Few Glasgow buildings can claim as varied a working history as the Tron Theatre, and its ghost story draws visibly on nearly all of it. The site originally held St Mary's Church, destroyed along with much of the surrounding area in a major fire that swept through Glasgow in 1793 — the church itself was lost, but its steeple proved sturdier than the rest of the structure and survives today, incorporated into the modern theatre building, an odd and striking piece of continuity between the site's religious past and its present life as a venue for drama. In the centuries since, the site has cycled through an unusually wide range of uses: a meeting hall, a place where public executions were carried out, a police station enforcing the law rather than breaking it, and, according to persistent local tradition, a meeting place for the Hellfire Club, the loosely organised eighteenth-century societies associated (fairly or not) with irreverent and supposedly blasphemous gatherings among the gentry.
Given that accumulated history, it's perhaps unsurprising that staff describe the Tron as one of the most reliably haunted buildings in the city, a reputation borne out, in their telling, by investigations from mediums who have reported apparitions specifically in the old Victorian Bar and among the back rows of the main playhouse. What sets these accounts apart from some of the more benign hauntings gathered elsewhere in this collection is the tone: the presences reported at the Tron are consistently described as threatening rather than merely present or curious, a harder edge that those who work there attribute, when pressed, to the darker uses the site has cycled through — the executions and the police custody rather than the theatre or the church.
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