Haunted Lambeth E-Book

James Clark

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 177

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Haunted Lambeth is a collection of real-life stories of apparitions and poltergeists from all across the London Borough of Lambeth. Included are the ghost stories of Lambeth Palace, the terrifying tradition of the 'Tomb of the Tradescants', a ghost at The Old Vic Theatre, the dream house that haunted the entertainer Roy Hudd, supernatural echoes of Waterloo's Necropolis Railway, the ghosts of Ruth Ellis and others at Streatham's Caesar's Nightclub. These stories have been collected and researched over many years, and come from a variety of sources including original newspaper articles, books and, as often as possible, personal communication with people directly involved.

Leseprobe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THIS book could not have been written without a great deal help from many people, including but not limited to: Lionel Beer (Travel and Earth Mysteries Society); John M. Clarke (author of The Brookwood Necropolis Railway); Jon Crampton (media relations officer, Network Rail); Rebecca Geary (Make Space Studios); Sally Hamlyn (marketing and publicity officer, Museum of Garden History – now the Garden Museum); Roy Hudd (www.royhudd.com); Darren Mann (www.paranormaldatabase.com); William McCormack; Sussannah Mortimer (cinema manager, Odeon Streatham); Philip Norman (volunteer curatorial assistant, Museum of Garden History – now the Garden Museum); Elizabeth Norton (author of Anne Boleyn: In Her Own Words & the Words of Those Who Knew Her); Andrew Nunn (premises and administration secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury); Ann Osborn (head of the Junior Department, Fairley House School); Mustapha Ousellam; Alan Piper; Ned Seago (stage-door manager, The Old Vic); Dolly Sen (www.dollysen.com); Anne Ward (archivist, Lambeth Archives and Minet Library); and the following users of www.railforums.co.uk: ‘Capybara’, ‘Clip’, ‘KiddyKid’, ‘SalopSparky’, ‘steamybrian’, and ‘thedbdiboy’. My sincere apologies to anyone I should have mentioned by name but overlooked.

Thanks also to Jayne Ayris for looking over the (almost) completed book and providing invaluable feedback; Anthony Wallis for the amazing illustrations he created (you can find him at www.ant-wallis-illustration.blogspot.co.uk); and my family for all of their support and encouragement. Finally, a special credit must go to my brother’s IT company, www.prehocsolutions.co.uk, for rescuing my early work on this book after my PC suffered a catastrophic systems error.

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowledgements

Map

Introduction

one

Around Brixton

two

Around Clapham

three

Around North Lambeth

four

Around Norwood

five

Around Stockwell

six

Around Streatham

Main Sources

Copyright

MAP

The London Borough of Lambeth

(Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2012).

Key:

AROUND BRIXTON

(1) The Margate Road Horror

(2) ‘Supernormal’ Disturbances at The Gresham Arms

(3) The House that Haunted Roy Hudd

AROUND CLAPHAM

(4) The Devil in Disguise?

(5) Strange Tales from Clapham Common

(6) The Spectral Hansom Cab of South Side

(7) The Haunting of the Plough Inn

(8) The Black Dog of Wandsworth Road

AROUND NORTH LAMBETH

(9) Ghost Stories of Lambeth Palace

(10) The Tomb of the Tradescants

(11) Mercy Weller’s Ghost

(12) The Predatory Lift of Lincoln House

(13) The Lingering Shadow of Waterloo’s Necropolis Railway

(14) Ghosts at The Old Vic

AROUND NORWOOD

(15) The Ghost of Norwood

(16) Tulse Hill Station and the Phantom Footsteps of Platform One

(17) Gipsy Hill: Fortune Tellers and a Headless Phantom

AROUND STOCKWELL

(18) The Stockwell Ghost

(19) A Ghost on the Northern Line

AROUND STREATHAM

(20) The Many Ghosts of Caesars Nightclub

(21) The Haunted House of Shrubbery Road

(22) The Phantom of the Cinema

(23) A Mysterious Light in Tankerville Road

(24) The Phantom Nun of Coventry Hall

INTRODUCTION

LAMBETH is an odd place. As an entity the borough is the sum of many contrasting parts, its borders cutting out a long, narrow cross-section through south London. From the busy tourist attractions beside the River Thames in the north, the borough encompasses very different areas of varying degrees of prosperity as it stretches south, through built-up districts and down towards relatively leafier suburbs.

