THE DRESSING-ROOM
CASES OF HAUNTINGS AT THE PRINCE REGENT AND OTHER THEATRES
The idea of a theatre being haunted--a theatre where everything is
bright and everyone full of life--must, for the moment, strike one as
preposterous. Why, the mere thought of the footlights, to say nothing
of the clapping of hands and thunders of applause from the Gods,
conjures up a picture which is the very antithesis of ghosts. Besides,
why should a theatre be haunted? To be haunted, a place must have a
history--someone must have committed a crime there, such as murder
or suicide; and surely no such thing has ever happened in a theatre!
Imagine a murder, a real one, at Drury Lane, or a suicide, say, at the
Gaiety! Why, the thing is monstrous, absurd! And as to a ghost--a _bona
fide_ ghost--appearing on the stage or in the auditorium, why, such an
idea is without rhyme or reason; it is, in fact, inconceivable, and the
public--the all-wise public--would, of course, laugh it to scorn.
But stop a moment. Does the general public know everything? Is not the
theatre, to it, simply the stage, and is it not profoundly ignorant
of all that lies beyond the stage--away back, behind the hidden wings?
Is it not profoundly ignorant, also, of the great basement below the
stage with its dark and tortuous passages; and profoundly ignorant of
the many flights of cold and carpetless stairs, leading to story upon
story of seemingly never-ending dressing-rooms and corridors? What
does it know, too, of the individual lives of the many generations of
actors and actresses, call-boys and dressers who have toiled wearily up
those stairs and along those dimly lit passages in between the acts?
what does it know of the thoughts of all that host of bygones--of
their terrible anxieties, their loves, their passions? what does it
know of the tragedies with which, doubtless, many of these people have
been intimately associated, and of the crowd of ghosts they have,
wittingly or unwittingly, brought with them from their own homes?--for
ghosts, even as they haunt houses, haunt people and mercilessly attach
themselves to them. Moreover, although they have long since been
forgotten, tragedies have occurred in some of the oldest of the London
theatres. Hunt up the records of eighty and ninety years ago, and
you will find that more than one dressing-room witnessed the tragic
ending of some lesser star, some member of the crowd, a mere "walker
on"; that duels were not infrequently fought in grim earnest on the
boards; and that more than one poor super has been found hanging from a
cobwebby beam in a remote corner of the great maze-like basement of the
building.
Again, think of the site of a London theatre! Prehistoric man or
beast may well lie buried there; witches accused of practising their
nefarious rites on or near that site may well have been burnt there.
Think, too, of the houses that once may have stood there! Inns, with
dark tell-tale stains on their boards; taverns, tainted with vice--the
rendezvous of truculent swashbucklers and painted jades; and even more
terrible still, cruel and ghastly slaughter-houses.
Ground, then, and houses alike, all may have had their hauntings; and
the ghosts may have stayed on, as ghosts often do, haunting anew each
successive building. Yes, more than one London theatre is haunted--and
several of these theatres have more than one ghost.
The proprietors affect ignorance and of course tell you nothing. They
like to see long queues of people waiting for admission to their show,
but they have no desire to see a corresponding crowd at the box office
seeking permission to sit up all night in the theatre to see the ghost.
No, if you want to find out if a theatre is haunted, you must not
apply to the proprietor, you must inquire of the actors themselves;
and, in order to stand a really good chance of discovering the truth,
you should, if possible, for a time become one of them. It was for the
purpose of making such a discovery that I took it into my head one day
last year to apply for a walk on at the Mercury. I had often wondered
if the Mercury was haunted. I speedily found out that it was not.
Still, I was not altogether disappointed, for I learned from some of
my fellow-walkers on and from one of the stage hands of several very
interesting cases of hauntings at other of the London theatres. There
is the Prince Regent's, for instance, which, as recently as the late
nineties had a dressing-room, 25, that was always kept locked. It was
in the autumn of 1897 that John W. Mayhewe was engaged to play a small
but rather important part there in _The Merciful Pirate_. The cast was
an unusually large one, and Mayhewe discovered that he had to share
dressing-room 25 with another actor called Talbotson. The opening night
of the play, however, Talbotson was laid up with influenza, and Mayhewe
had room 25 to himself. Being one of those over-anxious people who err
on the side of being ultra-punctual, he arrived at the theatre at least
an hour before the curtain went up, and, on the way to his room, he
paused to chat with the stage doorkeeper.
