Haunted London (13 page)

Some years ago, a commissionaire who had not long been at the Haymarket, and knew nothing about the ghost of Buckstone, went to see the theatre manager of the time, Mr Stuart Watson, and said he had seen a strange man in the empty theatre at night on several occasions. Watson asked for a description of the man and then showed the commissionaire a photograph of Buckstone, which was immediately recognised as the mysterious stranger.

Stuart Watson himself had a curious experience in the room that is now the stage director’s office. He was working there late one evening when suddenly all the lights were extinguished and as he stumbled about in the total darkness, endeavouring to discover what had gone wrong, he began to notice an intense coldness and as this increased he became very frightened. Eventually, he found his way out of the room but he never discovered any reason for either the temporary loss of electricity in the office or the unusual and terrifying cold. He never experienced either again during the quarter-century that he was manager at the Haymarket.

The late Margaret Rutherford told me that when she was at the Haymarket in
The School for Scandal
she and her husband Stringer Davis spent one night in her dressing room where a bricked-up doorway used to give access to the stage. During the night they both heard curious creaking noises from the direction of the bricked-up doorway, almost as though a door was still there, and the rattle of bottles from the direction of an empty cupboard. The following evening, both Margaret Rutherford and her dresser thought that they glimpsed John Buckstone entering the dressing-room.

During the same run, actress Meriel Forbes (Lady Richardson) thought she saw the figure of Buckstone sitting in one of the boxes and then, noticing the light-coloured hair, decided that Mrs Stuart Watson was occupying the box. In fact, Mrs Watson was not in the theatre that night and the box, according to the theatre records, was empty and unoccupied. In 1963, when Michael Flanders was appearing at the Haymarket in
At the Drop of a Hat
, the assistant stage manager saw a man standing behind the performer’s wheelchair. Thinking that it must be a stage hand who had been trapped on the stage when the curtain went up, the stage manager was about to give instructions for the curtain to be lowered when the figure moved and it was seen that it could not be a stage hand since the figure was dressed in a long black frock-coat. As the stage manager watched, very puzzled as to who the man could be, the figure suddenly vanished mid-stage. A description of the figure admirably fitted John Buckstone.

Mrs Stuart Watson feels that Buckstone returns to the theatre because he had been so happy there and she says she finds that she is no longer frightened of the ghost. Whenever she feels that ‘he’ is near, when her door rattles, or when it opens by itself, she always welcomes the kind and gentle ghost and she would hate to do anything to offend or hurt him. The ghost is first said to have been seen as long ago as 1880, a year after Buckstone’s death, when the figure, recognised as the genial and much-loved actor manager, was seen in Queen Victoria’s box, where he had often been seated beside the queen during his lifetime. If tragic and violent happenings can cause hauntings, perhaps overwhelming love and affection can also.

HILL STREET, MAYFAIR

In a house in Hill Street, Mayfair, the ‘bad Lord Lyttelton’ (Thomas, the Second Baron) was awakened by what sounded like a bird fluttering in the bed curtains on 24 November 1779. As he awoke he saw the figure of a woman in white standing by his side and who warned him that he would soon die. Lyttelton asked whether he would not live two months and was told that he would die within three days. Next morning, he told his guests about the experience. On the fateful day he went to Pit Place, his house at Epsom, taking a number of friends with him. He declared that he felt perfectly well and was certain of bilking the ghost. Just after eleven o’clock in the evening he went to bed. When his manservant William Stuckey was helping him to undress, Lord Lyttelton suddenly put his hand to his side, collapsed, and died without a sound. There are slightly different versions of his death but all agree that he was in good health when he went to bed, that he died before midnight and that the warning came three nights earlier. Some people say the visitant was the ghost of a Mrs Amphlett, who had recently died of a broken heart after Lord Lyttelton had seduced both her daughters.

