Haunted London (27 page)

On Good Friday morning, 1959, Mrs Vera Stringer told me she popped down the road to buy some hot-cross buns, having unpacked a parcel from her mother-in-law which contained some knitted clothes for Steven, a tie for Graham and some nylon stockings for herself. As she returned to the house she saw smoke coming from the living room window. Indoors she discovered that her husband, finding the contents of the parcel alight, had thrown water all over the woollies and other things. He had put the fire out but all the gifts were ruined.

On Easter Monday, 1960, Mrs Stringer was in the kitchen when she smelt burning. She hurried into the living room and then into Steven’s bedroom, but everything appeared to be all right, until she went into her own bedroom where her husband had left a pullover, shirt and vest on a chest of drawers. The clothes were blazing. Once again the fire was extinguished but the clothes were ruined and the chest of drawers badly scorched.

Around Easter, 1961, there were no fires, but a mysterious and vague ‘grey column of fluorescent light’ was seen twice, once in Graham Stringer’s darkroom and once in the living room where it floated from one comer of the room to disappear in the opposite corner. Footsteps were often heard, the sound of doors opening and closing, and one morning the Stringers found the big window-pane in the kitchen smashed. It looked as though a fist had been put through it and glass was scattered all over the garden, although nobody had heard a sound.

Around Easter, 1962,
two
rooms were found alight. On the first occasion Mrs Stringer was in bed and her husband had just left for work. Suddenly she noticed the smell of burning and she was terrified to find smoke on the stairs and flames three feet high in the living room. She raced down to the basement to telephone the fire brigade. They soon had the blaze under control and Graham Stringer came home from work to help clear up the mess. In the afternoon Vera Stringer was at the launderette, leaving her husband in the garden trying to salvage what he could of the living room carpet, when she heard fire-engines and a neighbour ran in to her and said, ‘Go home at once—you’ve got another fire! ‘ This time it was Steven’s room—Graham Stringer had looked up from the garden and seen the bedroom curtains alight. There was no form of heating in the room and it is difficult to suggest how the fire could have started—excluding human intervention. After 1962 the fire-raising ‘phantom’ seems to have ceased activity.

WIMBLEDON COMMON

An unusual ghost in south London is an eighteenth century spectral highwayman, ‘Jerry’ Abershaw, who is reputed to gallop his steed across Wimbledon Common at night—a habit that could cause complications since a revision of local bye-laws in 1971 prohibits ‘unauthorised’ horse-riding between half an hour after sunset and half an hour before sunrise! Abershaw paid the penalty for his crimes and in 1795 his body swung from the gibbet that used to stand at Wimbledon Hill.

The Tower of London—the name still causes a shudder, as well it might, since for nearly a thousand years prisoners of the state have been confined, tortured and executed in this sombre collection of ancient and massive buildings. Some say there have been murders within the confines of these stout and high walls and certainly there have been suicides. If violent happenings and tragic deaths can cause hauntings, then surely the Tower should be more ghost-ridden than most places, and so it is.

From the well-documented apparition seen by a Keeper of the Crown Jewels and his wife two hundred and fifty years ago, to the ghost of a ‘long-haired lady’ seen in the Bloody Tower in 1970, stories of ghosts and ghostly happenings at the Tower are legion. There is no doubt that there are convincing reports, extending over many years, of very curious occurrences, including appearances of Anne Boleyn, the Countess of Salisbury, Sir Walter Raleigh and the murdered boy princes.

Julius Caesar has been credited with establishing the White Tower, the oldest building and the original tower from which the present collection of buildings takes its name. Shakespeare supports this assumption in his
Richard II
and
Richard III
but John Stow, the Elizabethan antiquarian, expresses scepticism, pointing out that Caesar came only to conquer ‘this barbarous country’ and none of the Roman writers ‘make mention of any such buildings created by him here’.

It seems likely that William the Conqueror, in 1078, began to build the great keep (known as the White Tower because white Caen stone was used) on the base of a Roman bastion, a work later supervised by Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester and Grand Master of the Freemasons. Some authorities have suggested that the name is derived from the Bryn Gwyn or White Hill upon which the tower was erected, white being a Celtic synonym for ‘holy’; whilst others believe that it was so-called on account of the whitewashing it received in the reign of Henry III.

Ralph Flambard, chief adviser to King William II, was imprisoned in the White Tower in 1100 after the king, as every schoolboy knows, was killed by an arrow while hunting in the New Forest. In one attempt to escape, Flambard, his bishop’s staff in his hand, fell from a window to the ground sixty-five feet below and was picked up unhurt. He lived for many years and was later successful in escaping from the dreaded Tower, received a pardon, regained his bishopric and was responsible for the completion of the nave of Durham Cathedral. Griffin, son of Llewellyn, Prince of Wales, was less successful when he tried to imitate Flamhard in his method of escape, and was found by the guards with his neck broken.

The perfect little Chapel of St John in the White Tower is the earliest Norman building in London. Here rested Richard II’s body in 1400 after he had been murdered in Pontefract Castle; here too the body of Elizabeth of York, Consort of Henry VII in 1503, lay in state after she had died in the Tower in childbirth. Five hundred tapers and candlesticks surrounded her bier. Here, while praying before the altar in 1483, Sir Thomas Brackenbury received instructions to put to death his nephews, the young princes, and the pathetic ghosts of these young brothers have long been reputed to haunt the vicinity of the White Tower, where their bodies were buried at the foot of the staircase, although they were murdered by Sir James Tyrell and two assistants in the Bloody Tower.

