That story went around school like wildfire, and by the
end of the week kids were accidentally leaving candy on

(07:22):
the floor just to see if it would disappear, and
it always did. Looking back, I'm sure the janitor just
cleaned it up, or maybe one of the employees picked
it up to avoid attracting mice, but we believed it.
When you're that young, everything's real, even the names they
call you. I never actually saw anything, but I thought

(07:45):
I did. Once I was walking back from the bathroom
during a movie. The hallway was empty, quiet except for
the muffled bass coming through the wall. As I passed
a storage closet, I heard a cough, and when I
turned the doorknob was moving just a little, like someone
had let go of it. I told my friends, but

(08:06):
they laughed it off, said that it was probably the
sound system, or maybe my imagination, and maybe it was.
Something about that moment stuck with me. Not because I
was scared, but because of how normal it felt. Like.
The idea of someone being in there with us, living
behind the scenes, wasn't that strange at all. We never

(08:28):
told adults, not seriously anyway. I mean, if you ask
someone's mom about the theater man, they would roll their
eyes and say, oh, that old story, as if it
was harmless, a town myth, nothing worth worrying about. The
idea of him stayed in the back of our heads.
He was part of the place, like the smell of
the carpet or the creek in theater tow's front row.

(08:50):
They stopped talking about him out loud, but none of
us ever truly forgot, And for a long time that
was it just a memory, weird, harmless story from when
we were kids until things started getting strange. But I'll
get to that. It wasn't sudden. That's what I remember

(09:13):
most about when things started to feel off. It wasn't
like one day everything was fine and the next it wasn't.
It was gradual, quiet, like the building didn't want to
come right out and say it. We were older by then, teenagers,
not little kids telling ghost stories anymore. We had part
time jobs cars, although beater ones, but real stress about

(09:35):
grades and breakups and where we would end up after
high school. But we still went to the Silver Savers sometimes,
especially in the fall when there wasn't much else to do,
cheap horror movies or reruns of old classics. They always
had a Halloween series in October, and that's when I
started noticing it. The first thing was the smell. Now

(09:58):
I know that sounds like nothing, but hear me out.
Movie theaters have a certain smell, right, popcorn, candy, soda,
the occasional mildew if the carpet's old, but this was different.
It would come in waves, and it will sour like
wet bread or spoiled fruit, almost earthy. It hit you
the strongest in the hallway by the projection room, and

(10:19):
sometimes in theater three near the back row. I remember
once leaning over to Jordan during a trailer and whispering,
do you smell that? And he just nodded, without taking
his eyes off the screen. Yeah, it's the theater man,
he said, half joking, but it wasn't funny anymore. There

(10:40):
were noises too, soft clicks, metallic knocks, ones. I was
in the bathroom alone, standing at the urinal when I
heard something from the event above me, like shuffling. I
finished up fast and got the heck out of there.
Didn't even wash my hands. That's not something you'll forget.
The next week, the vent cover was gone entirely, just

(11:01):
the black hole in the ceiling where the metal plate
used to be. I came back later. Someone must have
fixed it, but I never used that part of the
bathroom again. If you have. Us started comparing notes quietly,
like we didn't want to admit we were actually starting
to believe again. Sam, who used to work the snack counter,

(11:21):
told us once that the night crew kept finding popcorn
bags missing, just one or two at a time, but consistently,
no money missing, no force doors, just food. At first
they thought of raccoon had gotten in, but they couldn't
find any trace of one, no droppings, no scratch marks.
Then a manager reviewed the security tapes, and this is

(11:43):
the part that stuck with me. One of the cameras
in the hallway near the projection room just cut out
every night at a certain time, and no one talked
about that outside of the staff. But Sam swore it
was true. He said he heard the general manager went
up there one night he was going to check it
out in person. Then he quit the next day. People

(12:06):
stopped making jokes after that. I remember the last time
I saw something I couldn't explain. It was during a
school field trip. Weirdly enough, he brought us there to
see some historical documentary. Half the glass was asleep in
ten minutes, and I was in the back row board
chewing a piece of gum I found in my pocket
when I noticed something right out of the corner of

(12:29):
my eye near the left emergency exit, you know, the
one with a red exit sign that closed even during
the movie. There was a figure, just a shape, almost
like it was absorbing the light instead of reflecting it.
I turned my head fast, fully, expecting it to be
a trick of the projector or a backpack on a seat.

