About one in four people say they’ve actually seen a ghost or felt a ghost’s presence, according to the Associated Press. Local ghost trackers say Chicago is one of the world’s most haunted cities, namely, because of its propensity for disaster, murder and corruption. The play, Ghost Watch, by Chicago playwright Richard Engling opens this Friday. The play premiered in 1987, but it’s been revived and is haunting a local theatre this Halloween season. 
 
For Chicago Public Radio, Blair Chavis reports.
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Ghost Watch is a sexy, paranormal, horror story based on Richard Engling’s own encounter with a ghost in 1980.

ENGLING: Well the story of what caused the haunting grew out of my experience.

Engling says his small “cockroach apartment” in Edgewater was haunted by a woman and her presumably male murderer. Living there, Engling sometimes felt a strange sense of rage when he’d go in and out of the apartment door.

ENGLING: I came up with the fictional four lead characters as people who would come into this. And because I had had that experience of feeling like I was that guy for that split second, I thought oh, what if this was able to infect someone so that they would repeat this horror. In the play: Adam, a bankrupt film maker, his fragile girlfriend, Jessi, and their two ex’s Kendall and Alana, are tangled in a love quadrangle. Adam ropes his friends into helping him stake out a haunted Edgewater apartment, in hopes of getting the ghosts on video. Sarah Pitard, who plays the role of Jessi, says the play’s ghost was involved in a love triangle.

PITARD (JESSI): The ghost story in the apartment is that there was a woman who was having an affaire with a man in the apartment, and the husband broke into the apartment and killed her and then chased the lover down the fire escape…because he had seen the devil.

Excerpt from “Ghost Watch”:

KATHRYN DANIELS (MARGARET): Evil is real and you know it. FRANK SAWA (ADAM): Evil is a thing people do. It doesn’t go floating around on its own. Where did you see the apparition?
DANIELS (MARGARET): Right there.
SAWA (ADAM): (Makes ghost noises).
(Fades out)

That’s Frank Sawa who plays “Adam,” and Kathryn Daniels who’s playing “Margaret,” the apartment’s owner. Adam doesn’t realize he’s putting his friends in paranormal danger. Pitard says her character, Jessi, has demons that are more human.

PITARD(JESSI): I come from an abusive family. My step-father molested my character as a child. I’m attracted to men who are somewhat…I don’t know if abusive would be the right word, but definitely… aggressive.

Jessi is soon confronted by her abusive ex-boyfriend, Kendall, who returns to beg her forgiveness. Meanwhile, Adam’s seductive ex-girlfriend, Alana, concocts a plan to return the ex’s to their original partners. Actor Frank Sawa:

SAWA: She brings the “sexy,” I think, in the sexy thriller that is “Ghost Watch.”

Sex and evil tango throughout the show; Kendall pays serious dues for being seduced by evil. Kendall is played by Keith Neagle.

NEAGLE (KENDALL): His inner demons are the ones that ultimately pull him down. And of course, you know, the apartment helps with that, by possessing him, but I think, you know, his own paranoia and inner guilt and demons…I think he just, he gets there that much quicker.

The characters in the play, like ghosts, can get stuck in a sort of purgatory, repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

Ambi: Screams from a scene in “Ghost Watch”

The play is packed with ghost hunter favorites: a séance, a Ouiji Board, video cameras and thermometers for those ghostly “cold spots.” Playwright Richard Engling says the ghost he saw back in Edgewater in 1980 was of a woman kneeling on the floor.

ENGLING: She was in the area where the little, tiny dining table was. And she was translucent; she was like a glowing white color.

Engling says he thinks she looked terrified, kneeling by the wall, as if she were hiding from a murderer.

ENGLING: Once I started getting really satisfied with the fictional story, I no longer really cared all that much about what was real, so I personally never researched it, I don’t know.
URSULA BIELSKI: When you talk about experiences with the paranormal, you get to the point where, you know, you just have to take one ridiculous explanation over the other.

That’s Chicago ghost expert and writer, Ursula Bielski. Bielski says it doesn’t help that many people have paranormal experiences when they’re half asleep—like Engling did.

BIELSKI: I mean there are just some phenomena that occur that are not explained by science today. It might also turn out that we need to keep the past with us, and so we produce phenomena that a lot of people can experience and share because we have a need to keep the past alive.

But, did a murder ever really occur in the playwright’s building at all? Engling’s ghost story has some holes—like the victims’ names…or even a year. Neither the local libraries, Chicago police, nor the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office could search a homicide on Engling’s address, alone. Imagine searching for a possible murder that could have been committed by anyone at any time. At best, Engling’s ghost encounter sparked a great idea for a play.

For Chicago Public Radio, I'm Blair Chavis.

Ghost Watch opens November 2 at the Irish American Hertiage Center and will run through November 25.