Grand Theatre

The story

The Grand Theatre stands on Richmond Street in downtown London, Ontario, a few steps south of Dufferin Avenue. It opened its doors on September 9, 1901, and for most of its first two decades it belonged to Ambrose Small, a Toronto impresario who built up a chain of playhouses. Accounts of his career say that, of all the venues he controlled, the London house was the one he liked best.

The building's fortunes followed the shifts of popular entertainment. Moving pictures were drawing crowds away from live stages by the 1920s, and in 1924 the theatre passed to Famous Players, which fitted it out to show films. Two decades later, in 1945, the chain let the London Little Theatre company buy it for a fairly modest sum. Under that group the Grand became an amateur stage, and the company grew into one of the busiest and most successful community troupes in Canada.

From 1971 the organization spent three years turning itself into a fully professional regional theatre. By the mid-1970s, though, the old structure was in poor shape. In 1975 the board chose to rebuild rather than patch, and a reconstruction budgeted at about five million dollars was finished in 1978. Almost everything was renewed except the proscenium arch framing the main stage, which was reinforced and kept as the one major surviving element of the 1901 design. The project added a studio venue below the main house, and the architects who carried out the redesign received a Governor General's award for the work.

Over the years the stage has hosted a remarkable roster of performers, from W.C. Fields and Sarah Bernhardt to Michael Redgrave, Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, Maggie Smith, Sidney Poitier, Leonard Nimoy, Karen Kain, Victor Garber and Sandra Oh. Canadian stage figures such as William Hutt and Martha Henry are also part of its history. The building is a designated heritage property under Part IV of the Ontario Heritage Act.

The legend

The ghost of the Grand is inseparable from one of Canada's most famous unsolved cases: the disappearance of its owner. Ambrose Small, born in 1866 in Bradford, Upper Canada, according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Wikipedia says Newmarket), had just sold his theatre chain when he vanished on December 2, 1919. According to Wikipedia, that day he deposited one million dollars from the sale in a Toronto bank and had lunch with his wife, Theresa; another account places the payment on the day before he vanished. He was last seen in Toronto, at his Grand Opera House there, and never again after that. It is worth stressing, because the story is often told otherwise, that he did not disappear in London.

Toronto police searched without finding any trace of him. The only conviction connected to the affair was that of a former employee, who was found guilty of stealing bonds; nobody was ever charged with kidnapping or murder. Small was declared legally dead in 1923. In 1936 a review by Inspector Edward L. Hammond of the Ontario Provincial Police concluded that he had been murdered in a conspiracy led by his wife, but no case followed, and the file was finally closed in 1960.

London enters the mystery early. One early rumor came from the London playhouse itself: its caretaker asserted that Theresa Small and her lover had killed her husband and burned the body. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography records that rumor while noting that nobody knows whether there was any truth in it. A second story, repeated on Wikipedia without a cited source, holds that a few weeks after the disappearance the theatre's night watchman insisted he had seen Small walking into the Grand. The lead did not solve the case.

From these threads grew the belief that Small never really left his favorite theatre and still wanders it. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography sums it up by saying he survives in legend as the building's ghost. What the reliable record does not contain is much detail: no source found for this guide describes specific modern sightings, sounds or encounters, and none dates the first time the theatre was called haunted. Readers should treat the haunting as a tradition born from an unsolved disappearance rather than as a body of documented reports.

The building has nonetheless drawn paranormal television. The Canadian series The Girly Ghosthunters investigated the Grand in its first episode in 2005. The theatre itself has also embraced the legend on its own terms: in 2022 it commissioned and staged Grand Ghosts, a play by Trina Davies about Small and what he left behind. For the history of the case, Katie Daubs's 2019 book The Missing Millionaire is the most thorough modern account, and fiction has claimed him too, since Michael Ondaatje wrote him into In the Skin of a Lion.

What remains today

The Grand is very much a living building, not a ruin. Its main auditorium, the Spriet Stage, seats 839 people, and a smaller venue on the lower level, the Auburn Theatre (formerly the McManus), seats around 150. The regular season runs from September to May.

Because the 1975 to 1978 rebuild replaced most of the original structure, the main survivor from Ambrose Small's day is the proscenium arch over the main stage. The building remains a good example of the traditional proscenium-arch playhouse, a form designed to carry music and voices from the stage out into the audience. It is listed on the Canadian Register of Historic Places.

Visiting

The simplest and most respectful way to experience the Grand is to buy a ticket for a show during the September to May season; the theatre's official website lists the program. It is a working professional theatre, so backstage areas, technical spaces and the building outside performance hours are not open to casual visitors. No regular ghost tour of the theatre was found while researching this page, so check with the box office before assuming one exists.

The theatre is in the heart of downtown London, Ontario, on Richmond Street, and the exterior can be seen from the public sidewalk at any time. Those drawn by the Small mystery can pair a performance with Katie Daubs's book or with a production of Grand Ghosts if it is ever revived.

Sources

1. Répertoire canadien des lieux patrimoniaux — Parks Canada
2. Wikimedia Commons category : Grand Theatre (London, Ontario) — Wikimedia Commons
3. "Disappearance of Ambrose Small" — Wikipedia — Wikipedia
4. Official website
5. "SMALL, AMBROSE JOSEPH" (Kathleen D. J. Fraser, vol. 14, 1998) — Dictionary of Canadian Biography (University of Toronto / Université Laval) — Dictionary of Canadian Biography (University of Toronto / Université Laval
6. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.