"I noticed," he remarked, "when I was dressing for rehearsal yesterday
that my room smelt very musty. Isn't it often used?"
"It hasn't been used since I've been here," was the reply.
"Why?" said Mayhewe.
"I can't tell you," the doorkeeper answered surlily. "If you want to
know, you had better ask the stage manager."
Not caring to do this, Mayhewe made no further remarks, but hastened
upstairs. No one was about, and the noise of his footsteps sounded
strangely loud in the silent emptiness of the passages. He entered
his room at last, hung his coat and hat on the door, and, crossing to
his seat in front of a small mirror, sat down. "After all," he said
to himself, "I'm glad Talbotson won't be here to-night. I'm not in a
mood for talking, and the fellow bores me to distraction." He lit a
cigarette, leaned back in a more comfortable attitude, and for some
minutes allowed himself to revel in the luxury of a perfectly blank
state of mind. Suddenly the handle of the door turned--a solitary,
isolated sound--and he sat up sharply in his chair. "Who's there?" he
shouted. There was no response. "I couldn't have latched it properly,"
he reasoned, and once again he leaned back in his chair and smoked.
Five or six minutes passed in this fashion, and he was thinking of
beginning to dress, when there was another noise. Something behind him
fell on the floor with a loud flop.
Once again he turned swiftly round. It was his hat--a hard felt bowler.
It had fallen from the door peg on which he had hung it, and was still
feebly oscillating.
"It is curious how one sometimes notices all these little things," he
reflected. "I dare say door handles have turned and hats have fallen
a thousand times when I might have heard them and haven't. I suppose
it is because everything is so very quiet and I'm alone in this part
of the building." Then he glanced at his coat--a long, double-breasted
ulster--and rubbed his eyes thoughtfully. "Why," he exclaimed, "what a
curious shape the thing has taken! It's swelled out just as if someone
were inside it. Or has my eyesight suddenly gone wrong?" He leaned
forward and examined it closely. No. He was not mistaken. The coat was
no longer untenanted. There was something inside it--something which
filled it like he had done; but it was something to which he could
ascribe no name. He could see it there, and mentally feel that it was
peering at him with eyes full of the most jibing mockery and hate;
but he could not define it. It was something quite outside his ken,
something with which he had had no previous acquaintance. He tried to
whistle and appear nonchalant, but it was of no avail. The coat--his
coat--had something in it, and that something was staring back at him.
What a fool he had been to come so early. At last, with a supreme
effort, he took his eyes from the door, and, swinging round in his
chair, resumed smoking. He sat thus for some moments, and then a board
close behind him creaked.
Of course there is nothing in a creak--boards and furniture are always
creaking, and most people attribute the creaking to a change in the
temperature. So did Mayhewe. "The room is beginning to get warm--the
gas has heated it," he said; "that is why." Still he gradually lowered
his eyes, and when they rested on the mirror in front of him, he gave
the barest suspicion of a start. In the mirror were reflected the door
and the coat, but the latter hung quite limply now. There was nothing
whatever filling it out.
What in Heaven's name had become of the thing? Where had it got to?
Close beside Mayhewe was the grate, and a sudden rustling in it,
followed by a hurried descent of soot, made him laugh outright. The
explanation was now so very simple. The wind was responsible for it
all--for the door handle, the hat, the coat, and the creak. How truly
ridiculous! He would dress. With that object in view he threw the
end of his cigarette in the fender and, rising, was about to quit
his seat, when his eyes fell on his gloves. He had thrown them quite
carelessly on the wash-stand, almost immediately in front of him, and
he had noticed nothing remarkable about them then. But now--surely it
could not be the wind this time; there were hands in them, and these
hands were strangely unlike his own. Whereas his fingers had blunt,
spatulate tips, the tops of these fingers were curved and pointed like
the talons of some cruel beast of prey, and the palms were much longer
and narrower than his own. He stared at them, too fascinated to do
otherwise, and it seemed to him that they shifted their position and
came nearer to him, with a slow, stealthy, silent motion, like that of
some monstrous spider creeping murderously towards its helpless victim.
He watched them for some moments quite motionless, and then, yielding
to a sudden fit of ungovernable fury, he threw his tobacco pouch at the
nearest.
