Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

As proof that some actors never know when to go off stage, I present this story from the “Hamilton County Times,” July 12, 1906:

Los Angeles--A more uncanny visitor than death, whose silent entrance of its portals there is not a day that fails to record, has appeared at the county hospital, according to inmates. 

This weird apparition is not the rider of the pale horse, who is welcome, but a ghost, which is terrible--the ghost of a man who died there months ago--Lawrence Hanley, the actor; Lawrence Hanley in the wraith-garb of the spirit world enacting the role of Hamlet at midnight in the darkness of the corridor upon which opened the room where he died August 28 last; Lawrence Hanley smoking a cigarette and leaning with one arm raised upon thin air and with his feet crossed, saying, "Yes, I'll have another, thanks!" 

The doctors and the nurses laugh or pooh-pooh when they hear these reports, but doctors and nurses are of unsuperstitious fiber; they believe in scalpels and saws and such obviously material things, and if a ghost should appear to one he might call it a wreath of smoke, a shaft of moonlight or some other easily explicable thing.

The nurse who was with Lawrence Hanley when he died, H.S. Rea Don, when interviewed, refused to discuss the alleged spectral manifestation. Mr. Rea Don glared when he was asked if he had not chased the luminous phantom up and down the hall with a club to drive it from the building.

Those to whom the specter is said to have appeared are Willis H. Hoes, Frank Hartwell and Charles C. Morell. They tell substantially the same story, which was related by each without collaboration with the other. It seems especially strange that such a story should be told of Lawrence Hanley.

He knew more about ghosts, perhaps, than any other patient who ever died there, for his long and brilliant stage career acquainted him intimately with Shakespeare's ghostly company. As "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" he had held communion with avenging spirits; in the first year of his acting he had even impersonated Banquo's ghost and that of the Danish king. But the persons  mentioned gave him a part more ghastly than any of these, the eighth act in the human drama. Lawrence Hanley's death was itself as tragic as that of any character he portrayed, for he died miserably, the wreck of a man once fired with genius. 

Hanley's ghost is said to have appeared a month after his death.  A luminous, pearly vapor having the form of a man emerged from the southwest room on the lower floor. It was an opalescent apparition; it wore a stiff straw hat set jauntily, a light suit and carried a cane. It floated down the long corridor with the semblance of a stride--the tread of the actor upon the boards--and wailed in a voice itself the ghost of the vocal: "To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day," and so on to the end. He was Hamlet mournfully reciting "To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream." All of the great characters of his past he enacted. 

He strode quickly forward, they say, made as if to draw a sword, leaned his chin upon his hand and mused, beetling his brows until his eyes glowed with greater intensity, threw back his head and laughed, and then bowed and disappeared. The last time these men saw the spirit it was in a bibulous vein. It stood long at a bar of its fancy and tossed down unseen glasses of nothing until its wraith form began to stagger. It sang a song of revelry, then stopped short, straightened up and said: "I must go home." 

Hospital authorities do not attempt to account for the weird stories which have circulated, except to say that they must have emanated from the distorted fancy of some insane patients.