Haunted London (20 page)

Shortly afterwards he became aware of an indistinct and vague form watching him from the direction of a high brick wall — a short man with a drooping moustache and staring eyes behind metal-rimmed spectacles. After a moment, the figure noiselessly stepped out of the shadow of the wall and the watcher saw that the figure carried a large paper parcel under one arm. The form disappeared in the dim moonlight, going in the direction of an almost forgotten and litter-filled pond. After a few moments, the same figure returned but without the parcel, and this time the watcher realized with a start that he could see the trees and bushes through the form that was slowly walking towards him, slump-shouldered and with an appearance of sadness. Still the watcher stood his ground, and then, when the form was perhaps a dozen yards away, it suddenly disappeared.

Subsequently, the investigator spent the best part of several cold nights at the same spot and, although once or twice he thought he saw the same figure (and once saw a strange dog-like animal for a second) hidden in the deep shadow of the high wall, he never again saw the form clearly and he died before the plot of land was developed and built upon, perhaps laying for all time the ghost of Crippen. For a time, our watcher wondered about the big parcel that the figure had carried on the first occasion that he had seen it, and then he learned that only portions of the body of Cora Crippen had been unearthed at Hilldrop Crescent. The head, skeleton and limbs were never found.

THE MARLBOROUGH THEATRE, HOLLOWAY (REPLACED)

The Marlborough Theatre, Holloway, later a cinema, was reputed to harbour the ghost of an irritable ex-thespian in astrakhan collar that used to be seen in the vicinity of the manager’s office. In 1947, the manager, Mr Billy Quest, told me that he had no doubt that the place was haunted and although he had never seen the ghost himself, he had talked to patrons and a previous manager who had seen the apparition.

THE OLD QUEEN’S HEAD, ISLINGTON

The Old Queen’s Head at Islington is haunted by a female ghost. This is perhaps one of Sir Walter Raleigh’s ladies, for he built the old pub that formerly stood here; or perhaps Queen Elizabeth I herself, for she stopped here occasionally when the Earl of Essex lived here; or possibly, as the landlord’s wife thinks, it is the ghost of a younger girl. Mrs Arthur Potter says she has often heard the ghost run upstairs ahead of her, the little feet tap-tapping away along the passage, accompanied by the swish and rustle of a long dress. Mrs Potter’s daughter once heard ‘someone’ coming along a passage at the Old Queen’s Head when no one was there and once Arthur Potter walked into the ghost!

He was walking carefully downstairs in the dark one evening when the light-switch had broken and about half-way down he felt ‘a body or a thing’ press against him. He pushed it away and rushed down the rest of the stairs to switch on the light. The stairway was quite deserted and to this day Arthur Potter does not know what he encountered but he was very careful never again to walk downstairs in darkness.

POND SQUARE, HIGHGATE

The old and elegant Pond Square at Highgate has long been haunted by a ghostly chicken, a frightened, squawking featherless creature that has been seen many times over the years. This ghost has its origin in a far-reaching experiment conducted by statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon, Viscount St Albans — an experiment that cost him his life.

In 1626, Bacon, one-time Lord Chancellor of England, the highest office in the state, was sixty-five. He had enjoyed a brilliant political career before being found guilty of bribery and corruption and sentenced to a fine of £40,000, imprisonment in the Tower and prohibition from ever again holding office or sitting in Parliament. His work in philosophy and science was far in advance of his time and he had recently turned his attention to natural history, which he studied by following the Baconian Method: to discover the hidden, simple laws of the universe by gathering scientific data and laboriously eliminating all incidental attributes of those data to arrive at its essential causes.

In March that year, Bacon was riding in his carriage through the snow-covered streets of Highgate. Scientific problems were never far from his mind, and as he travelled along on that cold and icy day he suddenly wondered why the grass exposed beneath the snow by the wheels of his carriage was so green and fresh. Could snow be a preservative of some kind? He resolved to try an experiment immediately and called to his coachman to stop by the village pond and to purchase a chicken from a nearby farm.

Wrapping his cloak about him, Bacon stepped down into Pond Square and there and then ordered the coachman to kill the bird, partially pluck it and clean it. When this was done, Bacon, to the wonder and surprise of a few locals who had gathered round, took the warm carcass and stuffed it with snow. He then placed it in a bag and packed more snow tightly round it. It was the first frozen chicken.

Haunted Pond Square, Highgate, where a spectral chicken has been seen and heard for many years, perhaps dating from 1626 when Francis Bacon used snow to stuff the first frozen chicken; a far-reaching experiment that cost him his life.

In his enthusiasm to conduct the experiment without delay, Bacon had overlooked the extreme weather, and he was not a young man. He suddenly found himself shivering violently, then coughed heavily and collapsed in the snow. He was hastily carried to the house of his friend Lord Arundel at the corner of Pond Square and there, a few days later, he died.

There is no record of the ghostly appearance of Sir Francis Bacon, or of a phantom coach and horses in Pond Square, but there have been many reports of a spectral chicken, half-running and half-flying in circles, and almost denuded of feathers. It is seen near a brick wall at dead of night, always in the winter months. In recent years, the shivering chicken has been seen at least fifteen times, and no one keeps chickens these days in Pond Square.

Mr and Mrs John Greenhill lived in Pond Square during the Second World War and they saw the ghost chicken many times. ‘It was a big, whitish bird,’ Mrs Greenhill reported. ‘Many members of my family saw it on moonlit nights. Sometimes it would perch on the lower boughs of the tree opposite our house.’ During the war too, in December 1943, there is a report that a certain Aircraftman Terence Long was walking through Pond Square late at night when he heard what sounded like horses’ hooves and the grind of carriage wheels, followed by a frightful shriek. He peered about him but could see no horse or anything that could have made the noises he heard although they seemed so close at hand, and then he saw a chicken dashing about in frenzied circles, half-bald, flapping its wings and squawking and seemingly shivering with cold.