It may be that this murder gave the tower its name—it was originally called the Garden Tower as its upper storey opens on to that part of the parade ground which was formerly the Constable’s garden. At all events the silent ghosts of Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, have also been seen here, hand in hand, in white nightgowns, at the angle of a wall, outside the gate to the right, where the little bodies were hastily buried by their murderers. In 1674 excavation revealed the bones of two young boys. Charles II believed them to be the royal remains and they were buried in Westminster Abbey.

There is a story that the ghost of Thomas à Becket (murdered in 1170) was seen in 1241 when Henry III was strengthening the fortress. In these building operations he was delayed by two serious reverses. On the night of St George’s Day, 1240, when the work was nearly finished, the foundations suddenly gave way and the new structure fell apart as it might have done from an earthquake. The work was restarted and in twelve months was almost complete again. On the same night, St George’s Day, 1241, according to Matthew Paris (the outstanding Latin chronicler of the thirteenth century, a valuable historian and a monk) a priest saw a stem-faced, venerable figure in archbishop’s robes walk towards the newly-erected building and strike the walls with a cross which he carried—whereupon the building fell down. In the vision the priest enquired of an attendant nearby who the figure might be and received the answer, ‘The blessed martyr, St Thomas Becket.’

Whatever the explanation of the ‘apparition’, it is an historical fact that the building collapsed a second time. King Henry III seems to have believed that his grandfather’s crime in being responsible for the murder of Becket was unforgiven and on another occasion Matthew Paris records that when someone died, the king complained, ‘Is not the blood of the blessed martyr Thomas fully avenged yet?’

On the main floor of the White Tower, below St John’s Chapel, there is a stone crypt containing a block specially made for the execution of the Scottish lords and cuts from the axe are still clearly visible. Here too are some of the instruments of torture, for most of the torturing in the Tower took place in the White Tower. Thumbscrews, the crushing scavenger’s daughter, a spiked collar, bilboes for securing captives’ feet and a large gibbet bear witness to the ingenuity and cruelty of man.

Anne Askew was tortured on the rack here in 1546 and Lord Chancellor Wriothesley became so interested in the proceedings that he took off his coat and laboured at the levers himself until he had almost torn her body apart. Perhaps it is her agonized screams and groans that have occasionally been heard issuing from these impregnated walls rather than those of Guido Fawkes who was ‘examined’ in the Council Room at the Queen’s House, built in Henry VIII’s time for the Lieutenant of the Tower and still used as the residence of the Governor.

Anne Boleyn spent her last night on earth at the Queen’s House (then known as the Lieutenant’s Lodgings), and her ghost has been seen to emerge from a doorway under her room and to glide towards Tower Green where she was executed on May 19, 1536.

One evening in 1864 a guardsman of the 60th Rifles saw the white figure materialize in the dark doorway and float silently towards him. When his challenge was ignored he stabbed at the figure with his bayonet. He found no resistance and his bayonet went clean through the figure which still advanced towards him! He realized that he was face to face with a ghost and he collapsed in a faint. The Captain of the Guard found him unconscious on the ground and put him on a charge. At the subsequent court-martial for sleeping on duty (or being drunk) several other guardsmen swore that they had seen a similar figure at the same spot while on guard duty themselves, and furthermore two witnesses appeared and maintained that they had seen the same figure at the same time as the accused. They had seen him thrust his bayonet through the figure and had heard his scream of terror before he collapsed. In the circumstances the court took a lenient view and the prisoner was acquitted.

Tower of London. The Wakefield Tower, where the ghost of the murdered king, Henry VI, has been seen outside the chamber where he was stabbed as he knelt at prayer.

Another sentry saw a woman in white appear from the direction of the Queen’s House one evening a little after midnight. He could not see her head in the darkness but he distinctly heard the clicking of her heels on the hard ground. Puzzled, he watched the figure move towards Tower Green and then, when the form entered a patch of moonlight, he saw to his horror that she was headless. He fled his post but again the authorities were lenient.

Yet another guardsman on night duty near the Bloody Tower was standing motionless in the dim shadows when, with startling suddenness, he saw a white form appear before him. It seemed to rise out of the ground almost at his feet. Although shadowy and indistinct, he had no doubt that it was a headless woman. After challenging the strange appearance, he thrust his bayonet towards the form, whereupon it vanished.

Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, ‘committed suicide’ in the Bloody Tower and his ghost is reputed to have walked nightly afterwards along a narrow rampart. When sentries saw the ghost they were reluctant to do night duty in that part of the Tower and Sir George Younghusband, a Keeper of the Crown Jewels, has stated that the sentries were doubled. The ghost of the Earl of Northumberland may have had a reason to walk. Although a verdict of suicide was decided at the inquest, the Earl, a sympathizer with Mary Queen of Scots, was three times sent to the Tower on the orders of Queen Elizabeth I and was finally found there, shot dead through the heart in his bed, on June 21, 1595. It was widely believed that he had been murdered, especially as Sir Christopher Hatton, only a day before the death, ordered the Lieutenant of the Tower to place a new warder in charge of the prisoner. Some witnesses maintain that the ghost of Northumberland walks in the vicinity of the Martin Tower where a later Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was imprisoned for thirteen years. There the ghost is said to walk along a narrow path running along the edges of the ramparts each side of the Martin Tower, a path known as Northumberland’s Walk.

Years ago the Crown Jewels were housed at the Jewel House situated on the west side of the Martin Tower and it was there that the most famous of all Tower ghost stories originated.

The singular, impersonal and quite unexplained manifestation occurred in 1817 and is vouched for by no less an authority than Edmund Lenthal Swifte, the Keeper of the Crown Jewels, who lived with his family at the Jewel House, then in the Martin Tower. Swifte (who courageously saved the Regalia during the great fire at the Tower in 1841) was appointed Keeper in 1814 and he retained the appointment until 1852.