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March 27, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:00:35

Edition 712 - Nick Bromley, Stage Ghosts Update

A longer conversation with London theatre veteran Nicholas Bromley about the UK's haunted theatres. Includes a truly terrifying encounter between an apparition and one of the nation's most famous actresses on stage in Bath.

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	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is the Unexplained.
	Hope everything's good with you.
	Thank you very much for all of the emails that keep coming in and don't forget if you need to know news of whatever's happening with that TV show, anything to do with me, if the TV show ever disappears or there's anything you want to know, chances are you will find all of the answers only at my official Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
	It is the one with the logo on it and no other similar Facebook page.
	And if you have contributed to it lately, thank you and thank you for all of the support.
	I'm really so grateful.
	Also grateful if you've made a donation to the online show recently, which you can do by going to the website theunexplained.tv, following the link for donations and doing that.
	You know, it's absolutely vital.
	In this day and age, a cup of coffee probably costs about £3 now, $3 in the United States.
	If you could just maybe spare that at some point.
	These are very difficult times, and I'm getting bills in here.
	Like, for example, my internet communication is rising by, I think, about 20%.
	It's certainly rising by an awful lot, and I don't know how they can justify price rises like that.
	But everything is getting more expensive, as we all know, and we're all feeling the squeeze, and I definitely am because I've always been at the margins.
	So if this podcast has any value to you, and if you feel that you would like to contribute to it, then please do so by going to the Facebook page, rather the website.
	I'm getting confused now.
	The website, theunexplained.tv, following the link and making a donation there.
	If you have done that recently, I know these are hard times and thank you very, very much indeed.
	You know, I've tried to keep this over all of the years, 17 of those years, a free podcast.
	And I will do my best as far as I can, even in these awful times, to keep it going.
	And, you know, all we have is our community, isn't it?
	It's a great help to all of us.
	You know, you tell me that these shows help you.
	Doing these shows is also therapeutic for me.
	As I sit here in the darkness with the rain hammering still on my window.
	Now, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, former West End stage manager Nicholas Bromley on stage ghosts and haunted theatres.
	If the name is familiar to you, it's because Nick Bromley was on the TV show back in January.
	And at the end of the day, we didn't really have enough time for him.
	There are so many cases in the book, and we won't get through all of them today either.
	We only really covered the London theatres.
	So I thought what I would do is have a more relaxed conversation with him now, see if we can do some of the London theatres and also go out to what they call in the theatre the provinces, which is where I was born and brought up in Liverpool.
	But, you know, to other places, because there are fantastic stories from those other places too.
	So stories of the haunted theatre, the theatres themselves, and also stories from touring.
	Nick Bromley, Nicholas Bromley's Stage Ghosts and Haunted Theatres, his book on these things.
	And I've got a ton of notes here.
	Many of them I didn't get round to on the first occasion.
	So this is going to be a more leisurely exposition of that material which you asked for.
	And, you know, I completely agree.
	We needed to revisit Nick Bromley, so I'm glad he's doing it now.
	Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for all of his hard work on the show.
	And thank you, above all, to you for being there for me.
	All right, I think I've said more than enough now.
	So let's get to the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, Nicholas Bromley on Haunted Theatres.
	Nick, thank you very much for coming on.
	It's a great pleasure, Howard.
	You know, I had so many people after we spoke in January, Nick, say, are you going to give this man more time?
	So I think, you know, I think you left them applauding in the aisles.
	Well, at least not lying in the aisles, because sometimes I've known to kill off a few people with my conversations.
	Well, that's true enough.
	That's almost tangential to our conversation here, where people, in fact, have died on the stage.
	Now, look, talk to me first about you.
	It is obvious to me, if you don't mind me saying, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, that you are steeped in the theatre because you sound like an actor.
	And I mean that in the best possible way.
	That is very kind of you.
	I hate to disillusion you, but I'm not an actor.
	Well, I'm a silent actor.
	I have actually appeared silently in a few plays, not because I couldn't remember the lines, but that was my earliest job was as an acting ASM and stage manager with acting in brackets.
	And the idea was that if they needed someone to come on and draw the curtains, I was your man.
	And that's what I did for the first few shows.
	I used to come on silently, well, as silently as I could, and open curtains, draw them.
	In fact, I did actually close curtains because I was one of the policemen in a tour of My Fair Lady.
	And I and another great guy would be on either side of the big house tabs and at a given moment would come on to close them.
	This is before when Eliza goes to the ball.
	You know, at the end of Act I, you know, she becomes a princess before, well, she's mistaken for by Sultan Kapathi, the Hungarian Necher, I suppose, or count.
	Tony Manzi, who was a fellow footman on the other side, had a great advantage over me that he didn't wear glasses.
	So he could see what was going on.
	His second great advantage was that he could count music, which I couldn't do.
	So he would start off deliberately.
	I would see a foot coming out from the wings.
	I would start off.
	And of course, on the wrong beat.
	So I was left dangling with my curtain, which wasn't closing.
	And he would just laugh and fall about on the other side.
	We got away with it.
	I have a million stories about broadcasting because that's been my life.
	And what the public see, they wouldn't believe the stories behind it.
	And I'm assuming that the theater is exactly the same.
	I always wanted as a kid to be an actor, but people who came from Where I came from didn't do that kind of thing.
