Haunted London (25 page)

In April, 1972, Edward C. Hull wrote to me from Lewisham, having read several of my books, and he was kind enough to relate a curious experience which befell him when he was an attendant at the Staff College at Greenwich, housed in the Queen Anne Block of the Royal Naval College. On January 1, 1962, Mr Hull and a colleague heard sounds and witnessed a door opening that they were told might be due to the ghost of the unfortunate Admiral Byng.

Admiral Byng was the son of Lord Torrington and due to his father’s influence Byng received very rapid promotion in his chosen career in the Navy which he entered in 1718 at the age of fourteen, becoming a captain at the age of twenty-three, a rear-admiral at forty-one, a vice-admiral two years later and an admiral at fifty-one. The following year, 1756, he was sent from Gibraltar to relieve a garrison in Minorca. He was defeated in a sea battle with the French, and this defeat was seized upon by the British Government who used Byng as a scapegoat to conceal their own negligence in maintaining the garrisons of Port Mahon and Gibraltar. Byng was brought home to face a court-martial at Greenwich, where he occupied rooms in the Queen Anne Block that are reputed to be haunted by his unquiet ghost. He was found guilty and executed by shooting on board HMS
Monarch
.

That January day Edward Hull and his colleague were sorting mail in the deserted Staff College (the students were on leave) when suddenly the handle of the door began to move, slowly and then violently, and then the door was thrown open with great force. Yet nothing could be found that might have caused such an occurrence. Both men rushed immediately to the door but no one was in sight. As they looked at each other in the now silent corridor, they both heard faint footsteps. They closed the door and returned to their work. A few seconds later, no more, the entire proceedings were repeated and this time the door was thrown open with even greater force. Again the puzzled men tried to discover any possible cause but they were unsuccessful. On again returning to their work they heard sounds resembling grit dropping from the ceiling, or very light taps. Nothing was found on the floor or anywhere else and after a while the light tapping noise ceased.

Discussing the matter afterwards both men discovered that they had on occasions seen ‘filmy figures’ that appeared to float about the corridors, appearing and disappearing in a flash, and on one occasion Edward Hull saw a shrouded figure in one of the rooms at the Naval College. Thinking that it was a real person, he called out a greeting but received no reply and when he approached it the figure faded away into nothingness.

Edward Hull himself feels that Admiral Byng was innocent of the charges for which he was executed and that his ghost returns to the college in an attempt to make known the injustice that he suffered. Certainly there has been considerable controversy surrounding the case which has been a puzzling naval story for over two hundred years. It may be that his ‘ardent rappings’ and violent entry into rooms that he knew may yet redress an injustice.

GUY’S HOSPITAL, SOUTHWARK

Guy’s Hospital was built in 1722-4 at the sole expense of Thomas Guy, a bookseller in Lombard Street who made a fortune by printing and selling Bibles. The hospital has always had a ghost, a nursing sister who appears in various wards and who has been known to rest her hands on patients’ shoulders.

In 1969 ghostly footsteps echoed through Addison Ward, on the first floor, and the hospital chaplain was asked to conduct a service of exorcism. Staff, including two senior nurses and a houseman, as well as patients, heard the footsteps on this occasion.

The three staff members were sitting at a table in the centre of the long ward with the lights on. The houseman had been called to the ward because an elderly woman patient was thought to be dying. Two other patients in the ward were awake at the time.

Suddenly heavy footsteps sounded along the centre of the ward. They approached the middle of the ward, apparently walking straight through the door, and stopped near the bed of the woman who was dying. Several other patients woke up, two of them in time to hear the footsteps approach the bed. The two patients who were lying awake also heard the sounds.

After a few moments the footsteps, heavy and squeaking, went back the way they had come—through a closed door, and in the few moments of quiet between the two journeys, the woman patient died.

THE HORN INN, BERMONDSEY

The Horn Inn, Crucifix Lane, SEI, has only a ghost voice, that of a female child crying and calling for its mother. There seems no doubt that the cries, perhaps of a child of eight- or nine-years-old, are objective for they were heard over a period of seven years by many different people and once by two people at the same time. Following a visit by a medium the little girl ghost seems to have gone, but a new ghost was discovered. A very old lady who banged on walls and floors and moved furniture around and even slept in other people’s beds when they were vacant. The tenancy of the inn changed in 1970 and I have not heard of any disturbances since then.

