Great Australian Ghost Stories Read Online Free

distinguished features, dressed in evening clothes with a long cloak and a top hat.
    â€˜A real toff ’e was, wiv’ ’is hair parted in the middle an’ all slicked down. But not a real man … not flesh and blood. Icould see frough ’im, I could,’ the distressed fireman explained. ‘Like looking frough dirty glass it was. An’ ’is eyes? I shall never forget ’is eyes till the day I die. They glowed in the moonlight … a bit like cat’s eyes, but like no cat I ever seen!’
    The most widely publicised sighting of Federici’s ghost occurred in 1917. Betty Beddoes, the theatre’s wardrobe mistress, was working round the clock to finish costumes for a production of Sheridan’s School for Scandal which was about to open. At 2.30 in the morning another fireman knocked gently on her workroom door and stuck his head inside.
    â€˜Excuse me, Miss Beddoes,’ he said, ‘er … would you like to see a ghost?’ Curious but sceptical Betty said she would and followed the fireman up the side stairs to a landing beside the dress circle. The fireman pointed. Betty looked and could hardly believe her eyes. Federici was sitting in the middle of the second row of the dress circle, quite motionless and staring down at the empty stage. His face was in profile and although his features were indistinct Betty could see where his carefully groomed hair was greying. His immaculate white shirt front glowed in the half light and the studs that fastened it and the jewelled stick pin in the shape of a horseshoe securing his cravat sparkled like stars.
    The wardrobe mistress and the fireman watched the spectre for a long time and it was still there when they returned to work. Fifty years later, Betty Beddoes could remember every detail of that experience and delighted in recounting what she called her ‘only brush with the supernatural in nearly ninety years’.
    Two years later another fireman, John Gange, spotted the ghost on two different occasions and Charlie White, chief machinist at the rival Her Majesty’s Theatre, claimed that he had ‘laid’ the ghost in the 1930s, insisting that it was nothingmore than a shaft of moonlight shining in through a small window above the dress circle, but earlier witnesses were not convinced and the sightings continued.
    Irene Mitchell, proprietor of the St Martin’s Theatre in South Yarra, reported seeing it while visiting the Princess one night and Kitty Carroll, wife of the impresario who took over the theatre after World War Two, claimed that she had come upon it suddenly in a side aisle during a rehearsal of the Ballet Rambert in 1947.
    In 1966 June Bronhill, playing in the musical Robert and Elizabeth , observed a very peculiar light moving about at the back of the dress circle during a performance and told her colleagues: ‘It was very strange, glowing in the centre and dull around the edge, with a sort of pinkish tinge to it. It moved slowly, backwards and forwards behind the last row of seats for three or four minutes then suddenly … it was gone. At first I thought it was an usher with a torch searching for something or helping a member of the audience, but as I looked closer I swear there was no figure behind that light!’
    Did she think she had seen Federici, the perennial star was asked. ‘I’m not sure.’ Bronhill laughed. ‘Someone told me he died in a red costume, so maybe the pink colour is a faded version of that. I really don’t know what I saw and certainly not who I saw, but I do know I saw it … and I looked for it every night after that.’
    By the early 1980s the Princess Theatre was closed and rapidly becoming derelict. Onto the scene came an enterprising couple, Elaine and David Marriner, who bought the old theatre and restored it to its former glory. The Victorian-berserk-style décor was refurbished inside and out, the wrought-iron-lace-capped