Haunted London E-Book

James Clark

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 226

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Beschreibung

From heart-stopping accounts of apparitions, manifestations and related supernatural phenomena to first-hand encounters with ghouls and spirits, this collection of stories contains new and well-known spooky tales from famous sights and buildings in the centre of London. Drawing on historical and contemporary sources Haunted London contains a chilling range of ghostly phenomena. From the monk ghost who clanks his chain's on Buckingham Palace's terrace every Christmas Day, the Phantom horse-bus that occasionally rattles along Bayswater Road to the haunted Pig Tree, a terrifying apparition that frequents Green Park, the colourful tales featured here create a scary selection of ghostly goings-on that is bound to captivate anyone interested in the supernatural history of the area.

Leseprobe

HAUNTED

LONDON

HAUNTED

LONDON

JAMES CLARK

Frontispiece: ‘Unearthly Hour’. (Andrew Rigby www.sxc.hu/profile/the1select)

First published in 2007 by Tempus Publishing

Reprinted in 2009 by

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Reprinted 2010

This ebook edition first published in 2014

All rights reserved

© James Clark, 2007, 2014

The right of James Clark to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 5993 3

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1

The West: from Kensington to Mayfair

2

Royal London: Around the Green Park and St James’s Park

3

Westminster: Politicians and Priests

4

The River Thames: Around the Victoria Embankment

5

The City: London’s Heart

6

The Tower: Tower Hill and the Tower of London

7

The East: Ghosts of Jack the Ripper’s Victims

Appendix

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My very grateful thanks to everyone who helped me put this book together and my sincere apologies to anyone I may have overlooked here: Scott Burke of The Connaughts Postcard Museum; Nick Butler, park manager of Kensington Gardens and Brompton Cemetery; John Clark, senior curator (Medieval) and deputy head of department at the Museum of London; Vanessa Crowe at the Bank of England; Richard Freeman; Dhani Hirani, reception, The Royal Parks; Chloe Holloway, office administrator, St James’s Park and The Green Park; Jennie Lynch, assistant archivist, The Parliamentary Archives (House of Lords Record Office); Darren Mann from The Paranormal Database website; Alan Murdie; John Smith; Mark Wasilewski, park manager, St James’s Park and The Green Park; The British Library; Merton Library Service; Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives; Wandsworth Libraries.

In addition, special thanks must go to the following: Jayne Ayris for looking over the typescript and offering valuable feedback, Anthony Wallis of www.ant-wallis-illustration.co.uk for creating some wonderful illustrations to use in this book, my brother Steve for making my computer behave itself, and my parents for helping in far too many ways to list.

INTRODUCTION

London must be one of the most haunted places on earth. Whichever corner you turn, whichever road or alleyway you wander down, there is a good chance you will find yourself somewhere that has been the setting for a strange tale at least once during this city’s long history. And so when I was asked to write a book about London’s ghost stories my first thought was, where to begin?

Depending on the definition used, ‘London’ can cover a vast area, and all of the various districts that comprise what is known as Greater London have their own tales to tell and merit books of their own. After much deliberation, it was decided that this book should focus specifically on the area around the centre of London, roughly from Kensington in the west to Whitechapel in the east, as this is the area that most people would recognise as being London and which tends to appear in guidebooks. (The map on page 125 shows exactly where all the stories told here are set.) But even within these boundaries it would be impossible in a book of this size to do justice to any of these fascinating stories if I tried to include all, or even most, of the literally hundreds of eerie tales in which London is steeped. Doing so would have resulted in little more than a gazetteer of the city, with insufficient room to tell the tales as they deserve to be told, and so I have not attempted this. Instead, this book concentrates mainly on ghostly tales attached to London’s best-known and most important landmarks.

In the following pages you will find stories about such famous buildings as Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, No. 10 Downing Street, St Paul’s Cathedral and of course the Tower of London, which must surely have one of the densest populations of ghosts anywhere! In addition, there are tales about one or two places that may not be so instantly recognisable but which could not possibly be left out. Thus you will also read about one of history’s most notorious haunted houses (No. 50 Berkeley Square in Mayfair) and what is probably the world’s most famous haunted pub (the Grenadier in Belgravia). Finally, the concluding chapter describes the many ghost stories that came about as a result of the awful crimes of Jack the Ripper in London’s ‘Autumn of Terror’ in 1888.