KENNINGTON

A curious type of ghost seems to have disturbed the Rt. Hon. John Stonehouse, MP, and his family during their occupancy of a flat in Kennington in 1969. The former Minister of Post and Telecommunications firmly denied that he left the flat in the October because of ghosts, but his son Matthew complained of hearing inexplicable noises, and two previous tenants of the flat maintained that there was a poltergeist active on the property.

Restaurant owner Peter Norwood left the flat in March, 1969, and stated that several strange things happened in the first few months that he was there. In particular he recalls a wicker basket that ‘floated’ on several occasions and doors that opened for no apparent reason. He never discovered any logical explanation for the happenings.

Public relations man Peter Earl shared the flat with Peter Norwood and one night he was playing bridge with three friends when they all saw a ‘grey figure’ pass one of the open windows. He too recounts movement of wicker baskets which seemed to be ‘picked up and hurled across the room’, although no one was ever near them at the time.

THE KING’S ARMS, PECKHAM RYE, SE15

The present King’s Arms, Peckham Rye, replaced the old pub of the same name that was destroyed by a direct hit from a bomb in 1940. The bomb killed eleven people in the pub at the time and injured many more. Ever since it has been built the present King’s Arms has been haunted, not by a tangible, single-purpose ghost, but by scores of curious and quite inexplicable happenings, insignificant in themselves but collectively overwhelming evidence that some unknown force is present.

More than one barmaid has reported peculiar experiences that have nothing to do with any person and one landlord and his wife heard footsteps that could not have been produced by a human being. Once they sounded from a locked and empty room and another time from the direction of a deserted passage. These and other sounds were heard by more than one person. Objects were moved and domestic animals behaved hysterically for no apparent reason. Previously sceptical of such things, Mr and Mrs Anthony King admitted in 1968 that they were having second thoughts.

LANGMEAD STREET, WEST NORWOOD

Strange happenings took place at Langmead Street, West Norwood, lasted several years and affected all eight occupants. Soon after they moved into the six-roomed house in 1947 the Greenfield family were puzzled by tapping noises which began in the empty loft and gradually grew louder until they sounded like stones being broken and heavy furniture being dropped. At first birds or rodents were suspected but the deserted loft showed no trace of either and before long the noises were far too loud to have been made by such creatures.

Time passed but the noises continued, often very loud and always frightening. Then there would be a few weeks of silence before they started up again. In July, 1951, Cecil, the twenty-six-year-old son, found himself awakened one night by the sound of movement outside his bedroom door. Thinking that one of the family must be unwell he opened the bedroom door, but all was quiet and the landing was deserted—and then he saw something rounding the bend in the stairway, a tall, grey-white shape that seemed to have no face. As the form advanced towards him Cecil felt himself becoming increasingly cold with terror and only when the shape was almost within touching distance did he find his voice. As he screamed, the form vanished. His parents, young sister Pat, brother Dennis and his wife and her parents all found Cecil white and shaken. He had obviously seen something that had frightened him badly.

A few nights later Dennis and his wife returned home late and when they opened the front door they saw the same grey-white, faceless figure, standing motionless in the narrow hallway. Very frightened, they ran to a neighbour’s house but when they returned with the neighbours, the figure had disappeared. Later the figure was seen one afternoon by Pat.

Alarmed by the sudden appearance of the frightening figure and puzzled by what was happening, the Greenfields called in the police. When the police were unable to explain the happenings, the family sought shelter at night with friends and the police maintained constant vigil at the house. One night when nine police officers were in the house, they all heard raps and thumps from the direction of the loft. Investigation of the empty loft produced no explanation. An eiderdown was found to have been moved from a bed and a picture crashed to the floor, the cord unbroken, and the hook still secure in the wall.

