Theatres are notorious for ghosts and legends, mysterious figures and sounds – but when workers at one venue in upstate New York heard strange noises, officials soon found a real-life trapped naked man.
Employees at Landmark Theatre in Syracuse on Friday morning called authorities after hearing banging and muffled cries for help.
The Syracuse Fire Department responded, “drilled a hole in the wall and utilized a fiber-optic camera to determine his exact location and how best to extricate him,” the department said in a Facebook post. “Firefighters were then able to free the individual after carefully cutting through several layers of drywall and structural clay tile.
“He was treated and transported to Upstate University Hospital by AMR.”
The man reportedly had entered the theatre two or three days beforehand.
Mike Intaglietta, executive director of the theatre, told Syracuse.com that the man had been seen wandering through the theatre earlier in the week but staff thought he’d left.
“I don’t know if he was entering to keep warm or to use the bathroom,” he said.
Whatever the individual’s motivations, Syracuse Fire Deputy Chief John Kane told Syracuse.com that the man found a crawl space and hid for two days before falling behind a wall of the men’s bathroom and becoming trapped.
The name and condition of the man has not yet been released.
Bizarrely, this is not an isolated incident of someone naked getting trapped in the wall of a public establishment.
In 2017, a man without clothes also had to be rescued by the fire department from behind the wall of a fast-food joint in California.
"Sometime early this morning while businesses were closed, 48-year-old Robert Turbidy found himself on the roof of the south Napa Togo’s/Baskin-Robbins," police said in a 14 March 2017 release, according to the Napa Valley Register.
"He lowered himself into a crawl space using a makeshift rope that broke. Robert was stuck at the bottom of the crawl space and without access to the businesses," police said.
Fire Department Battalion Chief Charlie Rhodes said at the time that firefighters found the entrapped man curled in the fetal position.
"He was very relieved,” Chief Rhodes said. “He said he had been there for about eight hours.
"This was a very unique situation," Rhodes added – but given the latest New York theatre drama and a rake of other incidents ... perhaps it was not.