You do not have to believe in the supernatural to enjoy a good ghost story and it must be left up to the reader to decide whether to consider some or all of the tales recounted here as literally true, or to think of them more as colourful legends. Either way, they undeniably provide an enthralling perspective from which to examine this great city. And once you start looking into the stories behind the reports of spectres and phantoms, what an incredible history is revealed!

‘The real magic of discovery,’ according to Marcel Proust, ‘lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes’ and so, with that thought in mind, welcome to a London that will appear at the same time both familiar and strange – welcome to Haunted London.

James Clark,August 2007 [email protected]

CHAPTER ONE

THE WEST: FROM KENSINGTONTO MAYFAIR

Kensington Palace

Kensington Palace has been home to many royals and it has seen many die, too. It was the death of King George II here in 1760 that led to the palace’s most enduring ghostly tale.

George Augustus was born in 1683 in Hanover, a former state of north-western Germany, where he spent his early life. He was the only son of the German prince George Louis, elector of Hanover, and when his father was crowned King George I of Great Britain in 1714, the younger George was designated Prince of Wales. In 1727, he succeeded his father as King George II and he would reign for thirty-three years although for much of that time he wished he could return to his native land.

His final years were passed at Kensington Palace where, it is said, the ageing king would spend long hours gazing out of the window towards the weather vane. He was desperate to receive news from his beloved Hanover and every day would hope against hope that the wind was blowing in the right direction to speed along the ships bringing long-awaited despatches from his homeland. But the winds stayed against him, the ships were kept away from England’s shores and the king’s heavily accented voice could often be heard muttering in frustration, ‘Vhy dond’t dey kom?’ At long last, the winds did change and the ships finally arrived bearing their precious despatches, but it was too late. George died an unexpected and rather undignified death at about 7.30 a.m. on 25 October 1760. Having gone to make his toilet he collapsed and cut his head against the edge of a bureau as he fell. His valet discovered him lying on the floor, a doctor was called and the king was pronounced dead, a subsequent autopsy revealing the cause of death to be a dissecting aneurism of the aorta.

According to legend, his ghost still haunts the palace, waiting for the news he never lived to hear. Sometimes, when the wind blows strongly from the west, his sad, pale face is glimpsed at a window gazing out towards the weather vane, and a mournful voice drifts through the corridors, asking, ‘Vhy dond’t dey kom?’

The palace can claim at least three other ghost stories. One tells that the spectre of a ‘man in breeches’ is sometimes spotted wandering around the courtyard, and in 1912 Jessie Middleton recorded in her The Grey Ghost Book that the room in which Queen Mary II died of smallpox in 1694 was reputed to be haunted.

The third story concerns the ghost of Princess Sophia, fifth daughter of King George III (reigned 1760-1820). The tale is that Sophia fell in love with a royal equerry by the name of Thomas Garth and had an illegitimate son with him. The scandal was quickly hushed up and the child was taken from Sophia to be brought up elsewhere. Unable to bear the anguish, Sophia retreated from the world, taking solitary refuge inside her rooms at the palace. There she grew old, and unloved, she sat at her spinning wheel as the years passed, her eyesight failed and she gradually became blind. Sometimes, in the hushed hours of the early morning, the creaking of her spinning wheel can supposedly still be heard.

Kensington Palace.

The ageing King George II would spend long hours gazing at the weather vane.

Statue of George II depicting him in Roman dress, in Golden Square, Soho.

Built in the seventeenth century, Kensington Palace was originally a mansion known as Nottingham House until William III purchased it in 1689 and commissioned Sir Christopher Wren to oversee its enlargement. Although it continues to be a working palace and a residence for members of the Royal Family, parts of the building are now open to the public. Diana, Princess of Wales, lived in Kensington Palace until her death in 1997, as did Princess Margaret, who died in 2002. It is said that Princess Margaret was once asked whether she had ever seen the ghost of George II and replied that she had not, although she held out the hope of doing so one day.

Hyde Park

Hyde Park once echoed to the cries and thundering hooves of royal hunting parties. The Tudor king Henry VIII (reigned 1509-1547) seized this land from the monks of Westminster Abbey in 1536 and turned it into his private ground for hunting deer and wild boar. In the early seventeenth century, James I (king of England 1603-1625) granted limited public access to the park and it was fully opened to the public in 1637 during the reign of his successor Charles I (reigned 1625-1649). Today, Hyde Park with its 350 acres and approximately 4,000 trees – not to mention its ghosts – is open to visitors all year round from 5 a.m. until midnight.