It rolled convulsively over on its back after the manner of some living
stricken creature, and then, gradually reassuming its shape, stealthily
began once more to approach him. At last his nerves could stand it no
longer. A demoniacal passion to smash, burn, torture it seized him,
and, springing to his feet, he picked up his chair, and, swinging
it round his head, brought it down with the utmost frenzy on the
wash-stand. He was looking at his handiwork--the broken china, chair
legs, and gas shade--when the door of his room opened and the call-boy
timidly entered.
Mayhewe kept the stage waiting some minutes that night, but the
management did not abuse him nearly so violently as he had anticipated,
and the next evening he was allotted another room.
Then it transpired, leaked out through one of the old supers who had
worked at the theatre for years, that room 25 had always borne the
name of being haunted, and that, excepting in circumstances such as
the present, it had invariably been kept locked. Some two years ago,
according to the old super, when just such another emergency had
occurred and the room had been used, the same thing had happened: the
gentleman who had been put there had been seized with a sudden fit of
madness, and had broken everything he could lay hands on; and some
time before that a similar experience had befallen an actress who had
unavoidably--there being no other room available--occupied room 25.
Now had Mayhewe not heard of these two cases, he might have concluded,
in spite of feeling sure that he had been in a normal state of mind
upon entering the room, that what he had gone through was due merely
to an over-excited imagination; but since he now knew that others had
witnessed the same phenomena, he saw no reason to doubt that there
was some peculiarly sinister influence attached to the room. As to
the cause of the haunting, he could elicit nothing more authentic or
definite than the somewhat vague recollections of a very old actor.
According to this rather doubtful authority, shortly after the opening
of the theatre, one of the performers had suddenly developed madness
and had been confined in room 25 till a suitable escort had been
found to take him to an asylum. It was the only tragic occurrence, he
asserted, that had ever taken place in that theatre. Now, supposing
this to be true--that a madman really had been conducted from the stage
to room 25 and temporarily confined there--might one not reasonably
believe that in this incident lay the origin of the hauntings? It was
in this room, in all probability, that the outbreak of madness passed
its most acute stage--that psychological stage when the rational ego
makes its last desperate stand against the overwhelming assault of
a new and diseased self. And again--supposing this incident to be a
fact--what more likely than that the immaterial insane ego of the
afflicted man would, at times, separate itself from his material body
and revisit the scene of its terrible conflict, permanently taking up
its abode there after its material body had passed away? This theory--a
very possible one, to my mind--would have strong support from parallel
cases, for half the most malignant forms of haunting are directly
traceable to the earth-bound spirits of the insane. There are several
houses within a short walking distance of Bond Street that were once
the temporary homes of mentally afflicted people, and they are now
haunted in a more or less similar manner to room 25.
If this story of the old actor's is not correct--if his memory played
him false--then of course one must look around for some other solution;
and as, apparently, there is no history attached to the Prince Regent
Theatre itself, one must assume either that the site of the theatre
was haunted prior to the erection of the present building; or that the
ghost was originally attached to some person who once occupied room 25,
and that it subsequently left that person and remained in the room; or
that some article of furniture in room 25, possibly even a fixture,
was imported there from some badly haunted locality. There is, indeed,
evidence regarding the first point; evidence that, either on or close
to the site of the theatre, the remains of prehistoric animals--animals
of a singularly savage species, which makes it more than likely that
they met with a violent death--were unearthed; and as ghostly phenomena
in the form of animals are quite as common as ghostly phenomena in
the form of human beings, the hauntings of room 25 may very possibly
be due to the spirit of one or more of these creatures. Or again,
they might be caused by what is generally known as a Vice Elemental,
or "Neutrarian"; that is to say, a spirit that has never inhabited a
material body, but which is wholly hostile to the human species. Such
spirits are often, I believe, drawn to certain spots by the lustful or
malicious thoughts of individuals, and this might well be the case at
the Prince Regent's Theatre.
* * * * *
It was also during my engagement at the Mercury that I heard of a
haunting at the Lombard. This theatre, it appears, has a ghostly
visitant in the form of a particularly malevolent-looking clown.
According to one report, a lady and her daughter--Mrs. and Miss
Dawkins--occupied box 3 one January night during the run of an
exceedingly pretty modern version of _Cinderella_.