	So, you know, it was just not for a Liverpool comprehensive schoolboy.
	They thought it was outrageous when I said I wanted to be on the radio.
	God knows what they'd have said.
	You want to be an actor?
	Do you realize they'd have said to me in the careers lesson, they'd have said, Do you know how many people in that profession are unemployed at any one time?
	I don't think I'd have got very far with that.
	But I was always greatly in awe of actors and the theatre.
	I remember being, and I'll tell this story briefly, and then we must get on to the contents of the book.
	I sense we could probably talk all night about all sorts of things around the subject.
	But I can remember being a student journalist in Cardiff, University College Cardiff.
	And, you know, Radio City Radio Station paid for me to go there and train to learn the finer points.
	They thought here's a local lad who can read the news, but we've got to teach him how to be a journalist, otherwise we're not getting, you know, as money's worth.
	So they sent me to Cardiff, and I was trained by all sorts of wonderful people, but I had to go and interview this man who was producing a stage play at a beautiful theatre.
	And I remember he had the most amazing, I mean, he looked, he had a cravat and a beard, and he had this perfect voice that resonated around the theater, which made me feel as I was interviewing him, I could feel my voice getting higher and higher as his voice was hitting the corners and the bass traps, you know, in the theater.
	But he said, we're here doing, it's a small play, a two-hander.
	We were doing Edward Bond, Long Day's Journey into Night.
	I remember him saying, which is probably not a two-hander, but I just remember the way that he, Edward Bond.
	So I have great admiration for people like that because when you're doing theatre, it's live and you have to make it live.
	And that is the great gift of it.
	It is the hardest work, but I think it's the most rewarding work.
	But we could have conversations around this, I know, all night.
	So let's get to the book, Stage Ghosts and Haunted Theatres.
	Yes.
	Why did you write this?
	Well, I'm getting, between you and me and whoever's listening, who will be listening, I hope, I'm getting on a bit.
	And so I thought, and I've been collecting, basically I've been collecting stories of ghosts and theatres, but mostly theatre ghosts, since about the nine, since the 1980s, seriously.
	I've been writing them down and gradually building up a file of stories which have been told to me or I've read about or I've experienced myself.
	About two years ago, this is before COVID, I thought it's time for me to try and put it out, as it were.
	So I started off.
	And then, of course, COVID came and I thought, I better hurry up.
	You never know.
	And I finished it and then it went out last year.
	Yeah.
	So got it out last year.
	But that was, so it's a long, it's almost, there's 30 years of stories in the book.
	And at the risk of sounding like an actor, is the theatre replete with ghost stories?
	Yes, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, I think there are, should we say there are approximately 3,000 to 4,000 theatres in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, we must say that.
	And although, funnily enough, when I wrote to many of them in the 1980s, I used to get back some very prissy letters saying, certainly not, we have no ghosts here.
	Now, now, the ballpark has gone, is that's the right word?
	No, it probably isn't.
	But people do want to know if they've got a ghost in their theatre.
	I think before that, they were a little ashamed that, or ashamed or embarrassed by the fact that someone unseen could be, you know, pushing a patron into the wrong seat or moving their glass from the bar.
	Now, that happens quite a lot.
	May not be a ghost, of course, but it usually is.
	And I think theatres are, a lot of theatres are haunted, not all.
	One of the reasons why they're haunted, people ask me, and I think one of the reasons is that if you've got a building, you can also add the other two categories of buildings which are often haunted, and that are churches and pubs, of course.
	So if you have a place where people come to to, in all frames of mind, to either participate in a performance or to watch or to enjoy themselves,
	some people will leave a memory behind of either the occasion or if they've come, say, if they're having a troublesome time, be it backstage or in the audience, that may leave an impression on them.
	I mean, quite a few people, of course, quite a few, if you look at many of the stories of ghosts in theatres, quite a few seem to relate to people who have had accidents in the theater and have died through no fault of their own, but through an accident, a common cordon one.
	They might have fallen from the backstage, from the fly galleries onto the stage, or they've tripped over.
	This happens quite, has happened a few times from the dress circle into the stalls.
	People or they have actually died in the theater, because I mean, that's one of the things which theatre managers seldom admit to, but quite a few people die in the theatres, but they don't, it's never recorded that they die in their seat.
	It's always on the way to the theatre or to the pardon, to the hospital.
	Right.
	If you can get them out and into an ambulance, you're clear.
	I often wonder if, and here I am jumping in, I often wonder if those who've expired in the theater, not necessarily actors, but performers.
	I always think of Eric Morecambe.
	Eric Morcombe, one of the greatest comedians that we've ever had from Morecambe and Wise in the United Kingdom.
	If you've never heard of them, check them out online.
	You're in for a big treat.
	But they were part of all of our lives.
	And Eric Morecambe died, as a lot of other performers died, just behind the curtain, didn't he?
	He'd been on with Stan Stennett in South Wales, and they'd done a performance, a conversation about his life.
	It was a beautiful thing from what I understand.
	I think there is a little bit of film about that, and he died there.
	And I often wonder whether the likes of Eric Morecombe or the great Tommy Cooper, who died live on television at a theatre, whether they've left any impression.
	Yeah, I'm sure they have.
	I mean, Tommy Cooper, it was at Her Majesty's.
	No, beg your pardon, it's His Majesty's now, in London.
