Haunted London (22 page)

Everyone present at Lady Tryon’s party at Eaton Place on June 22, 1893 saw the unmistakable figure of Sir George Tryon, in full naval uniform, suddenly stride unannounced through the room. At that moment Sir George lay dead at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Joseph Pearcey decided to call the police and using torches the police searched the front garden and found several pennies. David was inside the house, answering questions put to him by a kind but suspicious officer, when one of the constables who had been searching the garden came in to announce that he had been hit by a flying penny.

The family passed a restless night. Wherever David went metal objects flew about. ‘It was as if the boy was magnetized,’ his mother told me. Next day, the spanner broke the glass of the front window. David was outside at the time but the spanner came from indoors.

It was decided that David should spend a few days with his uncle at Basildon and Mr and Mrs Pearcey moved in with relatives who lived nearby. The house, or the poltergeist, or the occupants, benefited from the ‘cooling-down’ period and I heard no more reports of disturbances at the house in Esmond Road.

HAMMERSMITH CHURCHYARD

Many years ago, a haunting that obtained much notoriety and became known as the ‘Hammersmith ghost’ was associated with the churchyard of that borough. A tall white apparition was frequently seen and on one occasion a woman crossing the churchyard at night claimed that she saw a white figure rise from among the tombstones and glide towards her. When she fled the figure chased her and, as she was caught by the ‘apparition’, she fainted and was subsequently found by a passer-by. Tragically, she later died of shock. Some time later, a man was equally terrified as he walked through the churchyard and fled from ‘a tall, white figure’ that suddenly appeared before him. Apparently he was faster on his feet than the unlucky woman, for there is no report of the ‘apparition’ catching up with him! The spectre was commonly believed to be that of a local man who had committed suicide by cutting his throat.

At length, a number of Hammersmith residents kept watch in an attempt to solve the mystery but this well-intentioned vigil ended in tragedy when one of the watchers mistook a man wearing a white overall for the ghost and opened up with a shotgun, killing the unfortunate man. Sentence of death was passed on the responsible party, but perhaps mindful that a death had already resulted from the mysterious figure in the churchyard, this sentence was commuted to one year’s imprisonment. There are certainly grounds for suspecting the paranormal origin of the Hammersmith ‘ghost’, although the affair was never completely explained. I was shown a coloured print of the ‘Hammersmith ghost’ dated 1825 some years ago.

HOLLAND HOUSE, KENSINGTON (REBUILT)

Holland House in Holland Park, Kensington, was badly bombed in 1940; the central block, including the haunted Gilt Room, being almost totally destroyed. After the war it was rebuilt as a youth hostel and today there are few reports of any ghostly activities in the successor to the fine Jacobean structure where James I stayed in 1612, where William Penn lived for a time, a place that was once the chief salon of Lord Byron and was known by Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Moore and Lord Macaulay, who wrote tenderly but sadly in 1841 of the ‘favourite resort of wits and beauties, of painters and poets, of scholars, philosophers and statesmen... the avenue and the terrace, the busts and the paintings, the carving, the grotesque gilding, and the enigmatical mottoes ...’

Holland House was built for Sir Walter Cope in 1607 and called Cope Castle. The upper apartments were on a level with the stone gallery of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, the front windows commanded a view of the Surrey hills and those at the back of Harrow, Hampstead and Highgate. After becoming the property of Sir Henry Rich, first Earl of Holland, who married Sir Walter Cope’s daughter and heiress Isabel, the house was renamed and it was the ghost of Sir Henry himself that walked at midnight at Holland House, entering the Gilt Room through a secret door, with his head in his hand.

The Royalist Earl had been executed in 1649 at Palace Yard, causing something of a sensation on the scaffold. He was a handsome man and dressed for his death in a white satin waistcoat and white satin cap, laced with silver. Handing the executioner £10, he instructed him to be careful of his clothes, adding, ‘And when you take up my head do not take off my cap!’ Whether the ghost’s head was seen wearing a white satin cap or not I do not know, but there were said to be three spots of blood on the side of the recess for the secret door from which the ghost emerged to walk slowly through the scenes of former triumphs — three spots of blood that nothing would ever efface.

The best-known ghost story associated with old Holland House, however, was related to John Aubrey, the antiquarian, in his
Miscellanies
published in 1696. He relates that the beautiful Lady Diana Rich, daughter of the Earl of Holland, walking in the fresh air of her father’s garden before dinner, ‘being then very well’, met with an apparition of herself, identically dressed, as if she were facing a looking-glass. About a month later, Aubrey says, the Lady Diana died of smallpox. And furthermore, he adds, that ‘’tis said that her sister, the Lady Isabella Thynne, saw the like of herself also before she died’. Aubrey states that he had these accounts from a ‘Person of Honour’, but he was a credulous man and his appetite for folklore and gossip make his miscellaneous writings somewhat unreliable. Yet in her history of Holland House, published in 1875, the Princess Marie Liechenstein adds that a third sister, Mary, married to the first Earl of Breadalbane, not long after her wedding, had a similar warning of her approaching death and that it was an accepted fact that whenever a mistress of Holland House met herself, death hovered about her.

KENSINGTON PALACE, KENSINGTON

Kensington Palace, so-named from the adjoining district, was purchased by King William III in 1689 for £18,000 from Daniel Finch, second Earl of Nottingham, and the king often held councils at the palace. It was the birthplace of Queen Victoria who was living there when she succeeded to the throne. Her nursery is amongst the rooms now open to the public. Queen Mary, consort of George V, was also born at Kensington Palace and it was the residence of Queen Anne, George I and George II. It was at this palace that King William III (1702) and his consort Queen Mary (1694), Queen Anne (1714) and George II (1760) all died.

