It’s a story right out of “Tales from the Crypt.”

In 1980, Elmhurst native Richard Engling was living in a rundown building in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood. As weeks went by, he became more uncomfortable in the efficiency apartment. At times he felt inexplicably frightened, and on some nights he had nightmares.

And whenever he was in a little hallway near the door of his bedroom, an eerie cold washed over him.

One night, Engling awoke to find a woman kneeling on the floor near the hallway.

“I first called out for my girlfriend, but clearly it wasn’t her,” he said. “She was glowing all white and translucent. She looked terrified. She kept looking from me to the little hallway area and back, and I got gooseflesh so bad, my skin was painful.”

But this ghost story didn’t end there.

After that night, anytime Engling walked into the hallway he felt an another spirit, this one full of rage.

“When I walked through the doorway I felt this really angry, murderous presence, and I felt like those were my emotions. It was a very strange sensation,” he said.

Engling ended his lease as quickly as he could and moved out. But the experience stayed with him for years.

In the late 1980s it served as his inspiration for writing “Ghost Watch,” a play about four film producers trying to make a documentary on a haunted building.

“Ghost Watch” was first produced in 1987 by the Chicago Actors Ensemble, but the original production nearly fell apart under a host of interpersonal conflicts.

“It was almost as if the play itself was haunted,” said Engling, 55.

Fast forward to today. Engling and colleague Ann Keen, who together founded the Polarity Ensemble Theatre in 2004, are ready to give “Ghost Watch” another try. And this time, it will be a practically new script and a completely different cast.

“Oh, it’s going to really be a real exciting night,” Engling said of the show’s upcoming debut in Chicago. “I was really lucky with the cast I got. They’re real terrific actors and very exciting to watch. They’re a pleasure for me to direct them because they really get these characters.”

The group has made every effort to create a unified vision for “Ghost Watch,” said Keen, the theater’s managing director.

“We’ve had a team involved from the very beginning,” she said. “Everybody had a say in casting. There were some disagreements, but we were excited from day one. The script is solid. It’s scary and more intriguing and more modern than before, and it’s nice to start from a place where people agree.”

A warning: “Ghost Watch” is not for the faint of heart. In the play, the characters are driven into repeating the same crimes that are haunting the apartment.

“It’s a pretty dark story. The stage manager sometimes hides her eyes during some of the disturbing scenes,” said Engling, artistic director.

But it also probes the intricate relationships between the four characters, which Engling believes are its most interesting facets.

The group was dubbed Polarity to reflect the delicate balance between creativity and madness so often found in theater. Engling and Keen try to pick classical works, like “Macbeth” or “Hamlet,” and then add a twist. Last spring, they set a production of “Hamlet” to rock ‘n’ roll and pop music.

“We think a lot about the origin of theater,” said Engling. “It’s dedicated to the god Dionysus, who could inspire but also bring madness and destruction.”

Engling is a freelance writer. He and his wife, Gail, live in Evanston.