	When he collapsed, people thought it was a gag, and the curtain came down, and his feet were the other side of the curtain, and they dragged him back, everybody thinking he was joking.
	And of course, sadly, he wasn't.
	I've yet to receive a report of Tommy Cooper being seen at His Majesty's, whereas Bierbohm Tree is the acknowledged ghost at His Majesty's.
	And Bierbohm Tree was the man who actually built the current theatre, which stands there today.
	Some of it, of course, may be down to unfinished business.
	You know, Tommy Cooper left at the peak of his career.
	He had nothing else to prove to anybody.
	He'd done it all, and he was loved and still is loved.
	You know, the only person who could go onto a stage and just go, and people would instantly laugh.
	You know, he'd put his hands up and go, ah!
	And that was all he'd done.
	So he had nothing else to prove.
	So maybe there was no unfinished business.
	There was no real-life drama about him.
	A very good point.
	A very good point.
	Whereas others have.
	I mean, Sid James died at, he died up in Sunderland, at the Sunderland Empire.
	Again, no stories of him, as far as I know, of returning to Sunderland.
	Yeah, I think that's a very good point.
	But, you know, if there's nothing to prove or they've had a good life or they have no...
	His great thing was to put on spectacular plays and to appear in them, of course.
	And he wasn't able to do this because he couldn't get rid of Chu Chin Chao, which played and played and played, and in fact, was playing when he died.
	And so one wonders whether that's the reason why he loved this theater, and one of the reasons why he is still occasionally seen or heard at His Majesty's.
	I'm a great fan of, it was a stage play, and I think it's been done on television once, and it was certainly a wonderful movie with Tom Courtney and Albert Finney.
	I'm a great fan of the dresser.
	Oh, yes.
	A tormented actor at the end of his career, and the man who's there tasked with, you know, dressing him, making sure he knows his lines, keeping him on track, and it's all, you know, it's during the war, and it's all falling apart.
	Are there stories that maybe you haven't got in the book of tormented characters, people who are at the end of their tether, literally, at the end of their lives?
	Are there those sorts of stories in the theater?
	There are.
	I'm trying to think of one which would relate to a specific ghost.
	There is, and it isn't in my book, but there is a story about the Oldham Coliseum where an actor was tragically slain during a production of Macbeth.
	And as you know, Macbeth is a jinxed play.
	The Scottish play.
	The Scottish play, which is, you're saying it absolutely correctly,'cause I shouldn't even be mentioning You should never quote.
	One of the superstitions, if you like, is to never quote any lines from the play, because it will bring bad luck.
	It is a very odd story, really.
	When the play was first done, it was written by Shakespeare so that James I was entertaining his brother-in-law, who was the king of Denmark.
	And he put this play on because James was a great advocate against witchcraft.
	He'd written a book condemning witchcraft.
	And so Shakespeare thought, well, let's throw a few witches into the pot, which they did with the three ones.
	But on the first night, apparently, the young lad, because there were no lady actors in those days, actresses, was playing Lady M, Lady Madness, and he fell ill.
	And it was said that there was a supposition, but no, that maybe even Shakespeare had to go on to play that part that night at the banqueting hall in Whitehall.
	Gee, and what happened in Oldham?
	No, no.
	No, no, no, no.
	Sorry, I was asking what happened in Oldham.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm skipping.
	I'm skipping.
	Well, this actor, Oldham, they put on a production because one of the other things, why Macbeth has had maybe so many things going wrong with it over the years, is that it's always a crowd puller.
	People love it.
	It's a wonderful, wonderful play.
	So if business was bad, managements would often put Macbeth on to bring the public in.
	And they put this production on, and they had There is the Leon Macbuff at the end.
	There is the duel, if you like, the fight in the battle.
	And this poor actor was run through by a sword and died.
	And I believe there was meant to be a sighting of him at the Oldham Coliseum.
	It's in the news now because the poor theater is going to be closed down.
	I don't know if everyone's aware of that, but there's a big furore going on to try and save it.
	And I wonder if, as some reputedly haunted locations in entertainment theatres or cinemas, if they close it down and turn it into something else, sometimes the ghosts go with the building.
	They do.
	They do.
	They are known to still walk on ground, which is now a supermarket.
	If you see what I mean.
	I do.
	I do.
	Sometimes they do.
	Yes.
	Yes, they do.
	Of course, sometimes they don't, but I can think of it as a cinema in Edinburgh that is a supermarket these days and is said to contain a ghost, having been a very well-known cinema.
	Now, let's get into the contents of the book.
	Because we did most of the London theatres, a lot of the London theatres, when we were on television and under time pressure, I want to skip through these, but I think we should do as many of them as we can and then, as they say, go to the provinces.
	So the Adelphi Theatre, London's famous Adelphi Theatre, there was a happening on the evening of Thursday, the 16th of December, 1897.
	One of the most infamous murders in stage history, it is said.
	It certainly was.
	It caused a shock akin to the one when Edwin Booth, not Edwin Booth, Booth, his brother, murdered Lincoln.
	It concerned William Terrace, who was the first matinee idol, I suppose you could call him.
	In fact, yes, he was.
	He was the first matinee idol of the Victorian stage.
	Irving was most famous actor, I suppose you like him.
	You know, he had many people who followed Irving.
	But for perfans, it was Terrace you went to see.
	I mean, for young ladies, especially.