The reason for this somewhat confused identity is that, as with London as a whole, the borough of Lambeth is an amalgamation of what were once separate villages surrounded by open countryside. To help make sense of this patchwork personality, the borough is often considered to comprise six general neighbourhoods: Brixton; Clapham; North Lambeth (including Waterloo, Kennington, Oval, and Vauxhall); Norwood (including West Norwood, Gipsy Hill, and Tulse Hill); Stockwell; and Streatham (including Streatham Hill and Streatham Vale). The present book has been organised along these lines.

Something these differing areas have in common with each other – as they do with the rest of the vast London metropolis – is a rich heritage of strange stories, telling of apparitions, poltergeists, and all manner of other bizarre wonders. The tales described here were collected for Project Albion, an on-going programme by ASSAP (the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena) to record and collate such mysteries and folklore from across the British Isles in what has been called a ‘Domesday Book of the paranormal’. You can find out more about Project Albion and ASSAP at the association’s website: www.assap.ac.uk.*

Are the tales recounted in the following pages true? Well, the stories are certainly real, in as much as they were reported in newspapers, written about in books, and/or circulated via all manner of other means, including simple word of mouth. To that extent, they give a glimpse of what might be called the mythological landscape of Lambeth, and if nothing else this offers an interesting perspective on places you might have thought you knew.

As for the objective reality or otherwise of the incidents related – well, that’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself! Whatever conclusions you reach, the journey involved in uncovering your neighbourhood’s stranger side can be truly fascinating. Read on to discover the unnatural history of Haunted Lambeth …

James Clark, 2013

* I have previously collected tales for Project Albion from the London Borough of Wandsworth (Lambeth’s neighbour to the east) and from Mitcham in the London Borough of Merton; for further information about these, see my website at www.james-clark.co.uk.

1

AROUND BRIXTON

AROUND BRIXTON. Key: (1) The Margate Road Horror; (2) ‘Supernormal’ Disturbances at The Gresham Arms; (3) The House that Haunted Roy Hudd. (Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2012.)

The Margate Road Horror

In July 1979, American cinema audiences were terrified by The Amityville Horror. The silver-screen version of a bestselling book by Jay Anson, it told the – purportedly true – story of an American family who fled their home in fear after being plagued by supernatural events. That same year a somewhat similar tale emerged from Brixton in south London.

Until around two years before, the Victorian house in Margate Road had been home to Randolph Galway, a clerk in his mid-forties, and his wife Stasia. They had been happily married for thirteen years but their marriage began to suffer soon after they moved into the house. According to newspaper reports, Randolph became depressed and turned to alcohol, sneering at his wife when she repeatedly claimed to have seen a ‘strange ghostly form like a dog with horns’. After about six weeks, Stasia announced that she could not bear to stay in the house any longer. She left her husband, taking their two children with her.

Margate Road, the setting for a tale of supernatural horror in the 1970s.

The night after she left, Randolph let himself into the empty house and saw what he was convinced was a ‘black goat’ running down the stairs. The dark shape rushed past him and out through the front door – and it was at that moment, he later told reporters, that he ‘decided the house was haunted’. He moved out, quit drinking, and his wife and children came back to him.

After the Galways left, the property was purchased by the council, who renovated and redecorated it. In late 1979, the house became home to thirty-three-year-old unemployed driver Peter Richardson, his wife Linda, and their five children. Once again, it took just six weeks for the occupants to be driven from the building.

During those ‘six weeks of hell’, as Peter later described them, hardly a day went by without some uncanny happening frightening the Richardsons. One night, a ‘cold, smoky sort of shadow’ hovered above the bed, touching Linda (who was pregnant at the time with their sixth child) on her arm. Another time, Linda and one of her daughters, aged twelve, watched a doll walk across the settee by itself. On a third occasion the family’s youngest daughter, aged five, told her mother that she had seen her talking to another woman, though no one else was in the house at the time.

One night, around the beginning of December, it all became too much to bear. Peter had gone out for the evening, the children were in bed, and Linda was alone watching the television. Suddenly she saw a footstool move by itself from one side of the room to the other. ‘I sat petrified, unable to move,’ she later told the News of the World. ‘Then the room went crazy. A china doll flew at me and smashed on the table in front of me. Birthday cards were flying around the room and things were falling over. By this time I’d gone to pieces. I screamed.’

When Peter returned home he found Linda so upset that they did not wait until dawn but simply took the children and fled, abandoning many of their possessions.

Afterwards, the house was visited by Henry ‘Harry’ Cleverley, an assistant district housing manager with Lambeth Council who also happened to be a trance medium. The moment Harry stepped over the threshold, he sensed a disturbing presence. He was unable to tell whether it was male or female but had no doubt at all that it was hostile. He ordered it to depart and was surprised when it seemed to obey him. However, a moment later, as he walked back into the middle of the room, the threatening presence returned.

