The Citadel, on Waterloo Street in St Helens, has operated continuously as an entertainment venue since 1861 under a succession of different names over the decades, most long-windedly remembered locally as the Theatre Royal, giving it one of the longest unbroken runs of continuous entertainment use of any building in the town.
Staff tradition holds that heavy footsteps are sometimes heard crossing the stage when the building is known to be otherwise completely empty, an unsettling sound for anyone working alone in a theatre after the audience and performers have gone home for the night, and that a woman in Victorian crinoline dress has separately been seen standing quietly in the wings, watching a performance that finished being staged well over a century ago.
No specific date, name or historical incident underlies either report in the sources consulted for this entry, and both are recorded here as ongoing venue and staff tradition attached to one of the town's oldest continuously operating buildings, kept alive mainly through the simple accumulated weight of staff experience passed down across the venue's many decades of different names and different generations of performers.
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