The New Palace Theatre opened its doors in Westcliff-on-Sea on 21 October 1912, initially billed as the Palace of Varieties before a rename to the New Palace took effect that December, and it has operated as a working theatre in one form or another for well over a century since. The story told about its resident ghost, a manager remembered only as George, holds that financial difficulties overwhelmed him not long after the theatre's opening and that he hanged himself from the fly floor, the raised working area above the stage from which scenery and lighting are traditionally operated, a location that gives the story an unusually specific and theatrically apt setting for its central tragedy.
George's reported presence has settled into a consistent, almost domestic set of phenomena rather than dramatic apparitions: the smell of tobacco, specifically identified in some tellings as Old Holborn, drifting from near the fly door with no visible smoker present; a hand felt on the shoulder by performers and staff working alone, gentle rather than threatening in how it is generally described; an occasional figure glimpsed occupying a seat that should be empty; and, perhaps most evocative of all for a theatre, a piano sometimes heard playing in the empty orchestra pit when no one is there to play it. A separate haunting, a woman in white, is also reported in the building, and those who tell both stories are generally careful to treat her as an entirely distinct presence from George rather than folding the two together.
A genuine caveat belongs in this entry rather than being smoothed over: no contemporary news account or documentary record of George's death, whether by his own hand or otherwise, has been traced to confirm the story as historical fact, despite how consistently and specifically it is told. It survives as a well established theatre tradition, the kind many working theatres accumulate around their own backstage spaces over a long operating life, rather than as a documented event, and this entry records it on that basis.
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