Long looked about him to see where the bird might have come from, and when he looked back the bird had disappeared. A few moments later the aircraftman met an ARP fire-watcher who told him that the bird had been seen around the square for years, and that a month or two previously a man had tried to catch it but it had vanished into a brick wall.

Another witness is a motorist who had a breakdown in South Grove and he walked into Pond Square late one January night in 1969 to ask for help at a house where a light was still burning downstairs. As he crossed the square his attention was attracted by a movement, and looking towards a wall he saw a large white bird flapping its wings and running round in circles. At first he thought it was hurt and he walked towards it, but as he drew nearer he saw that it was a chicken with nearly all the feathers plucked from its body. A few feet from the frenzied creature he stopped and looked about him to see whether there were any young hooligans who might have been cruel enough to pluck the feathers from the live bird for fun. The square seemed totally deserted however, and, as he turned back, he found that the bird had disappeared. He heard no sound at any time.

It has been observed that some hauntings run down, almost like a battery, and it may be that after nearly four hundred years the phantom chicken of Pond Square is gradually fading, since no sound accompanied the 1969 appearance. In February 1970, a young couple were startled when a big white bird, nearly naked, dropped to the ground nearby, as they were saying good night. It made no sound and, after flapping around in a circle a couple of times disappeared into the darkness.

THE ROYAL NATIONAL ORTHOPAEDIC HOSPITAL, STANMORE

A Grey Lady is reputed to haunt the wards of the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital at Stanmore each November 13. She is generally regarded as the ghost of a nun, for the hospital is built on part of the grounds of a former nursery.

One nurse told me that there had been a ghostly Grey Lady at every hospital she had ever worked at! Some of the stories may be invented as a joke to scare new recruits when they were preparing for night duty for the first time, but the reluctance on the part of the hospital authorities to discuss and investigate alleged hauntings at hospitals suggests that there are genuine haunted hospitals in London as there are in the provinces.

SADLER’S WELLS THEATRE, FINSBURY

A theatre that took its name from the medicinal springs discovered in 1683 in the grounds of the Music House (formerly occupying the site) belonging to Thomas Sadler. Sadler’s Wells Theatre is where the ghost of Joe Grimaldi has been seen, his glassy eyes staring from outlandish clown make-up at the dead of night in one of the boxes. It is only right that Grimaldi should return to this theatre for Joe Grimaldi, his son and his grandson were all famous clowns here.

THE SPANIARDS, HAMPSTEAD HEATH

The Spaniards, on Hampstead Heath, has associations with Dick Turpin and I have been shown three curious knives and forks with bent handles that are said to have been in use by the highwayman and his associates on one occasion when the word came that King George’s men were in sight. Here too can be seen the room that Turpin engaged for the night, and the stable across the yard where Black Bess was lodged, and the tiny, foot-square, window cut in the stairway wall so that supplies could be handed out to highwaymen already saddled and anxious to be away.

The Spaniards Inn, Hampstead Heath, where the hoofbeats of highwaymen have been heard on still nights.

Appropriately enough, Turpin himself is said to haunt the inn as well as the nearby heath and over the years not a few landlords of The Spaniards have heard the clatter of horses’ hoofbeats, sharp and sudden in the stillness of the night, followed by total silence. No cause has ever been discovered for the sound of hoofbeats in a place where no horses have been stabled for years.

STOKE NEWINGTON

An interesting example of a mixed case of haunting and poltergeist manifestation took place at Stoke Newington in 1968-9, at a 150-year-old terrace house now demolished. The case involved the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker.

The affected household consisted of the tenants, Mr and Mrs Richard McGhee, their unmarried twenty-one-year-old daughter Valerie, another daughter, Sally, her husband, Richard Strachan, and their two small children, Danny (four years old) and Elaine (three years old). The case was brought to my attention by the Rev. John Robbins, the Unitarian Minister, chairman of the Unitarian Society for Psychical Studies and a member of The Ghost Club.

There were stories of a ‘white lady’, of loud and frequent footsteps, a groaning noise, knocks, fires and unexplained smoke-like apparitions. The troubles seemed to increase during the five years that the family lived there. I visited the house on two occasions.

A ‘woman in white’ was seen by Mrs June Rose (another daughter of the McGhees) in 1964 and the same figure was frequently seen (it was claimed) during 1968 and 1969 by the little girl Elaine, usually emerging from a wardrobe in the corner of the bedroom. The child maintained that the ‘white lady’ lived in the wardrobe, always wore a white dress and had only one leg. In September 1967, Elaine’s mother, Mrs Sally Strachan, saw the figure herself. That particular evening a lampshade caught fire inexplicably and a wardrobe fell over. About midnight Mrs Strachan went upstairs to bed and as she opened the bedroom door she immediately saw what looked like a Victorian woman in a white dress standing in the middle of the room, one arm crossed in front of her. She wore a white handkerchief or close-fitting bonnet on her head. Her long dress had a row of buttons all the way down the front, fastened by loops, and there were frills at the cuffs. The face of the figure was frightening in the extreme with enormous black eyes that seemed to fill the eye-sockets. The whole form seemed to radiate hatred and Sally Strachan was petrified with fright. She felt herself go suddenly icy cold and then she fainted.