Local Author Reveals the Phantoms of the Theatre
Spooky happenings at the Tabard feature in new book
Local author Nick Bromley
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For local author Nick Bromley ‘stage fright’ has more than one meaning. The company director who lives on the borders of Chiswick and Hammersmith previously worked in theatre and during this time collected a series of ghost stories which he has now collated in a new illustrated book Stage Ghosts and Haunted Theatres.
It was launched on National Paranormal Day 2021 which took place on 3 May and takes the reader on a selected tour of some of the British Isles’ phantom filled venues.
As a boy, a peculiar visit to the private apartments of the Palais de Versailles first encouraged Nick Bromley to seek out the possibility of their existence. Since then, personal experiences have convinced him of their presence, and he believes his stage career has enabled him to bear witness to several fragments of the afterlife.
He is convinced that the particular ability of theatres to retain memories and sightings of their past occupants is second to none. This has helped him over the years to assemble a collection of spectral encounters from witnesses on both sides of the curtain, be they actors, backstage workers, managers or front of house staff.
Fittingly introduced by Richard O’Brien, the creator of the legendary The Rocky Horror Picture Show, this book presents a new collection of untold supernatural experiences together with historic stories intertwined with the details of the individual theatres where ghosts in many forms have been encountered.
One of the tales concerns what was then the Tabard Theatre in Chiswick (since renamed the Chiswick Playhouse). One morning in 2013, during the run of The Mikado, the assistant stage manager, Kristina Kreculji told general manager Simon Reilly that there had been an inexplicable happening. She recounted that, at the very end of the previous evening’s show, it had been discovered that one of the set’s Japanese sliding paper doors had come off its hinges. As it was late, rather than doing an immediate repair, she and the crew placed the door safely upright, off stage in the stage left wing, so that it could be fixed back the next day.
As usual the theatre was fully locked up for the night, but when Kristina came the next morning to open up and make good the damage, she discovered that the sliding door had already been fixed back and was now hanging in its correct position. Together, she and Simon then thoroughly checked through the entire overnight CCTV footage from the security cameras only to draw a complete blank. Nobody human had entered the theatre overnight.
Nick’s book can be purchased online for £9.99.
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May 9, 2021