Princess Sophia lies buried in London’s Kensal Green Cemetery.

Statue of King Henry VIII at the main public entrance to St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

The park’s best-known ghost story concerns a gnarled old elm known as ‘Black Sally’s Tree’. Sadly, this tree was lost to Dutch Elm Disease many years ago. It was probably one of the many large elms felled in Hyde Park during the 1970s but none of the park staff I asked in 2007 could say exactly where this particular tree used to stand. (I would be delighted to hear from any reader who does happen to know.)

Black Sally herself was apparently a vagrant who usually tramped the roads and fields between Bristol and Penzance but occasionally her wanderings took her into London. Tall and slim with Romany heritage, she had once been an attractive woman but now age and grime obscured her looks. It was that grime that gave her her name, for Black Sally boasted she had not washed her face for ten years, not since her husband had fallen in love with another woman, at which betrayal Sally left their home for the open road. She lived in constant terror that her husband would eventually track her down and kill her.

One day, Black Sally came to Hyde Park where she found herself drawn to a particular ancient elm. The other vagrants who slept in the park cautioned her against that tree, believing it to be haunted by something evil. At first Sally heeded their warnings but one night she lay down to sleep beneath its branches and in the morning she was found dead. For a vagrant to die in the park was not unusual and because there were no marks of violence upon her corpse the authorities put Sally’s death down to natural causes. Some of the vagrants thought otherwise, however. They talked of having seen an unknown man lurking in the vicinity of the tree where she had died and they wondered if Black Sally’s husband had at last found her. One vagrant told how for several nights after Sally’s death, ‘sighings and moanings’ were heard coming from beneath the tree, and how a strange footprint could be seen on the ground there. At night that footprint was wet with blood, but the liquid mysteriously vanished by dawn and those who had known Black Sally well were able to recognise the footprint as her own.

The story of ‘Black Sally’s Tree’ is one of many collected by the ghost hunter Elliott O’Donnell, who recorded it in his Ghosts of London. He gives no date for the events recounted but in that book, first published in 1933, he states that this story was narrated to him ‘many years’ before. O’Donnell spent numerous nights in Hyde Park during the years before the First World War, chatting to the vagrants who slept there and learning their superstitious tales, many of which were centred on the trees that were so important to these homeless men and women.

One uncomfortably warm night, O’Donnell was walking from the Marble Arch end of the park towards Lancaster Gate when he heard a terrible groaning that seemed to come from a nearby clump of trees. Thinking that someone needed help he looked to see who was there but could spot nobody. Not far away, though, several vagrants were sitting under another clump of trees and so he hurried across to tell them one of their companions was ill but to his surprise they showed no concern, merely replying that that spot was where a tramp known as ‘Old Sammy’ had died. His groans had often been heard there after his death, they said, which was why every vagrant familiar with the park knew better than to sleep there.

Another evening, a vagrant who claimed to have once been a churchman told O’Donnell about the moonlit night he had been walking in the north of Hyde Park, near the path that runs parallel with Bayswater Road. The park was gloomy and silent, and the man was deep in thought, his head bowed as he strolled across the grass. Then he glanced up to see a woman a few yards ahead of him walking in the same direction. He was struck by how shabby and frayed her clothing was and the way her heels showed through the splits in the backs of her boots. Wondering if she needed any help, the man walked faster to catch up with her but no matter how much he quickened his pace the woman always seemed to stay the same distance ahead.

Eventually they came to a point where several paths met, and there the man’s attention was caught by a solitary tree standing black in the moonlight a short distance to his right. About 6 or 7ft above the ground, a sinister branch stretched out from the trunk. It bore an uncanny resemblance to a beckoning human arm and the long twigs at the end seemed to be bony fingers ready to clutch at anyone who strayed too close. Now the woman headed directly towards the tree and as she approached it the man realised for the first time that she appeared hazy and insubstantial. She walked into the tree’s shadow and turned around – and the moonlight that now fell upon her face revealed that this was no living being, that whatever it was standing there in the form of a woman had been dead a long time. Horrified by the ghastly sight, the man fled from the park.

