Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

Frederick Baker was an opera singer – and he loved his job. He enjoyed it so much, in fact, that he still shows up for work even though he’s been deceased for over a century. He died during a performance, you see, and opera house visitors who’ve never even heard of him claim to see his ashen figure still lurking about.

The stage is a popular place for ghosts, apparently. After all – just last week we told you about Michael Jackson’s spectre breaking up a sexy children’s nativity play.

This week we’re telling you about Frederick “Federici” Baker, a famed opera singer who kicked the bucket while playing the role of Mephistopheles. He was theatrically lowered into the very bowels of hell, as the script called for, and once there he gave up the ghost. The ghost, however, couldn’t give up the theatre.

As Wikipedia explains things:

“On the evening of 3 March 1888, the baritone Frederick Baker, known as “Federici”, was performing the role of Mephistopheles in Gounod’s opera Faust . This production ended with Mephistopheles sinking dramatically through a trapdoor returning to the fires of hell with his prize, the unfortunate Dr Faustus. The audience was spellbound. As the audience held its collective breath as Federici was lowered down through the stage into this basement, he had a heart attack and died immediately.”

And while he lay down there dying, activity on the stage carried on as usual. The cast took their final bow, the audience applauded and every husband in the audience was just glad their pain was over. That’s when the first sighting occurred:

Wikipedia gives us these goods as well:

“[Federici] never came back onstage, never took the bows. When the company was gathered together to be told that Federici had died, they asked, “When?”. Being told of what had happened at the end of the opera, they said, “He’s just been onstage and taken the bows with us.”"

Through the years others have seen Baker’s ghost floating around dressed in evening attire. Eighty years later, in fact, the ghoul was captured on film. According to Justin Murphy, a man who gave an interview on Australian TV:

“When this dramatised documentary was made by Kennedy Miller in the early 1970s, a photograph of the film set revealed an ashen-faced, partly transparent observer. No-one on the set saw the figure on that day. Only the photograph revealed it. It is one of many actual sightings.”

And that’s not all – a cleaning lady had an encounter too. Her name is Trina Dimovska, and this is what happened in her words:

“Something, I felt, bad behind me. It just touched my hair and my shoulders and my body on the back. And I just, like, frozen. I know what there is, because no-one was there – no human. Only me myself, because the theatre was closed.”

And that’s that. All poor Federici wanted to do was make his descent into hell completely believable, and he did so by sending his inner demon back on stage for the final curtain call.

Now that’s dedication.

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