Ghosts of Kent by Peter Underwood

Author:Peter Underwood [Underwood, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-10T23:00:00+00:00

Margate

The Theatre Royal, now sadly a bingo hall, has been described as southern England’s most haunted theatre: a multi-haunted place. I remember it as a big theatre (it seated about two thousand people), full of atmosphere, but I did not see the ghost in one of the boxes — a ghost that is said to draw back the curtains if they are closed — that Macqueen Pope told me he saw. Nor did I see the ball of orange light or hear the mysterious sounds of whispering, the inexplicable footsteps or the thuds and thumps and bangs that have convinced many people that this historic building is indeed haunted.

Margate’s theatre was opened in 1874 and many famous actors have walked its boards. Under the guidance of one-time actress Sarah Thorne it became the best-known theatre in the south of England but by the turn of the century its fortunes had declined and eventually it became a furniture store. Re-opened as a theatre in 1930, it soon became a cinema, then back to a theatre and then a centre for bingo fans.

Fred Archer, a newspaper editor, first told me about the haunting of the Theatre Royal which, he said, dated from 1918 when the ghost of Sarah Thorne was first seen. Over the succeeding years her ghost has been reported to revisit the theatre she loved, perhaps in protest at the uses to which the place has been put. Fred Archer said he had talked with eight people, from varied walks of life, who had seen the ghost of a woman, presumably Sarah Thorne, in the theatre over a period of twenty years, and at the time they encountered the ghost none of them had any idea that the theatre was reputed to be haunted. Among other arresting phenomena reported he told me about an orange-coloured ball of light that moved across the stage; a scream that seems to begin back-stage and then travel across the stage, through the theatre and out of the stage door; and of course the mysterious ghost in the theatre box.

Macqueen Pope, who was no stranger to ghosts and had seen for himself the famous Man in Grey at his beloved Drury Lane Theatre, said he believed this partial ghost was that of an actor who had committed suicide by throwing himself from the theatre box into the orchestra pit in the early 1900s. Joseph Braddock, a perceptive investigator, told me he had reason to believe the suicide took place in late Georgian or early Victorian days when there were still stock companies. An actor in one of them had been dismissed, he believed unjustly, and he threw himself from the box the following night. Soon the ghostly form of a man was reported to be seen sitting motionless in the fatal box and when such reports became numerous and troublesome the manager withdrew the box from sale, leaving it permanently curtained and then the ghost got into the habit of drawing back the curtains and so, finally, the haunted box was bricked-up.

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