Another instance of the play's effect, or simply a misunderstanding?
If you have read the earlier blog post on the Incident at the Scala Theater in London, then this story will sound familiar. An obscure play, performed in a small New England theater in the 1920s with a series of confusing events later linked back to the performance. A few murders, disappearances and people committed to institutions. But did it really happen?
The most reliable surviving account, entitled The Path to Carcosa, holds that it was all no more than the fevered ravings of a few unfortunately sensitive attendees, who, overcome in some way by the performance of The King in Yellow, became mentally unbalanced and spread stories of horror. While The Path to Carcosa was first published in 2017, numerous contemporary accounts of the event have surfaced since then, and these appear to be from some of the 'unfortunately sensitive' victims of the play.
They report the transformation of the theater into a ruined, empty auditorium, with decaying corpses in the seats and a horrific creature squatting on the stage, wailing a painfully beautiful lament, while a figure who matches the description of The Man in the Pallid Mask haunted the shadows and back rooms of the theater, silently beckoning them deeper into the mystery of the play. The backstage area was unsettling, with one room's walls covered in strange mystic symbols, and the lobby area reportedly had no way to exit the building. Eventually, of course, the victims managed to escape the building, and discovered the location of a post-performance cast party, which they (for some reason) decided to attend.
At the party, which was lightly attended, they met the cast and crew of the play, whom they assert were behaving very oddly, then ultimately transformed into various hideous monsters, whom they were forced to defend themselves against. The stories at this part become very confused, and are obviously some form of mass hallucination, as many of the accounts assert that the authors participated in the murder of several members of the cast and crew (a search of the police records yielded no mention of murders at this time), and a few even mention burning the residence where the party was held to the ground (again, no official records of this exist).
Another very odd feature of these accounts is the sheer number of them, in comparison to the possible attendance at the play. It is actually physically impossible for all of these people to have been at the single performance of The King in Yellow that occurred at the Ward Theater that night, yet they all assert that they were there. If it is a hoax, it is a very well-orchestrated one, pulled off by dozens of people who have no other apparent connection to each other. If it actually happened, the evidence for it is confusing and contradictory.
Nonetheless, in future posts I will sort out the stories of the victims, and try to post a coherent account of what they claim happened at the Ward Theater, Arkham, Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1925.
While it is in no way certain that you will have anything quite so dramatic to write of in your memoirs, we sincerely hope that you will consider joining us for the world premier of The Yellow Sign, an original horror play based on the writings of RW Chambers, November 11-13, 2022 at Playhouse in the Park, Murray, Kentucky.
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