Harry felt sure that Linda had psychic abilities she was unaware of, and that her sensitivity to spirits would make it impossible for her to live peacefully in this house. He promised to find the Richardsons somewhere else to live. The family moved into a nearby vacant property and the council agreed they could remain there as squatters until a new home was found for them.

‘We have no plans to exorcise the ghost, or whatever it is,’ declared a council spokesman, who stated that the house was to be re-let as soon as possible.

Harry Cleverley, however, decided to deal with the problem himself in his capacity as a medium. Some three weeks later he returned to the house accompanied by a team of spiritualists. Also present was journalist Diana Hutchinson, who reported on the visit for the Daily Mail. When the group entered the house, they saw open drawers and abandoned clothes, an unnerving reminder of the family who had fled these rooms in panic not so long before.

The plan, Harry told the journalist, was to exorcise any spirits present in the building, although he was scathing of the Church of England’s approach to exorcism. According to him, that was nothing more than ‘ritual mumbo jumbo’ and it was simply not possible to dispel spirits by ‘sprinkling water and mouthing prayers’. He explained that he would go into a trance and invite any spirits present to speak through him. Another medium, Peggy Holmes, was to act as ‘interpreter’ between the spirits and the group, while Peggy’s husband, Ray, and another team member, Angela Palmer, would protect Harry by acting as ‘friendly power-houses’.

The intrepid group crowded into the small bedroom at the front of the house. Harry entered a trance and very quickly began screaming, growling, and swearing. Peggy spoke to him in reassuring, level tones, asking the spirit that was apparently manifesting through him to talk about his or her (or its) problems, but this only seemed to make the spirit angrier. Harry began to flail his arms around wildly, screaming in fury as he bounced around the bed.

Eventually, the hullabaloo subsided. Still in trance, Harry continued to mutter darkly as Peggy spoke to him in a soothing, sing-song voice. She encouraged the spirit(s) to depart, to look towards the light where friends were waiting to help, and after about an hour she announced: ‘It’s over. I think they’ve gone away.’

The Richardson family had previously suggested that the strange happenings were connected to the suicide of a woman some years before. They had heard she had hanged herself in the house after her husband died (although the police stated that they had no record of this). The spiritualists, however, came up with a different answer.

Through Harry’s mediumship, they found that the spirits troubling the house were those of a man and woman who had lived there at some point in the property’s history and who might have dabbled in black magic. They were ‘full of hatred and violence’, claimed the spiritualists, and they resented anyone else living in what they clearly felt was still their home.

But that was all in the past now. Harry was confident that the exorcism had been a success and that the house would in future be unaffected by supernatural turmoil.

Despite such reassurances, however, the Richardson family were resolute that nothing would ever persuade them to move back into that house in Margate Road.

‘Supernormal’ Disturbances at The Gresham Arms

Strange goings-on in Brixton at the beginning of the twentieth century were ‘undoubtedly the work of some supernormal agency’. Such was the opinion of an author writing in the spiritualist journal Light in September 1900. This author, whose name was given only as W.C.L., reported that bells at The Gresham Arms pub in Fyfield Road had been ‘ringing separately and collectively, at all hours of the night and day, for the last five months.’

Furthermore, inexplicable footsteps were heard on the stairs from time to time, and doors would bang during the night. A second writer – see below – added that ‘other occurrences of a mysterious nature – such as the lighting of gas after a room had been closed and locked for the night – often took place.’

The pub’s proprietor (a gentleman named Mr Welch), along with the manageress, the potman (a soldier recently returned from the front), and the barmaid all attested to the fact that these events had been taking place, and W.C.L. himself (or herself) confirmed that he (or she) had ‘seen and heard every bell on the premises ring at midday!’ Two barmaids had apparently quit as a result of these disturbances.

Mr Welch considered himself a sceptic with regard to the supernatural, but was a practical man interested only in getting rid of the nuisance as quickly as possible. To that end he gave permission for a seance to be held on the premises, and this duly took place on Tuesday, 11 September 1900.

The medium involved was a lady named Mrs Brenchley, who was reportedly unfamiliar with either the pub or the area in general. Her psychic sensitivities suggested to her that the happenings were linked to a death in the house, and according to W.C.L. a man had indeed dropped down dead in the bar a few months before. Perhaps significantly, the unfortunate man in question had apparently been singing ‘Those bells shall not ring out’ just before he died.

The medium walked from room to room, and the others taking part in the seance followed her, listening as she gave her impressions of various other deaths she felt were connected with the building’s history.

At one point, she indicated a particular window and claimed that a coffin had been lowered through it (a detail that W.C.L. reported was subsequently verified).