LONDON PALLADIUM, ARGYLL STREET

During the course of an interview in March 1973, George Cooper, stage doorkeeper at the London Palladium, revealed that this famous West End theatre has a ghost. The Palladium occupies the site of Argyll House, the London home of the Duke of Argyll, a family whose association with the area is preserved by the name of the road in which the Palladium stands. At the back of the royal circle there exists the old Crimson Staircase, which is said to be a remnant from a previous house, and it is down this staircase that the ghost of a lady in a crinoline has been observed on several occasions. She has been seen by members of the staff and, more rarely, by artistes and visitors to this scene of the success of so many music-hall stars, where the annual Royal Variety Performances took place. No sound accompanies the appearance and no one knows who the figure is or why she haunts the dim passages of the existing London Palladium.

THE ROYALTY THEATRE, DEAN STREET (DEMOLISHED)

The Royalty Theatre that used to stand in Dean Street, Soho, had several ghosts. One was a little old lady dressed in early Victorian costume. She was a misty and grey form but she always seemed to be cheerful, smiling and nodding happily whenever she was encountered about the theatre by the staff or when she occasionally mingled with the audience during a performance. She was repeatedly seen by scores of people, for she had the habit of entering the theatre just as the performance was about to start and then, as the theatre-goers glanced towards her to see which part of the auditorium she was making for, she would, suddenly vanish. Most of the attendants at the old Royalty knew the ghost, with her ringlets and silk dress and bonnet, and many regular patrons saw her several times.

Another ghost at the Royalty was a woman in white, in the full dress of the Queen Anne period, who used to descend the staircase and vanish in the centre of the vestibule, some (those perhaps whose hearing as well as their sight was psychically attuned) claimed that she shrieked as she vanished. Courteney Merrill of Bournemouth used to be secretary and manager of The Gargoyle Club next door and he saw the Royalty Theatre ghost on several occasions. ‘She had a very sweet face,’ he said, ‘and always appeared to be seeking something or someone. She was perfectly harmless and never gave the least feeling of fear to those who saw her. Frequently she was seen walking down stairs that did not exist.’

When he was rehearsing
Murder in Motley
in April 1934, at the Royalty, Joe Mitchenson, the actor and theatrical archivist, saw an elderly and well-dressed lady seated in the prompt box. He was in the dress circle and immediately thought of the theatre ghost, but when he went forward to obtain a closer view there was nobody there.

This ghost seems to have some historical foundation for during the reign of Queen Anne a woman was murdered in the house that then stood on the site and her skeleton was discovered in the basement of the old theatre.

There was also the ghost of an unknown woman in grey that used to be seen sitting quietly in one of the boxes, a box where other people maintain that they have heard gasps and sighs that had no rational explanation. So audible were those noises on occasions that anyone occupying the box at the time had the greatest difficulty in not believing that there was an extra person in the box with them.

Some people think that the grey lady was Fanny Kelly, an actress who managed the theatre in the 1840s for the then Duke of Devonshire. Fanny is said to have committed suicide. Macqueen Pope was among those who told me that they had seen this mysterious woman in grey, while Thurston Hopkins maintained that the theatre was also haunted by a gipsy girl dressed in green and scarlet, another ghost that had its origins in the house that formerly occupied the site. This spectre only walked when an orchestra was playing, for the music of the violin attracted her and reminded her of her Romany lover and his ‘Devil’s staff’, as the Romanies call the violin. There was a story that the Romany fiddler had murdered the young gipsy girl and buried her body inside a hollow wall that later became a wall of the Royalty Theatre, and it is said that workmen, during the building of the theatre, discovered a girl’s body in a wall encased in a tomb of plaster of Paris.

ST JAMES’S PALACE, PALL MALL

St James’s Palace is probably more haunted than any London royal palace, but it is only rarely that news filters through to keep alive the ghostly legends connected with the historic collection of buildings that were erected by Henry VIII and now house the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and other court officials.

