The Curator of the Last Reel

I’m Marcus Hale, senior technician and resident skeptic for the Midwest Paranormal Collective. We’re a tight-knit crew of former employees from the defunct Northgate Amusement Park, a sprawling, decaying relic of mid-century Americana that closed its gates for good in 1989. The park has been a magnet for urban explorers and ghost hunters ever since, but we have a unique claim: we’ve catalogued over a dozen distinct hauntings, and we’ve given them names out of respect for the park’s history. Northgate’s corporate owners, now a hollow shell of a legal entity, have asked us to keep the names out of public reports to avoid attracting more trespassers. I’ll comply, but I’m not bound by their PR concerns. I’m writing this for the record, for anyone who dares to listen.

Our most persistent and terrifying resident is the Lady of the Arcade. Most locals call her ‘Violet,’ but that’s a lie. The Lady of the Arcade has no name that anyone living can pronounce. She’s most often seen in the gutted shell of the Grand Carousel Pavilion, but she’s been spotted in the old Funhouse and the empty Reflections Theater, which still smells of stale popcorn and ammonia from the projector years. She is not a lost soul in the romantic sense; she is a keeper, a collector, and the arcade is her gallery.

My first encounter with her was during a routine audio sweep in August 2023. I was alone, after midnight, running a handheld recorder through the Carousel Pavilion. The structure was a skeletal ruin, the merry-go-round’s horses long since auctioned off, leaving only the cracked concrete platform and a rusted pole where the center hub once stood. The air was hot and thick, and I could smell the faint, sweet scent of cotton candy that had no business lingering after thirty-four years. I was about to pack up when I heard it: a soft, rhythmic creaking, like a rocking chair moving steadily on old floorboards. I followed the sound to the back corner, where a tattered velvet curtain hung over a doorway that led to the maintenance tunnels. The curtain swayed, but there was no wind.

I stepped closer, and the creaking stopped. Then, from the darkness beyond the curtain, came a voice—not whispery or ghostly, but crisp and clear, like a woman speaking through a tin-can telephone. It said, ‘You are not watching. You are only recording. That is not why you are here.’ I froze. My heart hammered. The voice was not threatening, but it was commanding, almost pedagogical. I responded, my voice shaky, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ The curtain billowed, and for a split second, I saw a silhouette—tall, thin, wearing what looked like a vintage film projectionist’s apron. Then the creaking resumed, now coming from directly behind me. I spun around, and the Pavilion was empty, but my recorder had picked up a low-frequency hum that our audio engineer later identified as the sound of a film reel spinning at twenty-four frames per second—on a device that had no film.

A week later, my colleague, Dana, a former ride operator with a steel nerve, was in the Reflections Theater, setting up motion sensors. The theater had been the park’s grandest attraction, a 500-seat cinema that showed a loop of park promos and old cartoons. The screen was a tattered sheet of canvas, and the seats were torn and water-stained. Dana was on the stage, adjusting a tripod, when she noticed a figure in the projection booth, a small, rectangular window high on the back wall. The figure was a woman in a black dress, her face obscured by shadow. Dana called out, ‘Hey, you’re not supposed to be in here. This area is closed.’ The figure raised a hand and pointed at the screen. Dana turned to look. The screen flickered, and then it wasn’t canvas anymore—it was a real, moving picture. She saw a film of a family riding a carousel, laughing, the sun bright on their faces. The footage was from the 1960s, judging by the clothes. Then the image skipped, like a warped reel, and the family vanished, replaced by a child’s birthday party in the arcade, with the exact same carousel horses spinning in the background. The image froze on a close-up of a little girl’s face, her eyes wide with joy, but the joy was wrong—too bright, too long. Dana felt a cold wash over her, and the woman in the booth whispered, so close to Dana’s ear that she could feel breath, ‘My first acquisition.’

Dana ran out of the theater, and I met her in the courtyard, where she was shaking. She described the woman, and I showed her the audio transcript from my encounter. We both realized we had seen the same entity. That’s when we started calling her ‘The Curator.’ Our research uncovered the park’s history: in 1972, a fire broke out in the arcade building, killing a woman who was the park’s official photographer. Her name was Edna, and she had a macabre obsession—she took photos of every guest who entered the park, and she archived them in a private collection she called ‘The Last Reel.’ The fire destroyed most of the building, but Edna’s body was never found. The park closed the arcade for good, and the theater was repurposed, but employees reported strange occurrences for years: the smell of film emulsion, the sound of a camera shutter, and the feeling of being watched from the projection booth.

Our team decided to stake out the theater, determined to capture the Curator on video. We set up a 360-degree camera on the stage and a thermal imager pointed at the booth. At 2 AM, the camera’s battery died without warning, and the thermal imager showed a cold anomaly forming in the shape of a woman near the center aisle. The anomaly moved toward the screen, and then the screen lit up with the same birthday footage as before, but now the little girl in the film noticed the camera. She turned her head, looked directly at the lens, and mouthed, ‘Remember me.’ Then the film cut to a rapid sequence of faces—hundreds of them, all from different eras, all staring into the camera, their expressions flat. We heard a mechanical whirr, and the camera on stage turned itself on, as if being remotely operated. It panned across the theater and stopped on the projection booth. The booth’s window was now open, and a single reel of film was hanging out, flapping like a flag. Dana grabbed the reel, but it was stuck fast, as if glued. I pulled out a pair of scissors and cut the film. As soon as the film snapped, the temperature in the theater rose ten degrees, and the faces on the screen vanished. The projector’s light went dark.

We took the reel to our lab, a dingy basement we rent from a retired film archivist. We developed the film—it was old stock, but some frames were recognizable. We saw the carousel, the arcade, the theater itself, but every frame was overlaid with a ghostly double exposure: a woman’s face, half-turned away, like she was about to look over her shoulder. The final frame was a close-up of a woman’s mouth, open in a silent scream. Next to the mouth, we saw faint lettering, as if scratched into the film: ‘MY COLLECTION GROWS.’ We haven’t returned to Northgate since that night, but the Curator doesn’t seem to need the park anymore. Last week, Dana was at a family picnic, and she took a photo of her niece with her phone. When she looked at the image later, the background didn’t match the park they were at—it was the Reflections Theater, and in the third row, a woman in a black dress was sitting, staring at the camera. And in the girl’s eyes, there was a tiny reflection of the carousel, spinning.

Now I’m the one who has to write this report, knowing that my words could be a new acquisition. I’ve started to see her in my peripheral vision, always turning away when I focus. I’ve started to leave my camera running in my apartment at night. I’m not a skeptic anymore. I’m the one who knows that the Curator doesn’t just collect the dead—she collects the moments before they die, and she saves them, like a film reel that never ends. I don’t know how to stop her, but I know one thing: every person she takes, she gives them a role in her endless picture show. And if you see the woman in the booth, just keep your eyes on the screen, because she doesn’t like to be ignored. But if you look away, you might just become her next feature.

I’m going to end this file now. I’ve backed it up to three drives, but I know she’s already seen it. I can feel her watching me as I type, a cold tickle at the back of my neck. If you find this report, please don’t publish it with a sensationalized title. I don’t want her to know I care. Just remember: the last reel is the longest, and it never stops spinning. And she’s always in the booth, rewinding, ready to play you again.