The Comedy Store is rumored to be haunted. So we went ghost hunting with the pros — and we didn’t find any.
This was an unusual visit for two reasons: the timing was lousy — which means we didn’t get to sit in the original Comedy Store — and the trip was funded by our readers.
This story was originally published on October 6, 2009 in the Washington Post’s Sunday blog.
When I told my dad last March that I was planning to visit the Comedy Store, I didn’t know where I was going. I asked, “Anywhere near Annapolis?”
This was a joke. Dad has a theater I visit routinely, but I wasn’t asking about that one. This was more about that one. I told him there was a theater on Ocean Road in Annapolis, an area that’s always been kind of a destination in the summer, mostly populated with retirees in a retirement community. On the way to Annapolis, I’d stop at the Comedy Store, which I’d recently discovered when a friend of my dad’s, a doctor, told me about it. Now wasn’t the time to mention this to Dad, but I did, and he gave me his address.
It turned out that the address was good, but the theater wasn’t where I expected it to be. And when I finally arrived in Annapolis, I got a big surprise. “How does this happen?” I asked my dad, sitting in his office in the hotel we were staying at in town. He explained that I was on the way to the Comedy Store and wouldn’t show up at his office. Instead, he was scheduled to go to a meeting at the police department that afternoon, but on his way to the meeting, he heard on the radio that the Comedy Store’s closed, and he turned around.
When I asked him where he was going, he said, “You’re going to the same place I’m going.”
I didn’t know where he was going, but, of course, this was a joke. He was going to the same place that had been the Comedy Store’s home since 1956.