Haunted London

“I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me”.

Charlotte Brontë

Any visitor who walks through the older streets of London feels it: that sense of history, of lives lived, of deep layers of commerce, conflict, love, loss, prayers and passions long spent. You can see it in the street names carved into the buildings that form the street corners, in the gargoyles that grimace down from the ramparts of hundreds of London churches and in the sheer mass of monuments and houses both rich and humble that cram into the 600 square miles of Greater London.

But buildings and landmarks are only part of the story. What sets London apart from the classical behemoths of Athens and Rome is that ‘spirit’ that the ever-sensitive author Charlotte Bronte could feel around her: no bricks-andmortar solidity but a shifting swill of characters both alive and dead, still brushing past you as you turn a corner into a tiny deserted courtyard or peer into the darkened corner of a three-hundred-year-old pub. Even a hundred years ago,

Irish poet William Butler Yeats felt it, writing in a letter home to his sister, “I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through London’s streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air”.

Maybe you too will feel those whiffs of air ruffling your hair as you read this article, causing the hackles on your neck to rise momentarily. For today we bring you no London shopping trips, or thrill-packed ways to enjoy the River Thames. Today we will turn away from the capital’s crowded main

streets to walk more slowly through its older corners and meet some of its characters that are no less colourful for the unavoidable fact that they are long dead.

Before the Great Fire of London in 1666, it was said that there were a hundred London churches per square mile of the City, which makes for a fistful of haunted church stories even now. Strange to relate, some of the most chilling stories come from the church considered the heart of London: alive or dead, a Londoner can only call themselves a true Cockney if they are born within the sound of the bells of St Mary-lebow. Yet this church was infamous for hosting black satanic masses in the 11th and 12th centuries, constantly collapsing onto its congregations and killing them, and sheltering murderous mobs like the one that killed Lawrence Duckett there in the 1290s, leading 17 men and one woman to be tried and burned to death outside. Meanwhile, London’s oldest recorded ghosts are still seen in the ancient cloisters of Westminster Abbey, like the seventh century ‘floating monk’ who shows how far the floor of the Abbey has been lowered by bobbing along half a metre off the ground, usually just before evensong. In

1932, two American visitors to the Abbey said that they had had a long conversation with him and that they found him to be most polite…

Of course, ghosts don’t have to be ancient, as back in the 1930s

a phantom bus started terrorising the residents of Notting Hill. Last seen in 1990, it would hurtle along, unlit and with no driver, terrifying passers-by to the point where one motorist swerved to avoid it and crashed into a wall, killing himself and engulfing the area in flames. An eyewitness claimed to have seen the bus moments before the accident. Nor are hauntings confined to large and famous historical sites like the Tower of London (which, for a castle where only six people were actually beheaded, has more headless ghost stories than Harry Potter). Or Hampton Court, the undeniable jewel in the spectral crown of London’s most haunted, where the ghosts of Henry VIII’S wives scream for attention down through the centuries, racing along the ‘Haunted Gallery’ or sobbing at the top of the Silverstick Stairs.

London’s ghostly inhabitants are not confined to the well-bred, well-married or well-educated, but scatter themselves throughout, like at 50 Berkeley Square in Mayfair, a house where ghosts are jostling for space. It started with the tragic young woman who threw herself from the top floor in the early

19th century, and was followed by the unlucky-in-love Mr Myers who, rejected by his fiancée, locked himself in the house until he died in 1874. He now fights for the paranormal limelight with the Top Floor Lady, to the point where a drunken sailor who broke in one night ended up being so terrified that he hurled himself out of a window and impaled himself on the railings outside, thereby sealing the house’s reputation.

Even if you’re a tourist in London, you’re spoilt for ghoulish choice. Why not stay in Room 333 of the Langham Hotel, where the ghost of a Victorian doctor who murdered his wife on their honeymoon there, then took his own life, might shake your bed or hover in the corner, arms outstretched, eyes fixed and unblinking? Or the Savoy, where the ghost of a young girl who

died on the fifth floor can sometimes be heard operating a non-existent lift which clanks away in the witching hours of the night? You might just content yourself with a pint in London’s most haunted pub, The Grenadier in Wilton Mews, where a solemn silent spectre of a young officer caught cheating at cards and beaten to death there by his furious comrades often drifts across the low-ceilinged rooms or groans from the cellar. Or visit Handel’s House Museum, where its directors found themselves trying to exorcise a ghost, thought to be of one of the two sopranos who were known to vie for Handel’s attention (also seen by Jimi Hendrix who lived there before its renovation) so they could run the museum without creepy interference. Or just travel on the Underground, host to many haunted stations and a ‘ghostly dimension’ in its own right, according to the poet Seamus Heaney. Oh, and don’t think you can have a night off from haunted London by heading to the theatre, as they too are full of ghosts.

At the world-famous Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, the actor Joseph Grimaldi requested that when he died, his head would be severed from his body prior to burial. Almost unsurprisingly, his floating head now haunts several of the theatre’s boxes and has even been seen watching performances over people’s shoulders, with just the whiff of his lavender perfume presaging his presence. Even worse, Grimaldi was known as the father of the modern clown and appears with his face in full, white clown make-up: truly the stuff of nightmares.

On a quiet evening walking around London’s oldest streets, it isn’t difficult to imagine a ghost around every corner, hence the number of ghost-themed walking tours. Head there at night or at weekends when the city is virtually abandoned and, as writer William Holden Hunt wrote of Hampton Court in 1897, you will find, “a world invisible or half-known, where imagination and tradition vie in bringing forth strange noises and mysterious presences”.