Henry VIII acquired the ground in 1532 and he built the palace on the site of a hospital for ‘maidens that were lepers living chastely and honestly in divine service’, which dated from about the year 1100. Only the fine brick gateway of Henry VIII’s palace remains today, but an inner courtyard contains fourteen stones bearing crosses, worn but still visible, pathetic reminders of the hospital here 900 years ago, for the crosses mark the graves of fourteen leprous maidens who sleep, apparently undisturbed.

Not so poor Sellis, the Italian valet, who was almost certainly murdered by his master, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland. The blood-drenched figure of little Sellis, his throat cut from ear to ear, has been seen propped up in bed, in the position that his body was discovered, in the part of the palace that today looks like a country house.

Ernest, George III’s wicked fifth son, came back to his chambers at the palace late on May 31, 1810, after a visit to the opera and a night of debauchery. Almost immediately the sounds of shouts, cursing and scuffling were heard by the startled servants, but they were used to such disturbances and they knew better than to interfere. After a while, things quietened down and then the Duke called for Yew, his other valet. Yew found the Duke standing in the middle of his room, cool and composed, but his shirt-front was covered with blood and his bloodstained sword lay on the floor at his feet. The Duke declared that he had been set upon as he had entered the apartment and had only succeeded in driving off his assailant at the expense of being seriously wounded himself. He instructed Yew to fetch Sir Henry Halford at once. The distinguished physician arrived within minutes and discovered that the Duke’s wounds were superficial in the extreme, and the only deep cut being on the Duke’s sword hand. By the time the wounds were dressed to the Duke’s satisfaction and the room restored to its accustomed elegance, more than two hours had passed since the Duke had returned to the palace, and now he asked Yew to fetch Sellis. Yew’s subsequent sworn statement tells of his going straight to Sellis’s room and there finding the valet propped up in bed against the headboard, his head almost severed from his body by a frightful gash and a razor, covered with blood, at the opposite end of the room — too far from the body to have been used by Sellis himself or to have been thrown away by him in such a condition.

At the inquest the Duke maintained that Sellis had tried to murder him and had then committed suicide, an unlikely suggestion in view of the fact that while the Duke was large-boned and heavy, Sellis was small and slight. The truth is that the Duke had seduced Sellis’s daughter who had committed suicide when she found that she was expecting his child, and in order to silence the indignant servant, the Duke had attacked the poor man while he was in bed, holding him by the hair with one hand and cutting his throat with the other. He had then gashed himself with the razor, which he had then thrown to the floor before returning to his own room to disarrange the furniture, bloody the sword and generally act as though he had been attacked. The Duke of Cumberland was disliked in London before the Sellis affair, and although the matter was hushed up as much as possible, afterwards he was openly booed in the streets and so hated that he hardly dared show his face in public.

From time to time, scuffling noises, the sound of cursing and the sickly-sweet smell of blood is said to return to parts of the palace, and the awful spectre of Sellis with his throat cut and the body and bedclothes drenched with blood has been seen at this palace, which is so full of history that it would be surprising if it did not have a dozen ghosts.

In the seventeenth century, the Duchess of Mazarin was mistress to Charles II and Madame de Beauclair was mistress to Charles’s brother and successor James II. Both ladies, living in retirement, were allotted handsome suites of apartments in the palace and they became great friends. On more than one occasion they discussed the immortality of the soul, the evidence for apparitions, and the possibility of returning to earth after death. They gave each other a solemn undertaking that whoever should die first would return, if it were possible, to show herself to her friend. This promise was reaffirmed in the presence of witnesses when the Duchess of Mazarin lay dying.

Some years later, Madame de Beauclair stated that she had no faith in an afterlife, for she considered the fact that her friend had not returned to her as proof of the non-existence of a future life. A few months later, Madame de Beauclair sent an urgent message to a friend with whom she had discussed the matter of life after death, entreating her to come at once if she wanted to see her alive. The lady concerned was unwell, and hesitated and was about to send her excuses when a still more urgent message arrived, accompanied by a casket of jewellery, imploring her to come at once.

St James’s Palace, haunt of the murdered Sellis and the scene of a spectacular death-pact fulfilment.