	He was a bit of a swashbuckler.
	He'd been a rancher.
	He'd done all sorts of jobs before he became a horse breeder in Lexington, Kentucky.
	And he'd actually been working with Irving before he started to appear in his own melodramas.
	Now, melodramas were, I don't know, in popular appeal, the equivalent today of musicals.
	They had all the elements of spectacular, of spectacle about them, sometimes of music, large companies, of course.
	And he played the hero, saving ladies from terrible fates all over the world in all sorts of situations.
	Now, to fill out the companies in melodramas, they used what were known as supernumeraries.
	They still do.
	They're called supers.
	And these were jobbing would-be actors or actors who couldn't find a job but could be a super.
	They'd come on in crowds.
	They were the crowd scenes.
	They were the extras.
	He was playing a play called Secret Service, which was written by William Gillette, who had originated Sherlock Holmes on stage.
	Before that, he'd done another show called Harbor Lights, and in it, there'd been an extra, a super, and his name was Mr. Prince, Richard Archer Prince.
	Now, Richard Archer Prince believed that he was as good as Terrace.
	There's no way of saying if he was or not, but he believed it firmly, but no one else did.
	So although he went out on tour, he'd come down to London from, I think, the Northeast, and he would go out on tour, do shows, but he was always either getting sacked or not re-employed.
	And he came to London where there was more work, I suppose, and got a job as an extra at the Adelphi.
	He did a season with Terrace, but at the end of the season, when the melodrama came off, he was not re-employed.
	He was completely down on his luck.
	He had lodgings in Brixton, and he was desperate for money to pay for his rent and just to live, basically.
	His sister, very sadly, was a tart and she used to work the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square.
	And she wouldn't give him any money, she wouldn't even give him any money.
	And he wrote to the theatrical charities asking for some money to help.
	And he got a rejection from one of them.
	And he thought that he muddled up the charities.
	And he thought that Terrace, who was the secretary of the Jory Lane Theatrical Fund, had turned him down, which wasn't true.
	He also had a resentment against Terris because he really thought he was better than him.
	And this culminated in a desire to get back, as it were.
	And he lay in wait for Terrace outside the stage door when Terrace was coming to work.
	And as Terrace put his hand out to open the key to the special entrance for the star's entrance, as it were, to the side of the dressing room, the stage door room, stabbed him repeatedly in the back.
	He was immediately collared by people who were out in Maiden Lane and was arrested.
	Terrace was carried upstairs to his dressing room, but it was impossible to revive him and he died.
	But before this happened, his leading lady, called Jesse Millard, who in fact was Terrace's girlfriend, kept having this recurring dream in which she heard his voice saying, sis, sis, help.
	And that night, she heard it again after the actor was killed.
	There was also another incident to do with it in that there was a clock on the wall, and this stopped exactly at the time of Terrace's death.
	And then there were also reports of him being seen after his death walking about the theatre.
	The story grew that he had returned.
	He'd never left the Adelphi and this carried on for several years.
	He was also seen, which is rather strange, on the platform at Covent Garden tube station by a railway guard at the time on the platform who recognised him.
	And no one can quite work that out because the station wasn't open when Terrace was murdered.
	Hadn't been opened.
	But there was a theory that there was a stationer close by to where the underground station is now, and that he would go there to buy his copy of The Stage or The Era or one of the evening papers, which used to come out.
	So that's the story behind him.
	But he's not the only ghost at the Adelphi.
	A friend of mine called Tommy Baxter, who was the manager there for several years.
	At the end of the show, the audience go out, the cast go, the crew go, the ushers change and go, and he's usually the last man to leave.
	He has to lock up his safe and office, et cetera, probably write a report.
	And one night, it was when Chicago was on.
	And one night he was finishing again late, came downstairs, and it had been a really bad day, two-show day, one of those ones.
	And Chicago had on the stage, the orchestra was on the stage.
	So the instruments were all there.
	There was a piano.
	And Tommy was very musical.
	So he thought, I just want to relax a bit.
	I want to, you know, chill out, as it were.
	So he sat down and started to play the piano.
	He played away and something made him look to the left into the auditorium.
	And there, sitting watching him, were all these faces.
	So he put the lid down and left and went across to the Feathers for a pump.
	Wow.
	It's all he could do.
	Well, what else would you do in that situation?
	What else would you do?
	Yes.
	Let's go.
	Time to leave.
	Let's go to the Savoy Theatre.
	Yes.
	This is one that I liked, and we did talk about it on the TV, but let's bring it in here.
	You know, we can do five minutes easily on this, I would think.
	Lisa Brindley, the year is 2008, she's the wardrobe mistress.
	Yes.
	You were saying?
	No, no, she isn't.
	She was indeed.
	Yes, yes.
	So if I recall rightly, the story here was that Lisa Brindley wanted to answer what we call a call of nature and found herself in an obscure lavatory that I don't think she knew existed at the theater, but was being observed by something creepy.
	And that wasn't the end of the story.
	And I think also a couple of psychics were called in who said, don't go to that place again because there are evil spirits there.
	Yes, absolutely.
	Yes, the wardrobe at the Savoy then, I think it still is, is all wardrobes, wardrobes are always in the worst location theatres can put them, which is usually at the top of the building.
	And it's very seldom a lift.
	So this was at the top of the wardrobe at the Savoy was at the top of the building.
