Police respond to eerie reports of ghost riding parking garage elevator
Rockford, Illinois police got a creepy surprise when they responded to a bizarre call last week. Following up on a call about a ghost in a parking garage, authorities arrived only to find an elevator moving on its own.
The garage, which sits across from the notoriously haunted Coronado Theater, is known for freaking out the occasional bystander with its passenger-less midnight rides, but the latest report was the weirdest yet.
“Coronado in the elevator,” the police scanner crackled. “It just keeps going up and down, in the elevator. Unknown if they’re stuck or what’s going on. She can see through the glass was to be a person wearing all white inside the elevator.”
When police arrived on the scene, they discovered the elevator repeatedly moving from the 7th floor to the basement, but the mysterious woman in white was nowhere to be found. According to a local historian, the ghostly apparition might be the same spirit reported in the nearby Coronado Theater numerous times throughout the years.
“It sounded an awful lot like the woman in white that’s supposedly seen at the Coronado,” Haunted Rockford Tour Guide Kathi Kresol told local news. “That led me to believe that maybe something could possibly be there. I dont think that a ghost is necessarily tied to one place.”
No one is certain who the lady in white is supposed to be, only that it could possibly be the spirit of Mrs. Van Matre, one of the previous owners of the Coronado Theater.
An employee of the theater, Dwayne, has had several strange encounters including seeing an apparition of a lady in white moving among the seats in the balcony before totally disappearing. He was also witness to an event along with organist Don who was here late one evening rehearsing on the organ when they both heard a door on the stage open. Looking towards the exit sign, they saw a dark figure of a man. As they moved in his direction and even called out to him, he vanished. This encounter happened in 1970.
If you ain’t afraid of no ghost, you can scope out the Coronado for yourself, but chances are you’ll have a better chance of running into Bill Cosby or the Blue Man group than the white lady. But hey, you should bring your camera just in case.