Paranormal investigators say they captured ghostly image in Biddeford City Theater

A team of paranormal investigators believes it has captured a photo of the ghost of Eva Gray climbing the back stairs of Biddeford City Theater, where she’s said to have collapsed at the end of a performance and died backstage more than 100 years ago.

EVP Paranormal of Maine visited the theater on Dec. 19 and spent four hours taking infrared video footage, which showed what it believes looks like a woman in a dress on the stairs. The group posted a video with the image on its Facebook page Thursday.

Caroline Mezoian, 51, of Saco, who founded the group with Beverly Young of Buxton, said she thought the story about Gray – that she died the day before Halloween in 1904 singing “Good-Bye Little Girl, Good-Bye” with her 3-year-old daughter in the audience – seemed contrived.

“I didn’t really believe it, to be honest,” she said.

But when she saw the figure in the footage, Mezoian said, she almost fell out of her chair.

“Once you see the photo of it, how can you deny that there’s not something?” she said.

Skeptics, however, say such images, which aren’t uncommon, are the result of issues with photo equipment or configurations of light.

Although Mezoian believes the image is that of a woman, she will admit there’s no way to say whether it is Gray, who is known as the resident ghost of the theater, where previous sightings have been reported.

The womanly figure also wasn’t the only ghostly image that the team of five captured during the visit.

“I caught a man in the balcony, too,” she said, as well as what looked like a huge flame.

Mezoian said her team, which usually investigates homes, has never captured a “full-body apparition” in its four years of conducting paranormal investigations, but attributes that to only recently getting more sophisticated equipment.

She said they plan to return to try to determine whether what they saw was residual energy or an intelligent spirit.