(12:50):
But when I looked was gone. There was nobody near
that exit. No. I didn't say anything, but I didn't forget.
Now I can still picture it, not clearly. It's like
trying to remember the details of a dream, but I
remember the feeling, that sharp, quiet knowledge that there was
someone else in that theater. We stopped going after that year.

(13:15):
Some of us graduated, some of us just got tired
of it. The Silver Savers felt weird, like it wasn't
meant for us anymore, like the space had changed, but
nobody knew how to say it out loud. When the
Silver Savers finally shut its doors, it was like the
town just decided not to talk about it. There wasn't
any news article or official reason, at least not that

(13:37):
I ever saw. There was no out of business sign,
no final show, no goodbye one weekend. It was open,
still selling popcorn and playing second run movies. The next
the place was locked up, lights off, the marquee blank.
At first, people assumed it was temporary, maybe plumbing issues

(13:57):
or a busted HVAC system, you know how old buildings are.
But months went by, then years. The posters in the
glass displays yellowed. One of them night at the museum,
I think stayed up for so long it looked like
a ghost version of itself. The corners curled inward, the
colors faded until Ben Stiller's face looked like it had

(14:18):
been soaked in coffee. Eventually someone taped cardboard over the doors,
plywood went up on the windows. People stopped cutting through
the alley right behind. It just became part of the scenery,
a dead spot on main street, something your eyes slid
over without thinking. I moved away for college not long

(14:45):
after that, and I didn't really think about silver Savers again,
at least not in any serious way. When I came
home to visit my parents, I would pass by it
and glance over it. How to have it? That was it?
The building just sat there like a sleeping dog you
didn't want to step too close to. But every once
in a while someone would say something. At parties and

(15:08):
group chats, and over drinks. When people got nostalgic, the
topic would come up. You would hear how the Silver
Savers still gave people the creeps. Now, no one ever
bought the property, even though there were rumors of developers
being interested. One guy said he saw lights on inside
ones late at night, but when he went to get
a closer look, everything was dark again. My friend Martha

(15:32):
told me that she swore she heard breathing through one
of the plywood boards as she walked past the side door.
We laughed at the time, like you do, but the
way she said it, that she didn't want to be
the one bringing it up, made me wonder if it
was true. And then there was Nick. Nick lived down
the street from the Silver Savers. His bedroom window faced

(15:53):
the back of the building, the part with the old
employee entrance and the rusted fire escape. One night, he
told us he was up late playing Xbox when he
saw something in his window reflection, just a flash like movement.
He turned around and looked outside. There was a figure
standing in the alley facing the theater door, not trying

(16:14):
to get in, just standing there. He said. It looked
like a man, maybe tall, shoulders, slightly hunched, like he
was listening to the building or waiting. But here's the
part that got me. Nick said, the guy was barefoot,
middle of February, two feet of snow on the ground,
and he was barefoot. He didn't call the police, just

(16:35):
pulled the current clothes and didn't look again. A week later,
he moved his bed to the other side of the
room and I asked him once years later if he
thought that it was some drifter or a guy on something.
He shook his head and said, it didn't feel like that, man.
It felt like he was supposed to be there, like
it knew the building. That stayed with me. By then,

(16:59):
the theater had been for almost a decade, windows still
boarded up, nobody touching it, like the whole town had
collectively decided to leave it alone. And then out of nowhere,
it reopened. I remember seeing a post about it on
social media, a sponsored ad, clean white logo, shiny concept photos.

(17:20):
The Silver Savers Experience now open, completely renovated, luxury seating,
all new atmosphere. At first I thought it was fake,
some scam or art project, but it wasn't. They had
really done it. New investors, new management, total gut job.

