Theatre Royal, Drury Lane

The story

Wikipedia, our only source for this chronology, counts four theatres on this Covent Garden site since 1663 and calls it London's oldest theatre site still in use. The first, the Theatre Royal in Bridges Street, opened on 7 May 1663 under Thomas Killigrew and burned on 25 January 1672. A second theatre followed in 1674 and was demolished in 1791. The third, by Henry Holland, opened on 12 March 1794 and was destroyed by fire on 24 February 1809. The present building, by Benjamin Dean Wyatt, opened on 10 October 1812 with Hamlet. It was listed Grade I in February 1958. It was restored in 2013, has been managed by LW Theatres since 2014, and underwent major works from 2019 until it reopened in July 2021.

Two real people from its past feed the ghost tales. In 1735 the actor Charles Macklin killed a colleague, Thomas Hallam, with a stick during a quarrel over a wig, striking him in the eye. He was tried and convicted of manslaughter. The 1893 Dictionary of National Biography and Wikipedia agree on the year and verdict, but not on the room: the DNB says green-room, Wikipedia says scene room. We could not read the trial record. The clown Joseph Grimaldi, who performed at Drury Lane, died on 31 May 1837 and was buried on 6 June at Pentonville. The DNB entry mentions no ghost and no story about a severed head.

The legend

The theatre's central ghost story is the Man in Grey, a figure dressed as a late-18th-century nobleman, in a cloak and tricorn hat. He is said to cross the upper circle and vanish into a wall. He is supposed to be a man who was stabbed, whose skeleton, with a knife in the ribs, is said to have been found in a walled-up space. The date of that discovery is given as 1848 by Wikipedia, the 1870s by a ghost-hunting blog and the 1840s by another page. We found no primary source for any of them.

Here is what the evidence allows. The oldest dated account of the Man in Grey we found is a reported group sighting in 1939 during a photo call for The Dancing Years, which a blog gives without a source (saying half the cast saw it). Wikipedia names the theatre historian W. J. MacQueen-Pope as someone who reported the ghost, with no date, and we did not read his books. Searches also point to articles from October 1939 and 1947 in New Zealand newspapers, which we could not open. The oldest account we actually read in a newspaper is in the Laurel Outlook (Montana) of 17 May 1950, which has him walking only by day, between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., out of a wall on the upper circle level. Before 1939 the picture is vague. A syndicated American item of 15 November 1930 (Bismarck Tribune; the same story ran in the New Britain Herald) says in passing that a Covent Garden theatre had been haunted for more than a century, naming Sheridan as the ghost, and the Bismarck text adds that "The Drury Lane [t]heatre and the Haymarket theatres also reputedly house ghosts." That shows a loose reputation and nothing specific. So far as we could find, no document shows the legend to be older than that.

One more oddity: the present house dates from 1812, so a ghost from the 1700s can only belong to the site, not to these walls.

Other spirits are attached to the building later and without dates. Macklin is said to walk a backstage corridor, though we found no date for the link to his 1735 crime. Grimaldi is described as a friendly ghost who guides or kicks actors; a blog ties this to his reported wish to have his head cut off before burial, which we could not verify. Wikipedia says the actor Stanley Lupino saw the comedian Dan Leno in a dressing room, with no date. There is also a theatre belief that seeing a ghost brings luck to a production. Wikipedia quotes the author Tom Ogden calling the theatre one of the most haunted in the world, which is an opinion and not evidence.

What remains today

The 1812 theatre survives, listed Grade I, and it is in use. Musicals have filled its stage for most of the time since the Second World War, with Miss Saigon holding the record for the longest run. The pandemic added to the closure before the 2021 reopening.

Visiting

Drury Lane is a working West End theatre, and the way in is to buy a ticket for a show. The theatre's official site was blocked when we researched this page, so we cannot confirm the current program or whether backstage tours are offered. Check LW Theatres before you go.

Sources

1. Historic England list entry (List entry 1357276) — Historic England · Open Government Licence
2. Wikimedia Commons category : Theatre Royal, Drury Lane — Wikimedia Commons
3. Charles Macklin — Wikipedia
4. Drury Lane, the clown and the Man in Grey — seeksghosts (blog), 2014-05
5. Grimaldi, Joseph (Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900) — Wikisource
6. Macklin, Charles (Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900) — Wikisource, 1893
7. Official website
8. 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.