	And should we say that the conveniences were a floor down, which can be, you know, inconvenient.
	And she discovered there was a pass door which went through from backstage to the front of house.
	So there was a shortcut?
	A shortcut, which was unlocked.
	So she went through, and that's where she found the ladies, as it were.
	When she was there, she found it a bit creepy.
	You know, there was something, and the second time she went, something came running at her.
	She heard the flutter of, well, not the flutter, but the sound of clothes being pulled and footsteps.
	And she ran.
	She really ran away.
	And she had a couple of clairvoyant friends who came.
	And they said that, unfortunately, where she was was she was using the convenience, which in fact was once been on the site of someone's home.
	And she was inconveniencing them, if you see what I mean.
	Boy.
	So she was trespassing in a place where she shouldn't trespass doing what she shouldn't do.
	Good luck.
	So she won't do that again.
	No, no, no.
	Let's talk briefly in this segment about the Aldwitch Theatre.
	Now, the Aldwitch is a part of London that is very famous.
	A lot of visitors to London will have seen Trafalgar Square, then walked along the Aldwitch past what used to be the BBC World Service Bush House.
	But the Aldwitch Theatre, this was a place where, and this is comparatively recent.
	We're not talking about something that was decades ago.
	Somebody reported that there was a ghost, a man, walking in the stalls of the theatre.
	Yes, yes.
	Now, this is a pretty modern story.
	It's of this century, definitely of this century.
	The theatre was it has a twin which is next door to it, which used to be called the Strand.
	It's now the Ivanovello Theatre, the Novello Theatre.
	It was Seymour Hicks, there was an actor called Seymour Hicks, who funnily enough was related to Terrace.
	He was his son-in-law.
	And he and his wife had the lease on it and in the 20s and 30s had many, many big successes there.
	Then they moved on and the theatre became, if people may remember, the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the London home of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
	And it also was very famous for its Aldwych, what became known as the Aldwych Farces with Ralph Lynn.
	2000, I think 2006, 2007, there was a customer approached the house manager and said that there was a man who'd been walking in the stalls and he found it very off-putting.
	And Annie, as her name was, Annie Hashtari, asked, you know, what he looked like.
	And he said, well, he was a strange figure, you know, because he had a black Victorian frock coat.
	And he wasn't dressed for the show.
	You know, he looked peculiar.
	And she said, okay, right.
	Okay.
	I think you've seen a ghost because there was no one of that description, you know, looking of that era in that night.
	And then there was a little bar.
	There's a little bar at the back.
	And again, someone else said that they'd seen somebody.
	And she and the other customer looked at some photograph.
	There was a photograph on the wall of this bar.
	And there was a picture of Seymour Hicks.
	And she said, that's the man.
	Oh, my goodness.
	Yes.
	So Seymour Hicks continues to frequent the place.
	Actually, absolutely.
	Rather like, although he hasn't been seen, as far as I know, but Charles Wyndham frequents the Wyndham's Theatre, which of course he built himself.
	Very famous theatre.
	Very famous theatre and has a very proprietary interest in it.
	I think that's one of the reasons he's there because he loved the building and wants to make sure that it's looked after.
	I wonder if anything happens, if there's a performance there that he doesn't approve of, or if somebody makes a decision that would not have been a decision that he would have made.
	I wonder if he makes his presence felt then.
	Not to my knowledge, but he might delegate.
	He might delegate because this, I think it might be Fred the Fireman.
	I'm not sure, but I've got a feeling its name was Fred.
	And he liked to drink.
	Fred used to like a drink.
	And one day his little office was halfway up.
	There was a staircase which went up to the fly gallery, where people would fly scenery in and out from.
	And he was found at the bottom of the stairs of a broken neck one day.
	But every now and then, in the fly gallery, one heard, or still hears, perhaps, not for the last couple of years, at any rate, as far as I know, but very heavy footsteps walking up and down.
	So maybe he's directed by Sir Charles to express his displeasure in boots.
	What a wonderful story.
	So now we're in the provinces, as they call them in the theatre.
	In other words, places like Liverpool where I was born and where a lot of touring plays go.
	And there are some fine theatres up and down the country and in Scotland and in Wales and in Ireland.
	Let's start with the York Theatre Royal.
	This is very interesting because York is one of the most haunted cities in England, I think.
	I mean, it's the famous story of the man who saw the Roman legionaries walking through this house, but all he could see was he couldn't see their legs.
	All he could see was the bottom of their tunics and their heads and torsos, as it were.
	And then they disappeared.
	Of course, what they worked out was that the ground was much lower.
	The house where they walked through would have been much lower in Roman times and that Debris had raised the floor level.
	So the Theatre Royal York has what is known as a grey lady.
	Now there are lots of grey ladies in theatre ghost stories and in fact in ghost stories in all sorts of situations.
	But this one is interesting because the theatre itself was built in the 18th century, I think about 1744, or parts of it were built then.
	But it was built on the site of what had been of a hospital, St. Leonard's Hospital, in the Middle Ages, which had been run by nuns.
	And the grey lady is sometimes seen in the circle or in certain corridors, or a grey shape.
	I think we should call it either a figure or a shape because reports differ.
	But the story goes that it was a nun who was bricked up for conduct unbecoming to a nun by the abbess and died inside this bricked up room.
	That is meant to be the ghost of the Theatre Royal York.