George II and his consort Caroline of Anspach were devoted to the palace and the ailing king would often raise himself to gaze from the window of his room at the curious old weathervane with its conjoined cyphers of William and Mary, high up over the main entrance to the palace. Especially during his last illness in October 1760, the irritable and choleric king (who like the other exiled monarch at Kensington Palace, William III, preferred his native country to the one over which he was called to rule) would look towards the weather-vane, hoping for winds from the right quarter to speed the ships conveying long-overdue despatches from his beloved Hanover.

The despatches arrived at last, but too late for the king, who died on 25 October 1760, still struggling to watch the weathervane, and when there are strong winds blowing the ashen face of the king is still said to be seen gazing up at the weathervane as he did over 200 years ago. There lingers still an air of sadness about the old palace and it was not difficult to imagine that the ghost of the old king returns from time to time to the room in which he died.

Kensington Palace was later the residence of Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon and their family and also Prince Michael of Kent. When Princess Margaret was once asked whether she had ever seen the ghost of George II she replied, ‘I’m afraid not, but I live in hope.’

NORTH KENSINGTON

Many people have said to me that they can accept the possibility of ghosts (although the clothes ghosts wear are sometimes a problem) and stretching credence to the limit, most people accept the possibility (however remote) of animal ghosts, but ghosts of inanimate objects seem beyond possibility. Yet there is evidence for ghostly objects that bears examination and a case in point is the ghost bus of North Kensington.

The junction of St Mark’s Road and Cambridge Gardens, near Ladbroke Grove Station, was a dangerous one and the scene of many fatal accidents. It was here that the Number 7 buses turned quickly into Cambridge Gardens and many motorists not familiar with the area were forced to brake sharply and not a few had minor accidents until the borough council arranged for the removal of part of the garden of a corner house to facilitate safer driving.

Before this was done there were many reports of a strange bus, with the lights on but with no visible driver or passengers, which raced down St Mark’s Road in the middle of the night when no scheduled bus was running. There was more than one case of a car crashing at this corner, the driver complaining bitterly that he was avoiding a bus that he found had disappeared when he turned to see what had become of it.

A member of the staff of a nearby garage reported that several motorists had remarked on how late the buses ran and told him that they had seen one after midnight in St Mark’s Road, and once he had been surprised to see a bus pull up at the garage late at night but when he looked again it was nowhere in sight. He had neither heard it arrive nor heard it depart.

Following one fatal accident, a Paddington inquest heard evidence for the phantom bus and discovered that dozens of residents claimed to have seen it and hundreds more believed in the startling apparition.

One resident of St Mark’s Road who lived near the junction told me that he and his wife had seen the bus at least half a dozen times and they often stayed awake at night till after one o’clock to see whether a crash or sudden screech of brakes would tell them that yet another night motorist had encountered the disappearing bus, where no real buses now run.

Another man told me that he had been crossing the road, his back to St Mark’s Road, when a car approaching the deserted junction suddenly veered to the side of the road and mounted the pavement before coming to a jolting halt. Thinking that the driver must have been taken ill, my informant hurried to the car to find the white and shaken driver swearing and cursing about the driver of a bus that had come round the comer quickly and forced him on to the pavement. He asked what had happened to the bus, but my informant told him that he had seen no bus and certainly the roads were now totally deserted.

After the junction had been altered and made more safe, the phantom bus ceased to run, so perhaps this is an example of a ghost with a purpose and when the dangerous comer was rectified there was no need for the ghost bus to put in an appearance.

THE OLD BURLINGTON, CHISWICK

The Old Burlington, Church Street, Chiswick, was once an Elizabethan alehouse that was frequented by Dick Turpin. He is reputed to have leapt from an upstairs window straight on to the back of faithful Black Bess and so evaded once again the Bow Street Runners, those forerunners of the Metropolitan Police. The ghost at the Old Burlington is called ‘Percy’ and he appears in a wide-brimmed black hat and long cloak. Previous occupants of the inn described him as ‘good-humoured and harmless’ and although there are occasional reports that he has been seen in the bar and at the back of the inn, no one seems afraid of this harmless shape from the past.

WALPOLE HOUSE, CHISWICK

Walpole House in Chiswick Mall has long been reputed to be haunted by the ghost of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, who died here from dropsy in her sixty-ninth year. She lived at the fine seventeenth-century house during the latter part of her life, in the company of her grandson Charles Hamilton, the son of one of her daughters by the Duke of Hamilton (whose father was killed in a duel by the ‘wicked’ Lord Mohun). Barbara Villiers married Roger Palmer in 1659 when she was eighteen and he was made Earl of Castlemaine two years later. She became mistress of Charles II within a year of her marriage and she had great influence with the king for about ten years — until he met pretty Nell Gwynne.

Created Duchess of Cleveland in 1670, Barbara Villiers’ influence faded with her beauty and her last years, during which she swelled gradually to ‘a monstrous bulk’ were full of sadness as she spent more and more time remembering the gaiety and immorality of her youth. Five of her numerous children were acknowledged by Charles II and the sons became the dukes of Cleveland, Grafton and Northumberland.

She always wore high heels and the sound of her steps have been heard many times on the stairway where she would walk, gazing wistfully out of the tall windows of the drawing room. Sometimes she would raise her hands to the wide sky and beg for the return of her beauty. For two and a half centuries, that tap-tap of her heels and the appearance of her form have been reported from time to time at Chiswick House. These phenomena occur particularly on stormy, moonlit nights when the sad and bloated face has been seen pressed against the window, and the hands, clasped in despair, epitomize the forlorn plea that she repeated so often. After a while, the face is withdrawn from the window, the click of fading footsteps is heard for a moment amid the rain and wind and then silence reigns again over this house of memories.