Haunted London (16 page)

The figure had appeared to be quite solid and he stood firm on his feet, which were placed a little way apart. He was stockily built and about five feet, five inches in height. The whole appearance was of a grey figure and the outline was slightly blurred, but what impressed Miss Bickford most of all was the expression on the man’s face. His lips and eyes were smiling just as though he was tremendously pleased to see someone. Looking back, Miss Bickford cannot think why she was so startled as no one could have looked more friendly and kind.

The figure wore knee breeches and stockings. His coat was open, he was bareheaded and did not wear a full-bottomed wig, as in most of his portraits. Miss Bickford found that as far as she could establish, the clothes worn by the figure were the right period for Samuel Pepys, and she feels sure that the form she saw was indeed the great diarist, revisiting his beloved London: how different he must find it!

CHEYNE WALK, CHELSEA

A house in fashionable Cheyne Walk — that delightful riverside promenade bordering Chelsea Reach — has long been haunted by several ghosts. The occupant and others saw a phantom bear in the garden on several occasions and since the garden had, in Tudor times, formed part of a royal estate it was thought that the ursine phantom dated from bear-baiting days, and that the ghost was the spectre of one of the maltreated animals. Once, several guests drew the attention of the occupant to a figure, something like a Dutch doll, that appeared to be leaning out of an upstairs window. A dog that belonged to one of the guests growled savagely and then showed terror, crouching low to the ground, shivering and whimpering. While they were still watching it, the figure suddenly disappeared.

Unexplained sounds were often heard in the house, especially the sound of some heavy object being dragged over bare boards. Once these sounds seemed to pass through the room in which a number of people were gathered. They all heard the sounds but nobody saw anything to account for the noise.

Once, the occupant of the house hurriedly left a visitor in the middle of a sentence and rushed out of the room. Afterwards he explained that he had seen a woman with her throat cut, lying on a chesterfield in the room. There are rumours of a murder having been committed in the house, long, long ago.

CHURCH STREET, CHELSEA

A house at the river end of Church Street, Chelsea, almost opposite old Chelsea Church, had a resident ghost that was seen by many people but never by the lady artist who lived there.

One morning, the artist was working with a woman model and, dissatisfied with the face she had painted, the artist replaced it with the face of a pretty young woman from her imagination. She was pleased with the result, for the face had a suggestion of sadness, which the artist felt added a dimension to the picture.

After the picture was finished a friend came to the studio and seemed to receive something of a shock when she looked at the recently completed painting. All the blood left her face and she turned to the artist. ‘I thought you said you had never seen the ghost here?’ she challenged. ‘You must have — for you have painted the face of the ghost into this picture.’

Once, when the artist had a friend staying with her, the visitor heard footsteps tramping up the stairs at dead of night. They seemed to enter the drawing room and then retreat down the stairs and out into the yard. Next day, in broad daylight, the visitor saw the ghost of a pretty young woman standing by a window in the drawing room, looking out towards the river.

Several visitors asked about the loud raps and sound of heavy footsteps that seemed to climb the stairs in the early evening, from the direction of the Elizabethan cellars, remnants of a former house that once stood on the site. Once, during a party, six sceptical and mundane guests heard the sounds and, learning that they were of ghostly origin, diligently searched the whole house and every inch of the cellars but could find no cause for the noises.

Miss Geraldine Cummins, one of the world’s leading ‘automatic’ writers, told me she believed that Black Magic had been practised in the old house and that earlier still the house had been used as a brothel. She wondered whether the ghost of the sad-faced young woman was one of the girls who had worked in the brothel.

Mrs Hester Dowden, a reputable and highly-respected medium, held an exorcism in the house and believed that she had succeeded in exorcising the ghost. Thereafter, the owner was dogged with bad luck, but she loved the house and fought to the last to retain a charming fragment of the old village of Chelsea, but eventually she had to go and the house was pulled down and an ugly modern villa built in its place. This in turn was destroyed during the Second World War.

The vicinity of Cleopatra’s Needle holds a strange fascination for suicides and has a tall, nude ghost that disappears into the river without a ripple or splash.

Haunted London seen from Waterloo Bridge.

THE EMBANKMENT

The Embankment in the area of Cleopatra’s Needle and Waterloo Bridge had, and perhaps still has, a strange fascination for suicides and I have been told that it is a fact known to the older members of the River Police that there are more suicides and attempts at suicide in the immediate vicinity of this granite obelisk, which was originally erected in Egypt about 1500 BC, than on any other particular stretch of the Thames. There have been reports of a strange and shadowy figure, tall and nude, that disappears over the protective wall into the river, although there is no sound of a splash. The sound of groans and mocking laughter have been heard here, for which no explanation has ever been discovered.

Waterloo Bridge was haunted for a time by the ghost of a headless man following the discovery of a bag containing a dismembered body near one of the abutments of the bridge. The ghost was reported to appear on several successive nights near the spot where the remains were found. The body was never identified and the ghost was only seen for a few weeks.