	And there's a story from Bath about a grey mist.
	Now, this is not about ghostly footsteps or a strange man appearing in the dress circle.
	This is about the cast of a show, all of them assembled and they see this mist waft across.
	Absolutely.
	And this is a very strange story.
	I mean, when I say strange, it's very creepy in a way.
	In 1975, Dame Anna Neagle was touring a country and she came to Bath with the Dame of Sark, which is an adapt by William Douglas Hilme.
	It's an adaption of a true story, a dramatization of a true story of the Dame of Sark, who lived through the German occupation during the war of the island and put up her own resistance, as it were, in a dignified, dame-like manner.
	And just for listeners in the United States and other places, this is to do with World War II and the Channel Islands, Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, Sark, I'm sure there are others that I've forgotten, but the Channel Islands were occupied, the only part of the United Kingdom to be occupied by German forces.
	And that's what this drama was about.
	Sorry.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	And it's a confrontation between her and German officers who are there.
	And a good play, a good play, a good drawing room comedy, not comedy, a good drawing room play.
	And one night, Full House, and there were two Canadians watching, two Canadian girls.
	When it came to the first interval, they were looking around them, you know, as you do in an interval, they didn't want to go to the bar.
	And they looked up at one of the boxes in the theatre and they saw this woman sitting in the box.
	It's strange.
	She says, she looks slightly transparent, you know, looking at her.
	Everyone says it's extraordinary.
	So they got their opera glasses.
	You know, you put in two shillings and you can't see a thing.
	You put it out and you have a look.
	Anyway, they had invested in a pair of opera glasses, so they were looking at her.
	And as the curtain, as the end of the interval happened, the house lights went down.
	She transformed into a well, she just dematerialized, I suppose is the best way to say it.
	Transmogrified.
	And became a mist.
	And as the house curtains went up, the curtains went up, the mist came down and landed on the stage next to, the actors were on stage waiting for the curtain to go up, standing next to Anna Eagle.
	And the shape then swirled round and round and round.
	By this time, people were screaming and the rest of the cast were backing away gently towards the French doors.
	But Anna didn't.
	Dame Anna didn't.
	She stood her ground.
	She was the Dame of Sartre.
	And it swirled round and round and transformed into a woman in a grey dress standing next to the Dame.
	Now, the Dame wasn't having anything to do with it.
	Well, she wasn't having this.
	So she ignored it.
	But by then, it was pandemonian in the theatre, and they had to bring the tabstaff.
	The stage manager brought the curtain in.
	Dame Anna left.
	Nobody saw this again.
	But Dame Anna never played Bath again.
	That's an extraordinary story.
	I've never heard a story like that.
	And also, of course, as we both know, involving one of the greatest performers, one of the greatest actors of her generation, of any generation, Dame Anna and Eagle.
	And this is the Theatre Royal in Bath.
	I don't think we mentioned it.
	The Theatre Royal Bath.
	Theatre Roy in the Theatre Royal Bath.
	Yes.
	Who was she?
	This is the thing.
	The stories of the Grey Lady, again, a grey lady in Bath.
	And Bath was, of course, it's very close to Bristol.
	And in fact, during the end of the 18th century, the Bristol Company used to play Bath and then go back and forth between Bath and Bristol.
	And one of the players, of course, was Sarah Sittens, who was the great tragic actress of her time.
	So Sarah Sittens is often regarded as haunting Bath and haunting Bristol.
	But there's another story, which I think is very interesting.
	My theory is this, is that Bath became terribly fashionable in the 18th century.
	You took the waters.
	You also went there to have lots of fun.
	There were the assembly rooms, there were parties, there was gambling.
	And the man who, the master of ceremonies was a gentleman called Beau Nash.
	And Beau Nash had made a killing at Tunbridge Wells and moved and was invited to come to Bath to set up the assembly rooms, to become the host, as it were, like they have in casinos.
	And he was the king of Bath, as it were.
	I mean, he ruled it with a rod of iron.
	His word was law for many years.
	And he had lots and lots of girlfriends.
	And one of his girlfriends was a lady called Juliana Popjoy.
	And Juliana Popjoy was a girl, a local girl.
	And he met her, made her his mistress.
	And she used to ride around town on a horse with a big broom as if she was to sweep people out of the way, I suppose.
	One of those witches' brooms, you know.
	And she was known as Lady Betty Besham, B-E-S-O-M, which is a word for a broom.
	Bonash pulls on hard times.
	He becomes hopelessly in debt through gambling and he's destitute.
	She came back and she'd done quite well out of him.
	And she had a house which is next door to the theater, literally next door to the theatre.
	She nursed him.
	The story goes, she nursed him during his final illness.
	And when he died, she was completely heartbroken and she left Bath and she went back to her home.
	She lived in a tree, which is, this is absolutely true.
	She lived in a tree outside Warminster, which is in Wiltshire.
	And she lived in a big hollowed out tree for about 15, 20 years, as a recluse, as a hermit, as a in mourning.
	When she knew her time was up, she came back to Bath.
	Again, the story goes that she was found dead on the doorstep of the old house where she and Beau Nash had lived.
	Next door to the theatre.
	Next door to the theatre.
	Why do I say she could be the grey lady?
	One, because the theatre and the house were literally adjoining and may have been used for both, they could have been married up, as it were.
