Folklore of Enid's Performing Past:

"Spirited" Stories Surrounding the Places and People of Enid's Oldest Theatres.

A Project for Mythology & Folklore, by Brady Henderson

 Stories of the Knox Building: Meeting George

Enid’s old Masonic Temple, at the top of the Knox Building, has always harbored strange and unnatural things.  The stories have abounded about lights and noises, and even spirits haunting the place.  Though these make sense when you think about the fact that it’s almost a century old and has been shrouded in mystery ever sense being built.  From the original secret Masonic rituals to the temple’s abrupt and unexplained closure in 1946, little is known about what really happened in the building’s past.  Even after its renovation and now frequent use as Enid’s Symphony Center, strange things still happen there.

A short time ago, Douglas Newell, the symphony’s director for over eighteen years and the one who first eyed the Knox as a target for rebirth, was working alone one night in the main hall preparing the stage for an upcoming concert.  While hard at work, something above caught his eye, and he glanced upward at the side boxes of the hall.   To his surprise, he saw that all the chairs were set right up against the rail, hardly a concert arrangement.  Perplexed, Newell walked through the lobby and climbed the stairs that give access to the balcony and boxes.  After setting the chairs back in the appropriate places, he returned to the stage below.  Again something caught his eye, and sure enough, the chairs were again poised at the rail.  Though he knew something was very wrong, Newell was perhaps to tired to completely grasp what was going on.  And so he went about going up and again rearranging the chairs.  Finally upon returning to the stage, he again looked above him.  For the third time, all six chairs were pressed against the front rail.  Newell was dumbfounded.  How could these chairs keep moving?  Thus for the third time he entered the lobby, but then to his surprise heard footsteps descending the stairs from boxes.  To his temporary relief, there appeared a portly repairman, in an old uniform with “George” on the nametag.  Newell said “hello” in a friendly manner, but was met with staunch silence as the figure walked right past him, turning briefly to give a spiteful stare and puff on the stub of a cigar in his mouth, before disappearing down the stairs. 

The next day, Newell happened to be talking to the building manager and mentioned something about seeing a repairman.  The manager replied perplexedly that nobody had been called to fix anything, and that he hadn’t let anybody in that night.  Overhearing them, a local electrician who had done work on the Symphony hall before blurted out, “you must have seen George.”  “Yes,” said Newell, “that was the name on his shirt, but what was he doing there?”  The electrician said nothing, but came to Newell’s office a few days later with a decades-old newspaper article.  It began “Local Repairman George ____ Dies in Tragic Fall Down Knox Building Elevator Shaft…”  Newell now understood why “George” had left the lobby via the stairs.

An elevator shaft similar to that in the Knox Building.

Based on an interview with Douglass Newell, of Enid Oklahoma, about 45 years of age, conducted 9-11-2000 by Brady Henderson; and an interview with Dena Haselwander, also of Enid, about 40 years of age, conducted 9-11-2000 by Brady Henderson.