The lights were down and all eyes were focused on Cinderella, one of
the prettiest and daintiest little actresses in London, dressed in pink
and sitting before a very realistic make-belief of a kitchen fire,
when Miss Dawkins, who had her elbows resting on the balustrade and
was leaning well forward, heard a faint ejaculation from close beside
her. Fearing lest her mother was ill, she turned sharply round, and was
somewhat surprised to see that Mrs. Dawkins had left her seat and was
leaning against the wall of the box with her arms folded and a most
satirical smile on her face. Both the attitude and the expression were
so entirely novel that Miss Dawkins could only conclude that her mother
had suddenly taken leave of her senses; and she was deliberating what
to do, when a feeling that a sudden metamorphosis was about to take
place held her spellbound. Bit by bit her mother seemed to fade away,
to melt into the background; the dim outline and the general posture
remained, but instead of the actual body and well-known face, she
saw something else gradually begin to form and to usurp their place.
Her mother had very delicate and beautifully shaped hands, but these
vanished, and the hands Miss Dawkins now looked on were large and red
and coarse--horribly coarse. Fearful of what she might see next, but
totally unable to fight against some strange, controlling agency, she
continued to look. First, her eyes rested on a pair of sleeves--white,
baggy, and soiled; then on a broad, deep chest, also clad in white
and decorated in the most fantastic manner conceivable in the centre;
then on a short, immensely thick neck; and then on the face. The shock
she now received was acute. Instinct had prepared her for something
very startling, but for nothing quite so grotesque, nor so wholly
at variance with the general atmosphere of the theatre. It was the
painted, crinkled face of a clown--not a merry, jesting grimaldi, but
a clown of a different type--a clown without a smile--a clown born
and fully trained to his business in Hell. As he stood there glaring
at the footlights, every feature, every atom of his person breathed
out hate--hate of a nature so noxious and intense that it seemed to
Miss Dawkins as if the very air were poisoned by it. Being a devout
Catholic, she at once crossed herself and, although almost powerless
with horror, began to pray. The face then faded till it entirely
disappeared, and Miss Dawkins once again found herself gazing upon the
well-known countenance of her mother.
"Why are you standing?" she asked.
"I am sure I don't know," Mrs. Dawkins replied. "But I don't like this
box. I think there is something very unpleasant about it. I haven't
been myself for the last few minutes. When I was sitting by you just
now, I suddenly became obsessed with a bitter hatred against everyone
on the stage. The very sight of them maddened me. It seemed to me I
had met them all in a former existence and that they had done me some
irreparable injury. I got up and began to plot how I could best get
even with them. Then the idea of setting fire to the theatre seized me.
I had clear visions of a small, dimly lighted room, with which I was
strangely familiar, down below the stage in a dark, draughty basement.
I knew every inch of the place as if I had lived there all my life.
'I will go there,' I said to myself, 'and apply a match. If anyone
sees me, no one will suspect. They will only say, "It's old Tom. He
didn't get the chuck after all. He's come back."' I was repeating the
words 'It's old Tom,' and 'Fire,' when something seemed to strike me
very forcibly on the forehead. This caused me the greatest agony for a
moment. Then you spoke, and I was myself again."
"Would you like to go home?" Miss Dawkins asked anxiously.
"I think I would," was the response. And they went.
Subsequently, a few judicious inquiries elicited no little light on the
matter.
Many years before, an old actor, called Tom Weston, had been employed
annually in pantomime at the Lombard as clown. Like so many of his
profession, however, particularly the older ones, he took to drink;
and he was so often intoxicated on the stage that the management were
at last obliged to dismiss him. He took his dismissal very badly, and
one night, having gone to the theatre in disguise, he was discovered
in the act of setting fire to a room immediately beneath the stage.
In consideration for his many years' service and age, the management
did not prosecute, but recommended his friends to keep him under close
supervision. Tom, however, very soon ceased to cause the management
any anxiety, for, two days after he had attempted, in so diabolical
a manner, to wreak his vengeance on all who had been associated with
him at the theatre, he shot himself dead in his own home. But on every
anniversary of his death, so it is affirmed, he is either seen or
heard, or his presence is in some way demonstrated, in box 3 of the
Lombard Theatre. That his spirit should frequent that particular spot
in the theatre seems to be a fact for which no reason can be assigned.