The historic Wink Theatre in Dalton is said by some who worked there in its heyday as a theater to have been haunted.

DALTON, Ga. — Built more than 70 years ago, the Wink Theatre is said to be Dalton’s first air-conditioned building, and generations of Daltonians have fond memories of Friday nights and Saturday afternoons spent watching movies there.

But for those who worked at the Wink in its heyday as a theater it’s known for something else.

“People who have worked there over the years have reported a number of ghostly happenings,” said Jim Miles, author of “Haunted North Georgia.” 

“Nobody has actually seen a person, but one person said she saw a dark shape and then the film started to unravel from the reels,” he said.

But Miles said most of the paranormal activity reported over the years concerned sound.

“For example, during some renovations, a worker was doing some hammering. He stopped, but the hammering sound continued,” Miles said.

Dale Hurst lived with those sounds for a long time. His father Leon took over as manager of the Wink in 1971.

Hurst says his father would routinely hear children playing outside his office inside the theater.

And Hurst said he had his own experiences with the bizarre. He recalls one afternoon when he’d just finished a “changeover,” turning off one movie reel and turning on another, and returned to the balcony to watch the movie.

“I had an old metal stool in the projection room,” he said. “And it sounded to me like somebody had picked that stool up and was just beating the crap out of the projection room. Bam! Bam! Bam! I ran back in. And nothing was out of place. It was just like I left it.”

Hurst was also the janitor who had to clean up at the end of the night.

“One night I was down front, sweeping up. And the aisles of the Wink are pretty steep. I had my back turned, and it sounded like somebody running down the aisle,” he said. “They sounded really clumsy. It sounded like they came right up behind me. I turned around, and there was nobody there.”

Hurst notes that the theater opened back in the 1940s.

“It had a lot of wood in it. It had an old boiler. That can explain a lot of the noises. But there were also a lot I just can’t explain,” he said.