However, despite Mrs Brenchley’s abilities the seance failed to establish a precise reason for the apparent haunting. Neither did it succeed in putting a stop to the disturbances.

A few months later a second writer, Thomas Atwood, wrote a description of another investigation at the building. Once again, this was published in Light. As with the seance described above, Atwood’s investigation was carried out during the autumn of 1900, but this time the participants consisted of a committee of seven unnamed gentlemen.

This attractively restored building was once The Gresham Arms pub.

They were given permission to hold seances in one of the building’s rooms and, under Atwood’s direction, they held a series of sittings over the course of several weeks. They intended to encourage the spirits they believed were attached to the premises to communicate with them, although all agreed that it would be dangerous for any of the sitters to enter a full trance and allow a spirit to take control of him. From Atwood’s subsequent report, it seems that this was a wise precaution:

At our first sitting the presence of a powerful spirit, clairvoyantly seen, and described as repulsive in the extreme, was sensed by all sitters. He made several attempts to entrance one of the sitters, which, by a strongly combined effort, were successfully resisted. The impression left on the minds of most, if not all, of the sitters was that if this spirit had once got control, it would have been a case of what may best be described in three words: ‘hell let loose’.

Fortunately, apart from some shaken nerves, none of the sitters suffered any harm, and during the committee’s subsequent sittings they believed that they made contact with ‘many poor spirits’, which they were able to help. However, none of the spirits they contacted seemed in any way to be connected with the happenings at the pub.

Despite the committee’s best efforts, wrote Atwood, their attempt to ‘arrive at the truth as regards the alleged manifestations … concluded without a scrap of evidence of their existence … although, in fairness, it should be stated that one of our number declared that he personally had witnessed the ringing of the bells under circumstances that, in his opinion, precluded any suspicion of fraud.’

Nevertheless, Atwood stated that as soon as his group began their first sitting all the phenomena at The Gresham Arms ceased, so the proprietor, if no one else, must have been pleased at the outcome.

The Gresham Arms no longer exists. The shell of the old building has been attractively restored, and it now houses a number of apartments.

The House that Haunted Roy Hudd

Born in Croydon on 16 May 1936, the actor and comedian Roy Hudd is acknowledged as an authority on the history of music hall. His love for that bygone era of entertainment is genuine and infectious, but the story of how he first became familiar with one of music hall’s greatest stars makes for a very strange tale indeed.

In Richard Davis’s 1979 book I’ve Seen a Ghost! True Stories from Show Business, Roy told how, for as long as he could remember, he had dreamed the same recurring dream. Finding himself outside a house that had a porch with a stone pillar to either side, he would walk up a short flight of stone steps to the front door, push it open and walk inside, into a hall. Sometimes he would enter the room to his right – a fairly small room – and at other times he would walk into the room to his left.

It was the latter room he found most interesting. It ran all the way from the front of the house to the back, and it featured an unusual round sofa in the centre. At the far end a door led to a flight of steps, which in turn led down to the garden. Roy only ever ‘saw’ this garden at night, and whenever he did it was hung with decorative fairy lights.

The dream would always end the same way, with Roy in the cellar, seemingly surrounded by numerous other versions of him all standing in the same pose. As the years passed he came to understand this as meaning that the cellar walls were lined with mirrors.

One day, in around 1962 or 1963, Roy received an invitation from two actor friends of his to visit them at their new flat. The address they gave was in Akerman Road, Brixton, not too far away from Roy’s own home, and so he and his wife Ann got into their car and drove to see their friends.

Roy was unfamiliar with Brixton – yet, as they turned the corner into Akerman Road, he had the disturbing feeling that he had been there before. The couple drove slowly along the road, looking for the address they had been given, and as they passed one particular house, Roy suddenly announced: ‘This is it, this is the house!’

His wife told him not to be silly. They had never been there before and could see no number on the door. But Roy stubbornly insisted that this was the correct house, saying that he recognised the porch. As soon as the car stopped he leapt out and hurried up the stone steps to the front door, increasingly certain that he knew this building.

Ann joined him and rang the bell – and must have been surprised when the people who answered did indeed turn out to be their friends. She was even more surprised when her husband pushed his way past them without even saying hello, muttering, ‘I know this house’ as he entered the hall.

As his nonplussed friends looked on, Roy indicated the room to the right and described the interior to them, before looking inside and confirming that the room was indeed just as it appeared in his dreams. He then described the room to his left.

‘It was just how I’d always seen it,’ he recalled afterwards. ‘There was no round sofa, but the staircase leading down to the garden was there.’