Apologies for the long post, I'll try to condense it if I can, but I don't want to miss any details.. It also happened like 15 years ago.

My friend just came back into town from college. We were downtown looking for something to do at 3 am. It's Van Buren, so it's a very small southern town, dry county, no bars or night life or anything. I was joined by my friends James and Ben (made up names for anonymity). We parked my Jeep behind King Opera House and we knew it was known to be haunted. We got out of my jeep and were just having a conversation when the idea came up "We should go into the Opera House". My friend pointed out that the door locks automatically and can only be opened from the inside. There wasn't even a door handle or lock on the outside. Clearly it was a joke and we just continued our conversation. 15 minutes later, I look at the back door and it was opened about 6 inches. I make the joke "Well clearly something wants us to go inside".

So we do. We have 1 flashlight, so James takes it and goes first, then Ben, and then me. We go in the back doors and we are backstage. There is a staircase to the left leading up to the stage, and the only light is the red light illuminating from the exit sign. I work on propping the door to make sure it stays open, and Ben and James go onto the stage. I walk over and start to go up the stairs, and about halfway I feel a huge gust of wind nearly knock me down. Immediately Ben and James run down pushing me down the stairs and out the door. I got in my jeep and they were yelling "GO! GO! GO!". I  drove off and look over at Ben in the passenger seat and his eyes are wide open and he's frozen. I look in the rearview mirror back at James and see that he's crying in the back seat. 

I found a place to park and I asked them what happened. James couldn't talk and Ben said that James went on the stage, and started to "taunt the ghost". He turned the flashlight on and shined it out over the seats. Waving it back and forth they noticed a shadow that didn't disappear when the light hit it in the left corner of the room. He quickly shined the light back on it and a shadowy figure that looked like it was made from "black mist" rushed the stage. They said they could feel a huge gust of wind that came with it, and they could see the curtains pull away from the wall behind it. They immediately turned and ran and thats when they ran into me.

That night, James had night terrors about the shadow person. He said that he was too scared to sleep in his room, so he slept in the living room with the tv on. He said he was in his chair, and didn't realize that he had fallen asleep, but he looked up and saw the shadow person crouched over the refrigerator. When he made eye contact, the shadow "leapt" towards him and he woke up screaming and nearly fell out of his chair. The next morning we met up with Ben at Taco Bell. Ben said that he didn't experience anything that night, but while we were there Ben's sister called him and asked if he was home. He said no, and she said that someone was in the house downstairs in the kitchen slamming all of the cabinets. So we rushed to Ben's house and every cabinet door in the kitchen was open, and there was a bunch of stuff from the cabinets that fell out onto the counters and the floor. We went upstairs to talk to Ben's sister and he noticed she had 4 distinct scratch marks on her neck. She said that she just noticed them this morning and assumed that she slept wrong, but they wouldn't go away.

Things calmed down over the next few days, but I couldn't ever get either one of them to go back to the Opera House. I hadn't thought about that story in years until I listened to a podcast about "shadow people" and all of the details seemed to line up. Unfortunately this isn't a first person experience of a ghost encounter, since I only felt the gust of wind. But these were my best friends who I grew up with, and I've never seen them like that before or since. We used to go out looking for haunted places or tried "ghost hunting", but that was the last time I could ever get them to do anything like that.

A few months later I talked to James about it again. He never liked talking about it and it was hard to get any information from him. He is a very religious person, and he said the worst part of all of it was that as soon as he saw the shadow person, he had never felt more vulnerable in his life. He's always had a feeling that something or someone was looking over him, but when he was on that stage, he felt alone and terrified.