	The second reason is next door to the theatre in the house, there was a restaurant and they called it Popjoy's after her.
	Very smart French restaurant, which sadly closed and it became a pizza restaurant.
	It was open early in the morning and we were playing bar and I thought I'd get some breakfast.
	So I went in there and had my breakfast, asking about the ghosts.
	And the manager said, oh, yes, we have a curious, yes, definitely.
	Something has been seen upstairs, you know, sir.
	Something has been seen upstairs.
	Oh, yes.
	Anyway, I dug out the story.
	I dug out a story.
	And the story goes is that a man was, when it was Pop Joyce, the restaurant, a man was recommended it from his hotel.
	So he turned up slightly early for his pay table.
	So the theatre, the bar staff said, would you care for a cocktail before dinner?
	And he said, yeah, great.
	So he went upstairs to where there was a little room upstairs on the first floor.
	And they brought his drink up, where he was waiting for it to come up.
	And when he got up there, there was another person in the room.
	It was a woman dressed, you know, very elegantly sitting on another sofa on the other side of the room.
	He sat down, looked around, looked at his watch, nodded.
	She nodded back at him, looked back at his watch, and then turned his head and realized that the woman wasn't there, but something was sitting next to him, an old hag in rags.
	And he got up, screamed, ran from the restaurant, and never, again, rather like Dame Anna, never returned to Bath.
	So that may well have been the return of the hermit.
	It may well have been the return of the hermit.
	That's what I think.
	That's what I think.
	And talking of strange ladies further west than Bath and Bristol, Swansea.
	Ah, West Wales.
	Yes.
	The ghost scene at the Grand Theatre Swansea is described as a woman in a dazzling white dress, associated, as ghosts quite often are, with a smell of violets.
	Yes.
	Violets and lavender are the two most common scents.
	I mean, sorry, I must say this very carefully.
	S-C-E-N-T-S.
	I think we catch your drift.
	Yes.
	Now, who she is is, again, open to opinion.
	But the theatre was built in 1897.
	So like many of our current theatres, and it was opened by a great, great star of the day, Adelina Patty, who lived up the road.
	And Patty was asked to cut the ribbon, as it were, and smash the champagne bottle to open the theatre, which she did.
	People associate, although I don't believe she actually ever sang there because she was a wonderful singer, opera star.
	There was another story of another, of the lady who the lady in white was, was that there was identified as someone called Jenny, who, again, was an act, was in the business, an actress.
	And the story went that she had been on board the Titanic.
	She'd taken passage to America on board the Titanic and sadly had gone down with the ship.
	But I looked into this one and I went through the passenger list of all those who were either saved or drowned in the tragedy.
	And I couldn't find any actor or actress of that name on the passenger list.
	So not sure of that.
	There is the story that it could be a wardrobe mistress who, again, returned to the theatre having drowned crossing a river.
	So there's three possibilities for the woman in white in Swansea.
	But the opera singer story is credible, I think, in a way, because, of course, what would you do with an opera singer in previous eras and today?
	You garland with flowers, don't you, an opera singer?
	Yes, yes, you do.
	So maybe that's part of the huge bouquet would have been given to her on the day.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	When she came down from a castle up in Kragynoscast, which is just up the road.
	And that's the story, whether it's La Scala Milan or Glindbourne, I think.
	Okay, let's go to another theatre.
	Okay.
	If you're to travel from Swansea through Cardiff and up the beautiful border train route that I used to use when I was a student many years ago.
	Beautiful moonlit nights chugging along the border from Craven Arms and Shrewsbury and places like that, Shrewsbury, depending on how you want to pronounce it.
	The Lyceum Theatre in Crewe, which apparently has, if I've got this one right, is it Charlie the Formless Ghost?
	Crewe.
	Oh, yes.
	Crewe is haunted.
	Charlie is basically the type of ghost which we call a poltergeist.
	And Charlie hides things.
	Things disappear.
	Now, I've known this on other shows.
	actually known this on a show where props which have been laid out on the table are not there when you want them.
	Yes.
	This is either light-fingered staff or mischievous actors.
	But the third category of persons who might have moved them are poltergeists because they do turn up in other Places.
	Generally, people don't move props.
	They don't move things.
	They know that the business is, although we joke and laugh and have a good time, it's actually a very, very disciplined business underneath because everybody has a job to do.
	And if they muck around, then other people's performances or work suffers.
	So it's not really tolerated.
	It's certainly not frowned on.
	Props are important.
	If you've got a line in a play and you turn and you say, and you were there when that vase was put down here and the vase is not there, then you've got a problem.
	Yes, or, you know, I'm going to shoot you and you put your hand in your pocket and your gun's gone.
	So that's Charlie the Formless Ghost in Wolverhampton.
	In rather in Wolverhampton, I don't know.
	In Crewe.
	And there was the smoking man.
	That was the other one in Crewe, who you smell deep smell of cigarettes smoke everywhere, which is interesting because the theatre, in fact, has burnt down at times.
	All right.
	Let's go down from Crewe then finally here in England.
	We might try and squeeze in a Scottish theatre at the end of this in the interests of covering more or less, you know, most places.
	But Wolverhampton Grand.
	Now, you say in the book that Wolverhampton Grand is famous for not being haunted by Charlie Chaplin, who actually worked there.
	And if anybody was going to haunt that place, you would expect him to be.
