Reporter Corey Levitan checks out President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy as he works as the night watchman at Madame Tussaud's Las Vegas. Photos by Jane Kalinowsky.
Levitan checks a hall by Don King after hearing a door slam.
Matt Dodge, the real night watchman, instructs Levitan how to check the museum's emergency exit doors.
Jennifer Lopez's cheeks blush when you rub her rear.
Levitan inspects Madonna's uncannily realistic wax figure as Tupac Shakur -- who was murdered less than a mile from the museum -- raps in the background. The museum's lights and audio tracks remain on all night because of a temporary software glitch.
Elvis thanks you very much when you squeeze his hand.
Before beginning his shift, Levitan, pretending to be a wax figure, tries to frighten some tourists spying through the museum's closed front entrance. Later, the joke will be on him.
We both heard it. The sound was distinct.
"The practical side of me says it was the wind seeping through two doors," says Matt Dodge. "But a part of me thinks it was a female singing."
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Dodge, 27, is the facilities manager for Madame Tussaud's at The Venetian. In addition to fixing things that break, he's the night watchman weeknights from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.
Tonight, he has passed his flashlight to me. It is 1:02 a.m. and investigating is required.
It's possible that an intruder entered through one of the emergency exits, or hid inside a display before the museum closed. Earlier tonight, a door slammed when no one else was supposed to be in the building. Our search came up empty.
"That happens a lot," Dodge said.
Homeless people frequently sleep in the halls outside the exits, according to Dodge. In addition, a couple of daytime robberies have occurred and, not too long ago, some kids tried making off with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"They came very close to damaging his leg, and that's an extremely expensive repair," Dodge said. (Each of the 110 wax figures costs about $250,000.)
However, no intruder has been found after closing time, Dodge said.
It's also possible, at least to my mind in its current state, that our intruder may not be human.
Wax museums are one of my earliest irrational fears. During a Florida vacation when I was 8, my parents took me to one displaying a student in a classroom. It was the exact same figure I saw in another museum, posed as a Pilgrim, and I concluded that it was following me.
"Good luck," Dodge said.
When museum general manager Adrian Jones offered me this gig, he promised I'd be all alone. But tonight, Dodge said he was ordered to occupy the upstairs office "for liability purposes." (Apparently, to insurance types, just because I'm a reporter doesn't make it impossible for me to go insane and trash $27.5 million in wax figures.)
I considered pulling out because being "nearly alone" didn't seem scary enough. But right now, I'm as terrified as Lou Costello about to meet the mummy.
The camcorder in my right palm calms my jitters as I descend the stairs from the office to the empty -- at least I pray it is -- main floor. The Josh character from "The Blair Witch Project" put it best: "You know it's real, but it's like looking through the lens gives you some sort of protection from what's on the other side."
Josh got slain, by the way. And it strikes me that if one of these figures decides to defy logic and animate -- like Robin Williams' Teddy Roosevelt in "A Night at the Museum" -- the only protection afforded by my camcorder will be documenting the moments leading up to my coronary.
In addition to the creeps, Dodge also fights off nightly bouts of boredom and the blues.
"It does get lonely," said the New York City native, who worked as an audiovisual tech at the Manhattan branch before accepting the transfer/promotion three years ago.
"But it's an easy job and the pay's good," Dodge said. (Technically, I'm subbing for one of the three facilities workers under Dodge, for which I would earn $10 an hour.)
"Luckily, I have a very understanding wife," Dodge said, adding that they see each other only in the evenings before he goes to work.
"Now that you've arrived, the party can officially get started," Hugh Hefner says as I cross the sensor that triggers his audio clip.
I was prepared for that one, but not for the sheer creepiness enveloping me. If I were Dodge, I'd know that every figure is where it's supposed to be. All my untrained eye can see, however, is a bunch of people holding really, really still. Light glints off every pair of eyes as I round each corner. And the resemblances are uncanny. (Well, to be honest, both JFK and Brad Pitt look like the young Val Kilmer. But Hef and Larry King appear more lifelike than they do in person.)
I know how these figures are made. The heads and hands are wax, the bodies fiberglass. And the eyes glint because they're acrylic, with silk threads for veins. (At least that's how the museum claims they're made. I saw "House of Wax" with Vincent Price.)
Incidentally, Madame Tussaud (aka Marie Grosholtz), who opened her first museum in London in 1835, got into the business because her father made death masks of political prisoners guillotined during the French Revolution.
I'm just saying.
Sometimes, Dodge said, one of the museum's other 73 employees pulls a prank.
"They'll put a figure on the elevator and go home and I'll call the elevator," he said. "The doors will open and it'll just be a figure.
"That always gets me."
The prank figure of choice is usually (speak of the devil) the mummy.
"He's on tour throughout the building," Dodge said. (Great.)
But pranks can't explain the vast majority of what Dodge investigates.
"Sometimes a sensor will go off and you'll think you see someone coming up the escalator and no one comes up," he said, also mentioning unexplainable dark shadows and an ever-changing cologne scent wafting in from the vacant cafe.
Now is not an inappropriate time to point out that this museum opened in 1999 on the site of the original Sands, which was demolished -- like so many other Las Vegas hotels -- with little regard for the stories hidden in its walls.
I approach the Chamber of Horrors maze, added last year, where three live actors and numerous wax human remains wait to spook visitors during the day. Gently, but suddenly, the female sings again.
"Woo."
The audio tracks accompanying most of the displays cannot be switched off, Dodge said, because of a temporary software glitch. So Shaq is perpetually cheered, race cars whoosh in a nonstop loop around Dale Earnhardt, and Tupac Shakur -- who was murdered less than a mile away -- never stops rapping.
But this was definitely live, not Memorex. It resonated throughout the museum -- in what sounded like the key of C major.
"Anybody in there?" I ask. (Dodge does this eight times a night, by the way, as part of his hourly walk-throughs.)
I enter the night-black maze, biting my lip and clutching my camcorder.
BRACK-A-BRACK-A-BRACK-A!
A bank of green lockers explodes with rocking, noisy and violent rocking.
If I find someone, Dodge said, I need to escort the person out, after dialing Venetian security. He gave me that number. But he didn't give me the one for Ghostbusters.
The locker is one of the maze's electronic booby traps, of course. I realize this in a split second -- but only after my brain makes the unretractable decision to make my body flee screaming.
"What happened?" Dodge asked when I return later than expected, because of a 20-minute "Blair Witch"-like detour in which I search in circles for the office on the fourth floor when it's really on the third. (The mummy is by the fourth-floor elevator, I'm unhappy to be able to report.)
I perform two more hourly walk-throughs, avoiding the Chamber of Horrors. If there are indeed living humans inside, they deserve amnesty for their courage.
Just after 4 a.m., Dodge goes on a cigarette break. I rest my head briefly on his desk. The female sings "woo" again. When I awaken, Tupac and the Pilgrim figure are staring down at me.
When I really awaken, I quit.
See video of Levitan's night at the museum at www.reviewjournal.com/video/fearandloafing.html. Fear and Loafing runs on Mondays in the Living section. Levitan's previous adventures are posted at fearandloafing.com.