The police investigation was under the direction of Inspector Sidney Candler who is reported to have stated, ‘I was sceptical at first but now I am convinced something strange is happening here.’ Unable to help or prevent the mysterious disturbances, the police left and still inexplicable things occurred. Inside a closed cupboard a spoon rattled in a sugar basin; a large photograph fell out of its frame, leaving the glass front and backing undisturbed; a shopping basket moved from one side of an unoccupied room to the other. Afraid to go upstairs, the family moved their beds to the ground floor but still they did not sleep.

Once a married daughter and a newspaperman waited on the doorstep for the return of Mrs Greenfield. They told her they had heard heavy thumps from within the locked and empty house. When Mrs Greenfield opened the door she found that heavy furniture had been moved and a hanging mirror had been turned to face the wall.

Brilliant luminous flashes were seen in the living room by all the members of the family; a radio would be switched on or off; a mattress lifted itself and curled up in mid-air; vegetables and cooking utensils from the kitchen were found littering a bedroom; books were thrown about and torn; and then, quite suddenly, everything stopped. But the Greenfields were glad to have the opportunity of moving house and after they left the next occupants, Mr and Mrs E. Hewitt and their four young children, were not troubled by any poltergeist activity—or whatever it was that plagued the Greenfields for over four years.

THE OLD VIC, WATERLOO ROAD

The Old Vic in Waterloo Road, once famous for its blood-and-thunder productions, has appropriately a frightful spectre: a distraught woman wringing her bloody hands. No one knows who she is but it is thought that she might be some player from the past re-enacting the part of Lady Macbeth.

THE PLOUGH INN, CLAPHAM COMMON

In the autumn of 1970 psychic happenings resulted in the dismissal of the landlord of The Plough Inn, Clapham Common. Landlord Felwyn Williams and his wife were only at The Plough a few weeks when odd happenings on the attic floor worried them and soon the eight residential staff were afraid to venture upstairs alone. They insisted on going in pairs when they retired to their rooms at night.

The two top floors of the old and historic inn have long been reputed to be haunted, and curious happenings and even the appearance of the ghost, known as Sarah, were reported by previous publicans and occupants of The Plough. One resident barman woke up in the middle of the night and saw the form of a woman in white standing by the window of his room, staring silently into space, her long black hair unruffled by the breeze that billowed the curtains out from the open window. He jumped out of bed, woke the landlord, told him his story and left the pub the next day.

A correspondent who knew Felwyn Williams contacted me after strange noises were heard at night and several of the staff believed that they sensed the presence of Sarah. Mr Williams, thirty years old and described to me as very level-headed and sensible, formed a ‘ghost squad’ and held amateur seances in the haunted rooms. At one seance the name Sarah was spelt out and the date: September 11. As that date approached the staff of The Plough waited for some kind of manifestation but nothing happened.

Mr Williams had worked in four public houses before coming to The Plough and he never even thought about ghosts before taking over at Clapham, yet within a few weeks he had left The Plough. He said he had an ‘acute awareness of Sarah’ and he often felt certain that she was standing over him whenever he ventured upstairs. Her presence certainly had an alarming effect on the staff ‘who had all experienced Sarah’s approach’ which the landlord described as ‘like a mild electric shock and lasting on occasions for half a minute or a minute’.

Rex, the publican’s dog, seemed to have a fear of the undecorated rooms on the top floor and always kept very close to his master or mistress whenever he was upstairs. There is something of a mystery about the number of rooms on the top floor. From the outside three windows are visible but inspection from inside reveals only two windows.

Following reports of a ghost voice and unexplained knockings on a window at the haunted inn I made arrangements to carry out an investigation, but I was then advised that Mr Williams had been sacked. The ‘ghost’ publicity was bad for business and the owners were quoted as saying that everything had been imagined.

ST THOMAS’S HOSPITAL, LAMBETH

London’s best-known hospital ghost is probably the Grey Lady of St Thomas’s, the old building on the Albert Embankment that was founded in the thirteenth century by the canons of St Mary Overy’s Priory and dedicated to Thomas à Becket. The hospital survived the Black Death, the Plague, the Great Fire of London and the Blitz, and was the establishment that Florence Nightingale used as a base to revolutionize world nursing. It has a ghost that is kind and helpful; yet its appearance often heralds the death of the person who sees her.