(17:40):
They stripped it down to the bones and rebuilt it
grand reopening. People lined up for hours on that first weekend,
posting selfies under the new Neon sign, kids with bubble teas,
couples with wine spritzers, like it had never been abandoned.
And I kept thinking they had no idea what used
to be there or what still might be. Because the

(18:03):
thing is, when buildings sit empty that long, they don't
always stay empty. Something always fills a space, and not
everything likes to be disturbed. I held off going for
as long as I could. Everyone else jumped right in,
posting videos tagging their new location, raving about the recliners

(18:25):
and elevated concessions. There was even a cheese board on
the menu, a cheese board at a movie theater, the
same place I once found a use band aid stuck
to the back of a seat arm rest. It felt
like everyone had agreed to pretend the past hadn't happened,
Like we all collectively forgot the boarded windows, the strange smells,

(18:46):
the stories we swore we believed only half seriously. I
kept telling myself it was just a building, bricks and drywall,
whatever weird vibe it had back then, was probably just
mold or bad wire, but I couldn't stop watching the videos.
People were documenting everything, tiktoks, blogs, instagram reels, come tour

(19:09):
the new Silver Savers, watch me try every sort of
flavor in the freestyle machine. Most of it was harmless, flashy,
edits dumb jokes, but there was a few clips that
made my stomach titan. One of them was just a
girl filming a review after the movie, front facing camera casual.
She's walking through the hallway on the way to the bathroom,

(19:30):
talking about how comfy the seats were when behind her,
just for a split second, you can see someone standing
in the shadow under the emergency exit sign, not moving,
not a blur, just there, and then the motion sensor
hallway light flicks on and there's no one. People in
the comments were debating it just another guest, could be

(19:53):
a reflection, but she swears that she was the last
one out, and her caption said, I thought that the
had emptied. No one else came out behind me. Who
TF is that? Here's another clip too, a different account,
the short video of a kid running around the new
game lounge area they built in the old snack bar space.

(20:15):
The mom's filming him laughing when suddenly the camera tilts
toward one of the big air vents high up on
the wall, and you hear it, just a slow rhythmic
sound like breathing, a slow and human and then it
cuts off. Now the mom's follow up, Poe said that
they left early and the kid refused to go back,

(20:36):
kept saying that the man in the wall was watching me.
She said it like a joke, added the laughing emoji
and everything, but her face in the video didn't match
the caption. And here's the part that really got under
my skin. The Silver Savers started deleting comments, not all
of them, just the ones asking questions, people saying did

(20:59):
anyone else hear this? And those would vantage within a day.
I even tried commenting once, just to test it, like
that vent noise is creepy, right, And the comment was
gone the next time I checked. That's when I started
digging around just a little. I still knew someone who
worked there, Claire, an old friend from high school. She

(21:19):
was managing the night shifts and remember the theater from
the old days too. I messaged her, half joking, so
how's the ghost treating you? She didn't laugh. Instead, she
called me. She said she didn't want to put it
in writing, saying that some weird stuff had been happening
during the cleanup shifts. Popcorn machines running by themselves, trash

(21:40):
bags torn open when no one had gone near them.
She swore she heard someone whisper her name from the
back hallway. During closing, the cameras showed nothing, no one there.
But the weirdest part that security footage started cutting out again,
just like before, same time every night, around three am,

(22:02):
one of the lobby cameras goes fuzzy, just for a
few seconds, always the same stretch of hallway, always the
same few frames missing. She asked the tech guy to
look into it, and he said the files were technically fine,
no corruption, no sign of tempering. It was like the
footage never existed in the first place. Claire said the

(22:23):
owners told them to ignore it, to focus on customer experience, smile, clean,
and keep things moving. She asked me, then, kind of quietly,
do you think it's possible someone stayed here all this time?
And I said, the first honest thing that came to
my mind in weeks, I don't think they ever left.

(22:45):
Because the thing is it doesn't make sense. Nobody could
survive in there for that long, not without being seen,
not through all those winters, not without heat or food
or someone noticing. But stories are all the same, the
same shadow, it was the same sounds, same feeling, And
if it's not a man, then what the heck is it.