By the following evening, his fear had subsided and curiosity compelled him to return to search for the tree. He was certain he would recognise it by its striking appearance yet although he found the general area easily enough there was no trace of the tree itself and at last he asked an elderly man who knew the park better than anyone if he had ever seen a tree of that description. The old man seemed to know exactly what he meant and took him to a patch of open grass that he immediately recognised from the night before; this was definitely where the tree had stood but there was nothing there now. The tree had had a terrible reputation, the old man explained, because so many people had hanged themselves from its branches after sleeping beneath it and because so many rumours spoke of strange sights and sounds encountered in its vicinity at night. That was why the tree had been cut down – about twenty years before.

Many of Hyde Park’s old ghost stories involved the trees that were so important to the vagrants living in the park.

The north of Hyde Park; Bayswater Road is to the left in the picture.

Another tree features in the tale of a vagrant known as All Button Mary, named for the great number of buttons she wore on her jacket. After sleeping beneath an elm she awoke in the morning to claim that a voice from the tree had whispered to her all night long, endlessly enticing her to kill herself and leave this miserable world for a better place. It seems that All Button Mary took the voice’s advice for later that day her drowned body was discovered in the Serpentine.

The Serpentine dominates the southern end of Hyde Park. This artificial lake was created in the 1730s for Queen Caroline, wife of King George II, by damming the Westbourne Stream. At the time, artificial lakes were usually built long and straight and the Serpentine was one of the first in England deliberately designed to appear natural. It is a beautiful part of London but also one of those places that has acted like a magnet to the depressed and suicidal. One such person was Martha Sheppard, an unemployed maid who on the afternoon of Saturday 9 January 1858 climbed up onto the balustrade of the bridge over the Serpentine and leaped into the lake. Unfortunately for her (or fortunately, depending on your viewpoint), the large hooped crinoline skirt beneath her dress filled with air as she plummeted so that when she hit the water she simply bobbed around like a balloon for a few minutes until a policeman pulled her to safety. But many other suicide attempts were more successful. In the fourteen years leading up to 1858, for example, there had been 283 attempts in the Serpentine, ninety-one of which proved fatal.

It was in this same lake some decades earlier that the unhappy Harriet Westbrook Shelley drowned herself. Harriet was the first wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and had been abandoned by him for Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (best known as the author of Frankenstein). She was just twenty-one years old when she took her life in 1816, out of wedlock and pregnant by a lover, and her ghost supposedly haunts these still waters. One story tells that two ladies walking through an almost deserted Hyde Park one blustery autumn day paused on the Serpentine’s bank, looking into the lake where something was causing ripples to spread out. As they stood and watched, a slim pale hand – obviously a woman’s – slid up from beneath the water’s surface, the long fingers opening and closing convulsively like those of a drowning person. On the middle finger was a plain gold ring which flashed in the fading daylight. Too shocked to do anything but stare in horror, the ladies gazed at the sight for perhaps a minute, until at last the phantom hand slowly slipped back down and the waters closed over it.

The Serpentine has known murder, too. O’Donnell recorded that in 1857 a Newfoundland dog being taken for a walk near here suddenly raced away from its owners, plunged into the water and swam out towards a dark floating object which it seized and pulled back to the shore. It was the body of a murdered child. Following this gruesome discovery, rumours of ghostly activity beside the Serpentine apparently kept the lake’s banks deserted after sunset for several weeks.

In the eighteenth century many duels were fought in Hyde Park, sometimes with fatal consequences, and perhaps one of these duels was responsible for the phantom sounds reported by a vagrant who often visited the park prior to the First World War. This man claimed that on several occasions as he slept beneath trees in the park he had been awakened by the ringing clash of metal on metal and an awful hollow groaning. It sounded, he said, as if two men were fighting with swords but the men were never seen.

One final spectral visitor is said to appear along Hyde Park’s northern boundary, where a phantom horse-bus occasionally rattles along Bayswater Road. This supernatural vehicle appears perfectly solid and, so the story goes, most witnesses never even realise they have seen a ghost.

Bayswater Road is said to be haunted by a phantom horse-bus.

The Grenadier

It is the most famous haunted pub in London – and probably the world – but unless you’re familiar with the area you may need a compass to find the Grenadier. Hiding in Belgravia’s cobbled Wilton Row, it lies just a short distance south of restless Hyde Park Corner yet its atmosphere is that of a quiet country pub. A few narrow steps lead up to a small bar where, amid the military paraphernalia adorning the walls, a glass frame beside the bar protects yellowing newspaper cuttings that refer to the ghostly Guardsman said to haunt these premises.

