The proprietors affect ignorance and of course tell you nothing
- Date of account
- Published 1917
- Source
- Haunted Places in England
- Reference
- Haunted Places in England · selected passage 42
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
The proprietors affect ignorance and of course tell you nothing
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyThe 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_.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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