(23:08):
I didn't tell anyone I was going back again. I
told myself I wasn't going to I was just being dramatic.
But about a week after that first visit, I bought
another ticket, a late show, almost empty theater, and I
sat in the back row again, same seat, left side.
Wasn't even about the movie at that point, barely remember
what it was playing, something loud and forgettable. I just

(23:32):
needed to see if that feeling was still there, or
if it had just been in my head. It wasn't.
It was worse this time. The theater was quiet. When
I got there. There were maybe four or five other people,
all scattered through the lower rows. One guy in front
of me was eating out of a takeout container with chopsticks,
the globe of his phone lighting up on his lap.

(23:54):
Another girl sat alone with a blanket over her knees,
huge headphones over her ears. The lights dimmed. Everything felt tight,
like the room was one size too small for the
people in it. The air had that stale, over filtered quality,
like the hotel room where the windows don't open. I
try to breathe through it, focus on the screen. And

(24:17):
then I heard the sound a soft click up behind
me and slightly to the left, not part of the movie,
like metal tapping against metal rhythmically, but without purpose. I
turned to look, but all I saw was the ceiling
and the glowing exit sign near the projection room door.
I shifted in my seat. That click kept happening, faint

(24:41):
but there, and then the vent near the ceiling, the
one I hadn't noticed until just then, made a low,
creaking noise, like pressure building up or something inside adjusting.
I looked around again. No one else seemed to notice.
It was like I was the only one tuned into it,

(25:01):
like the room was splitting in half and night somehow
ended up on the side that could hear what was real.
Halfway through the movie, my phone died. Not run out
of battery. It died one second. I was at sixty
two percent. The next black screen nothing. I held the
power button, try plugging it into the c SUSB port. Nothing,

(25:22):
and then out of the corner of my eye, I
saw a movement down in the far right corner of
the theater, near the emergency exit. A shadow passed along
the wall, not someone walking out. There was no door sound,
no handle rattle, no exit light flashing, just a shape
and a little taller than most people, thin shoulders angled forward.

(25:47):
It didn't move like a person. I didn't stay until
the end. I waited until the next big sound effect
hit a crash, something with bass, and I used it
to cover the sound of me getting up and leaving.
Swapped out, calmly, trying not to give whatever it was
the satisfaction of knowing that it had gotten to me.

(26:07):
Once I was out on the lobby, I look back
through the glass doors. Nothing, just the dim light of
the hallway and the faraway flicker of the screen. I
haven't gone back since. Sometimes I think about telling someone
the podcast, a reporter, someone who investigates that kind of thing.

(26:28):
But then what who do I say that a woman's
kid saw a man watching him from a vent, that
I felt something watching me in a perfectly clean, modern
building where nothing officially ever went wrong. Who would care?
People don't believe in that kind of thing anymore, Not now,
not with phones in every pocket, cameras on every ceiling,

(26:51):
not with everything scrubbed and modernized and made safe. They
think ghosts starts supposed to be old, crumbling things, creaky
floor board and candlelight and dusty attic doors. But the
worst ones, the ones that stay, they adapt, They learn
how to hide in plain sight. So now when I

(27:13):
drive past the Silver Savers, I keep my eyes on
the road. If someone brings it up, by nod and
smile like everyone else, I let them talk about the
chairs and the drinks and how the sound system is
just incredible. Now I don't say anything because I don't
know what it is. I don't know if it was

(27:34):
ever a man. I don't know if it wants to
be seen or if it's just waiting for the people
who remember it. Scary Story Podcast is written and produced
by me Edwin Kobarubjaz. A huge shout out to our

(27:56):
Scary Plus members and supporters. We got an over amount
of story ideas, so I'll be getting to those and
keep everyone posted on what's coming. Oh, if you want
to listen to some stories submitted by listeners, find my
show called Paranormal Club and check out the episode that
say Listeners Submissions. It's where we get together to tell
creepy stories. To find the podcast on your app, just

(28:17):
search for Paranormal Club anyway, If you're following the show,
I will tell you another story next week. Thank you
very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.