If you hadn’t already guessed by the name and interior décor, the bright red sentry box outside declares that this pub has military connections. The alley alongside is called Old Barrack Yard and it once echoed to the stamping, rattling and shouted orders of soldiers being drilled. The pub itself used to be named The Guardsman and an enduring myth holds that while the public once drank, gambled and brawled in a downstairs bar, the ground floor served as a mess for officers of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. Tradition also maintains that the Iron Duke himself, whose home Apsley House stands nearby, occasionally visited the pub to drink and enjoy a hand of cards with his men but this seems unlikely for a man so ill-disposed towards drinking and gambling in public.

The story told as background to the haunting here states that a young subaltern was once caught cheating during a game of cards. His fellow officers, their better judgements impaired by alcohol, were so enraged that they seized him and brutally flogged him on the spot. So savage was his punishment that the subaltern staggered down the steps to what is now the cellar, where he collapsed and died. The year in which this is supposed to have happened is unknown, but it is said to have been in September, the month in which the disturbances at the Grenadier reach an annual peak.

Stories of strange happenings here were already well established by 1956, when Joseph Braddock recorded some in his book, Haunted Houses. The landlord then was Roy Grigg, who told Braddock that although he had some reservations about the truth of the cheating officer story, he had little doubt that the pub was indeed haunted. There was, he said, a strange, menacing atmosphere here that underwent an annual cycle, building up throughout the year to climax in September. During the first two weeks of that month Grigg’s young Alsatian dog always grew agitated, growling and snarling as if afraid. In the cellar it scratched away at the floor, apparently trying to unearth something and leading some to wonder if the subaltern’s body was buried down there.

The Serpentine.

One September, or possibly October, evening in 1952, Grigg’s son saw a mysterious black shadow. The nine-year-old boy was alone upstairs and as he lay in bed with the bedroom door open and the landing light blazing outside, a shadow appeared on the door. He watched in terror as the shadow grew larger and larger and then slowly shrank away, exactly as if somebody on the empty landing had walked towards the bedroom then changed their mind and retreated. That same year, Mrs Grigg was getting changed in her bedroom one afternoon and had not bothered to close the bedroom door because she knew she was alone on the top floor. She was shocked, therefore, to catch sight of a man coming up the stairs. Quickly covering herself she turned to see who it was and found … nobody. She had not recognised the man’s face and she never saw him again.

A year later, a second person spotted an unknown man on the staircase. Mrs Ward, proprietor of a pub in Hammersmith, was drinking in the bar of the Grenadier when she clearly saw a man walking up the stairs, but no trace of the intruder was ever found. Also in 1953 a childhood friend of Roy Grigg was staying the night in one of the bedrooms after driving the Grigg family home from Plymouth. He had been warned by a barman that there was something untoward about the room and so, being a Roman Catholic, he hung a rosary over the bed for protection. Despite this precaution he awoke in the night to find the room icy cold and was uncomfortably certain he was not alone, that something was lurking in the darkness beside the bed, trying to touch him.

In 1966 Dr George Owen (a geneticist, biologist and mathematician) and the experienced journalist Victor Sims interviewed Geoffrey and Paula Bernerd who had by then taken over at the Grenadier. Owen and Sims wrote about the case in their 1971 book, Science and the Spook. ‘When I first came to this place and heard all these ghostly tales,’ Geoffrey Bernerd told them, ‘I put them down to imagination and gossip. But now, I must admit, there’s much more to them than meets the eye.’ The Bernerds both stated that although nobody they knew had actually seen the famed phantom officer, staff members had certainly experienced plenty of mysterious happenings: light switches turning themselves off and on, footsteps being heard in empty rooms and pairs of socks apparently moving from one room to another. Some customers complained of a chilly atmosphere in a panelled back room. One particularly odd detail was, ‘a tendency for beer bottle tops to fly off spontaneously in a horizontal direction.’ Staff refused to sleep on the premises during September and some previous staff had left after claiming to see light bulbs unscrew themselves from their sockets and softly float to the ground and hear an electric buzzer sound with no one nearby to press it. It was even hinted that the phenomena affected some of the nearby houses in Wilton Row, where tapping sounds were heard and electric lights occasionally switched themselves off and on.

The Grenadier, probably the most famous haunted pub in the world.