	But there's something else there.
	Chaplin, you see, worked all over the country, all over the country.
	He went on tour in Sherlock Holmes.
	He played Billy, Dr. Watson's page boy in Sherlock Holmes.
	And so an awful lot of theatres are associated with Charlie Chaplin, but he doesn't appear there.
	In fact, I don't know of him appearing in any theatre or Stan Laurel, who again he worked with.
	The man who Chaplin and Laurel, they emulated some of his tricks, turns, was Dan Lino, who of course does haunt theatres, but that's another story.
	The grand, we have an angry manager, an ex-angry manager, Mr. Purdy, who is known to smash glasses in the dress circle bar.
	They just smash, and they all say it's Mr. Purdy.
	Is that only when the performance is sub-par or is that all the time?
	No, I think it's every time he can't get it.
	Mr. Purdy.
	Mr. Purdy to you.
	Has he ever been seen or is he just felt?
	No, just sometimes, sometimes seen, but mostly it's glasses smashed and the smell of cigars.
	Boy.
	And I think we should go finally to Scotland.
	I think we did one Scottish theatre when we were on the TV, but we had to rush it.
	So let's go as far north as we can.
	And I know that you've done research on the theatre in Aberdeen.
	That's about as far north as you can go in Scotland.
	And it's another story a little bit like the fireman at the Aldwych Theatre, wasn't it?
	Or Wyndham's Theatre, rather, that you told me about a little while ago.
	Yes.
	And this is a guy who sadly met his end in a mechanical way connected with the stage.
	I mean, there are risks involved in these things.
	So tell me the story connected with that theatre in Aberdeen.
	His name was John Murray, and his nickname was Jake.
	And he was a stagehand, and he was killed by a stage hoist during a circus performance in, I believe, in 1942.
	He haunts the theatre or has haunted the theatre.
	This is His Majesty's Theatre.
	His Majesty's Theatre, which is still called, which has never changed its name.
	It's always been His Majesty's.
	And he has been heard again on the fly floor walking up and down.
	He's been heard on the passage in the west balcony on the stage left side of the building.
	He's been again seen wearing a brown, one of those, you know, those old dust coats people used to wear.
	He's been seen in one of those behind what was the frame paint, sorry, I'll say this again, behind the paint frame.
	And again, the other element of Jake's appearances is the fact that he pinches things.
	He used to pinch paintbrushes, and then they'd turn up somewhere else.
	So another light-fingered presence.
	A light-fingered presence.
	And one of the crew believed that he saved him from falling off the paint frame when he toppled over.
	He thought this hand pushed him back.
	Now, I've heard that in a couple of theatres, that a hand has come out and some, well, not a hand, but some force has kept you upright when you should have fallen.
	So Jake has actually intervened to save somebody's life, it is believed.
	Yes.
	Well, that's what the witness claimed, at any rate.
	And I think you may not know anything about this, which is fine.
	There's another grey lady story there, I think.
	There are grey ladies everywhere.
	Grey ladies.
	We don't have to investigate that.
	Now, listen, Nick, are you going to be writing a sequel to this book?
	Because a lot of people I speak with who write books like this, they say, God, I finished the book, it was published, and then I thought of six more.
	Well, bullies are them.
	I haven't thought of six more.
	I would love to continue it.
	My problem is, if I could call it a problem, the challenge is to find stories which one, I believe myself to be authentic and told by people who believe them.
	And that's very important because I do like to get witness stories rather than taking stories, you know, just it is said.
	I hate that.
	That's important.
	So this is a book that is not full of myths.
	This book is full of accounts that have been, as far as you can, verify these things, verify.
	And the Day Man and Eagle story is from past I've never heard before is an absolute classic.
	Well, it's a great book, and it's got many more stories that we've had time to go into, both on the TV in January and now recording again in March.
	Well, thank you.
	Thank you very much.
	It's very kind of you.
	And, you know, I hope you enjoyed it.
	I hope it wasn't an ordeal.
	Stage ghosts and haunted theatres are never an ordeal.
	Nicholas Bromley is the man that you've been hearing, and the name is spelt the same way as the town in Kent, Bromley.
	And if you check him out online, you will see the book there, and I would definitely recommend it.
	There's a lot of material there, and the next time that you go to the theatre, if you do, just look behind you.
	You never know who or what might be there.
	And I'm not only talking about pantomime.
	You know, in Britain, if you're not listening in the United Kingdom, you may not know this.
	But in the UK, we have this thing called pantomime.
	And I think they might do it in Canada.
	I think they do it in Australia too.
	But it's a beautiful entertainment.
	I went to a lot of them when I was a little kid.
	And the great thing is that there would be some kind of caper going on on stage.
	And somebody in a nice jokey way malevolent would appear behind one of the star characters.
	And all the kids would shout out, he's behind you.
	So it's become, if you're listening in America, if you're listening in South America or, you know, the Far East or somewhere like that, then you may have no idea what I'm talking about.
	But pantomime is a British national tradition.
	And one of these days, I will tell you my story of seeing the great comedian Ken Dodd when he appeared at the Liverpool Empire and I was only six years of age.
	And he screamed after the stage on a motorbike and threw bags of sweets out to the kids.
	Long time ago and far away.
	That's enough rambling from me.
	More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained online, so until we meet again.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been the Unexplained and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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