Elliott O’Donnell related at The Ghost Club the experience of one police officer who was crossing Waterloo Bridge at night when he heard someone running after him and, looking round found himself face to face with a well-dressed young woman who appeared to be in a highly agitated and excited state. She implored him to go with her, as she had just left someone in great trouble. She led the officer, from whom O’Donnell had the story first-hand, back off the bridge and along the Embankment. As they approached Cleopatra’s Needle he saw a young woman in the act of throwing herself into the river. He rushed forward and just succeeded in preventing the tragedy. After he had managed to bring her back to the safety of the pavement, imagine his surprise on looking at her, to see the exact counterpart of the young woman who had fetched him — in both features and dress! On turning to the latter for an explanation, he discovered that she had vanished. Subsequent questioning ascertained that the young woman he had rescued had no twin sister or indeed any close relative or friend and she had seen no woman of any description on the Embankment that night.

ISLE OF DOGS

A riverside district comprising Cubitt Town and Millwall, within the borough of Tower Hamlets, is known as the Isle of Dogs, although it is actually a peninsula and not an island. The basis from which both the Isle of Dogs and the neighbouring suburb of Barking take their name is reputed to lie in the legend of a ghostly hunt. In ancient times, the forest of Hainault covered this part of Essex, culminating in a swamp of Thames mud, and the legend tells of a handsome young huntsman and his bride who elected to spend their wedding day boar-hunting. The bride, eager to make a mark on her big day, outran the rest of the hunt and, forgetful of the dangerous ground, dashed wildly on until she found herself engulfed and sinking, slowly but surely, into the treacherous quagmire. Her husband, too late to rescue her but determined to try, plunged gallantly into the slushy wasteland and was also lost in his efforts to save his impetuous young bride. This sad wedding day is regarded as the origin of a skeleton horseman and hunting dogs that have been seen at nights in the locality, a story that is perpetuated in a very old poem:

A hideous huntsman’s seen to rise,
With a lurid glare in his sunken eyes;
Whose bony fingers point the track,
Of a phantom prey to a skeleton pack,
Whose frantic courser’s trembling bones
Pray a rattling theme to the hunter’s groans;
As he comes and goes in the fitful light,
Of the clouded moon on a summer’s night.
Then, a furious blast from his ghostly horn
Is over the forest of Hainault borne,
And the wild refrain of the mourner’s song
Is heard by the boatmen all night long,
That demon plaint on the still night air,
With never an answering echo there.

The story of the wharfs of the Isle of Dogs is a long history of violence and sudden death and there are many stories of ghostly happenings in the area. One of the more persistent concerns a ghostly clergyman seen as recently as July 1971, as well as on many previous occasions, in the vicinity of Ratcliff Wharf.

Running east from Ratcliff Wharf is Ratcliff Highway, notorious for years as the wickedest thoroughfare in London, where prostitutes sold themselves for the price of a drink and murder was commonplace. Not a few of the hard-headed and down-to-earth dockworkers and lightermen have stories to tell of strange happenings, ghostly lights, sudden echoing laughter, hollow voices from places apparently deserted and an atmosphere that many men have found downright frightening.

Mark Kitchener, a young lighterman from Islington, recalls his grandfather talking to him about a former vicar of Ratcliff Cross who was said to run a lodging house for seamen 200 years ago when nearby Limehouse was the haunt of ‘homeward-bounders’ sailors and seamen of the roughest kind who came ashore to drink and brawl. The house run by the vicar of Ratcliff became known as a place to be avoided, even by the toughest sea-men, for there were stories of men being murdered for their money, and anyone that made trouble was likely never to be seen again.

John Denning is a master builder contractor and one Sunday morning in July 1971 he was busy mixing cement on the empty quay and looking forward to a break for a mug of tea. He remembers hearing a clock chime and checking his watch and then, as he bent down to continue his work, he became aware of an elderly man, dressed in black and leaning on a cane, standing about twenty yards away, looking at him. Denning leaned on his shovel and called out a greeting to the stranger but he received no reply. The old man just stood there, his long white hair moving slightly in the breeze; and then the builder realized that the visitor was not looking at him, as he had at first supposed, but at something behind him. John Denning turned round to see what had attracted the attention of the man. He could see nothing untoward or unusual on the deserted wharf, but when he turned back there was no sign of the old man!

Greatly puzzled, for there was simply nowhere that the old man could have hidden in a few seconds, Denning stopped work and looked about him at the locked warehouses on one side and eight feet below the empty quay, the equally empty dock. He could see around the quayside for a distance of several hundred yards, but there was no movement anywhere. He walked to the edge and looked down at the quiet and undisturbed water. He could find no answer to the mysterious disappearance of the old man. A little later, when two of his workmen arrived with some materials, John Denning told them of the curious experience, and although he was very white and trembling slightly, they laughed the matter off and told him to forget it and have a cup of tea. Then, at eleven o’clock the same morning, one of the men, Peter Kinsley, saw the same figure.

Peter Kinsley was busy with two buckets of water at the far end of the quay (where John Denning had seen the old man) when he suddenly noticed a figure standing at the angle of the docks, looking out over the water towards the lock gates. He appeared to be quite solid and normal in every way and, thinking to himself that this must be the man his friend had seen, Peter Kinsley quietly put down the buckets he was carrying and walked towards the man who was about ten yards away from him, on his left. As he approached the figure he realized that he did look rather odd. He was wearing gaiters buttoned up at the sides and a high and close-fitting neckband; his clothes were black and sombre and the straight cane did not appear to have a handle. ‘I remember noticing the blue veins standing out on his wrinkled hand and the knuckles tightly clenching the stick,’ Peter Kinsley said later, ‘and then when I was about three yards from him, he just wasn’t there! He didn’t fade or become transparent or anything like that. He was there one second and gone the next.’