Princess Theatre, Melbourne

Spring Street facade
Address	163 Spring Street
City	Melbourne
Country	Australia
Designation	Victorian Heritage Register
Architect	William Pitt
Owned by	Marriner Theatres
Capacity	1488 seats
Opened	1857
Years active	1857-
Current use	musicals, opera
www.marrinertheatres.com.au/hireprincess.htm

The Princess Theatre is a 1488-seat theatre in Melbourne, Australia.
It is listed by the National Trust of Australia and is on the Victorian Heritage Register.

Ghost sightings

The theatre has experienced several reported ghost sightings.
On the evening of 3 March 1888, the baritone Frederick Baker, known under the stage name "Frederick Federici", was performing the role of Mephistopheles in Gounod's opera Faust. This production ended with Mephistopheles sinking dramatically through a trapdoor returning to the fires of hell with his prize, the unfortunate Dr Faustus. The audience was spellbound. As the audience held its collective breath as Federici was lowered down through the stage into this basement, he had a heart attack and died immediately. They laid him on the floor, lifeless, in his crimson vestments. He never came back onstage, never took the bows. When the company was gathered together to be told that Federici had died, they asked, "When?". Being told of what had happened at the end of the opera, they said, "He's just been onstage and taken the bows with us." Since then, many people who have never heard of the Federici story have claimed to see a ghostly figure in evening dress at the theatre. For many years, the third-row seat in the dress circle was kept vacant in his honour.
When a documentary was made nearly 80 years later, by Kennedy Miller in the early 1970s, a photograph of the film set revealed an ashen-faced, partly transparent observer. No-one on the set saw the figure on that day; only the photograph revealed 'the ghost'.