Haunted London (4 page)

ST BARTHOLOMEW’S HOSPITAL AND CHURCH, CITY

St Bartholomew’s Hospital has a long and interesting history. In 1423, Dick Whittington’s executors carried out repairs that preserved much of the old hospital for many years. A statue of Henry VIII is in the place of honour over the entrance gates, for when the ancient priory was dissolved he ordained that the hospital should be preserved for the sick and afflicted of London.

The hospital was founded in 1123 by Rahere, variously described as a courtier, minstrel and jester, at the court of Henry I. He was a canon of St Paul’s and there is in the British Museum a
Life of Rahere
written by another canon within fifty years of the original founding of the hospital. The writer of Rahere’s life says he was a frequenter of the palace and of noblemen’s houses, and he made himself so agreeable with his suave manners, witty conversation, musical ability and flattering tongue that he came to be highly esteemed as a leader of ‘tumultuous pleasures’, though he was of humble origin. However, the atmosphere of the court changed after 1120 when the only legitimate son of King Henry I was drowned on a voyage from Normandy to England. It was said that the king never smiled again, and certainly the life at court became much more austere. Rahere made a pilgrimage to Rome where, near the spot reputed to be the site of the martyrdom of St Paul (some three miles from the city), he caught malaria. In his distress he vowed that if he was allowed to recover and return to England he would establish a hospital for the poor, as a thanks-offering. His prayers were answered and one night, during his convalescence, St Bartholomew appeared to Rahere in a vision and indicated Smithfield as the appointed spot for his hospital and church.

Back in London, Rahere found the authorities favourable to his projected scheme, for Smithfield was then an unpromising place, mostly marsh, with only one dry space, where the public gallows stood. Some idea of the size of the original priory building can be obtained by picturing the nave as stretching from the present church to the great gate in Smithfield, covering what is now the graveyard.

The first hospital for the sick had a master (Alfune, who had previously built the church of St Giles, Cripplegate), eight brethren and four sisters. Rahere’s life as first prior to St Bartholomew’s was not a peaceful one, for he had many enemies and at one point there was a plot against his life that only failed because a conspirator confessed. However, he governed the hospital for twenty-two years, and left the establishment well established and prosperous.

Rahere is represented on his majestic tomb clad in the black habit of the Augustinian canons. It seems that the tomb was opened for some reason in 1865 (his body lies just beneath the effigy) and some time after a pew-opener was taken ill and confessed that she had stolen one of the sandals from Rahere’s coffin. Over the centuries, there have been many records of people who were supposedly healed by praying at Rahere’s tomb and his sandal and a fragment of his coffin are preserved in the museum housed in the cloisters. A tiny window can be seen to the left of the thirteenth-century clerestory window; its reputed function is to drive away evil spirits that infested the north side of the church. The ghost of Rahere is said to have been seen here on many occasions, and footsteps, presumed to be his, have been reported many times in the ambulatories. A former rector saw the figure several times as did some of his church workers. Once, when a woman was helping to arrange the flowers in the church she complained that she could not arrange them satisfactorily; they kept falling over and they seemed to move whenever she ‘turned her back’. The rector said, ‘You know why? Rahere was standing behind you and you know how he dislikes women!’

Another rector stated that he noticed a strange man in the church one weekday evening when the church was in darkness except for a light in the sacristy. The cowled figure stood looking down the nave with the light behind him, and the rector walked towards the figure and asked whether he could be of any assistance. Without replying, the monk-like form turned and walked without making any sound — as far as the rector could remember — towards the Lady Chapel. The rector followed and when he almost reached the dark-clothed figure, it suddenly and inexplicably disappeared. The same rector and his wife both report seeing the phantom monk standing beside the altar rail, and several members of the congregation have had similar experiences.

Elliott O’Donell, for sixty years one of Britain’s most active ghost hunters, told me that he once saw the shadowy figure of a monk slip past him as he walked down the aisle towards the main entrance to the church, one summer afternoon. O’Donnell had the impression of stealth and he heard no sound. He also told me of a church official who was alone in the church one morning when he saw a luminous white form in the central aisle. As he watched it seemed to form into the shape of a woman and he thought that he recognized his daughter who had been in Australia for years. He was somewhat upset, thinking that perhaps she had died suddenly, but in a letter he received from her later he learnt that she had been seriously ill and that when she was sure she was about to die she had thought that she was standing in St Bartholomew’s church looking at her father! It was subsequently established that both the date and the time of the two experiences corresponded.

Other visitors have reported seeing a strange white light or shape in the central aisle and a frightening dark shape gliding along one of the ambulatories. A former curate fainted when he saw the latter and was ill with the shock for some time afterwards.

More recently, two ladies visited St Bartholomew’s one sunny July morning, happily looking forward to an interesting tour of the ancient church. Suddenly, as they walked down the central aisle, they had a curious feeling of being trapped and in some alarm they proceeded into the church, but then found themselves gripped with the fear that something dreadful was following them. After a moment they came to a halt, as they both experienced an appalling sense of horror and something so inexpressibly evil that one fled, half-sobbing, out through a side door into the sun-baked street where her companion joined her a few moments later. Both said that they would never again visit St Bartholomew’s the Great.

Miss Dorothea St Hill Bourne of Farnham in Surrey tells me that she had three curious experiences at St Bartholomew’s. On one occasion, she had arranged to sing some Bach at the church, but on arrival discovered that the organist did not have a copy of the piece she was to sing. However, she was fairly confident that she knew the piece and the organist used her copy, but it was arranged that they would try the piece over. As Dorothea sang to the deserted church, she had the distinct impression that the church was full with a silent, expectant crowd. As she finished her rehearsal the impression vanished and the great church was still and empty.

On another occasion, Dorothea was walking along one of the ambulatories towards the west end of the church when it seemed to her that the altar and high candles had been moved and were in a slightly different position to where she had been accustomed to seeing them. After a moment, everything was as it should have been, but, just for a second, it was as though she had stepped back to a previous age when the positions of some of the things in the church were a little different to their positions today.

The third experience that Dorothea St Hill Bourne had at St Bartholomew’s was during the period that a pageant was being enacted. The church was packed and, just briefly, Dorothea distinctly saw the figure of a monk walk down the great aisle — a figure that took no part in the pageant and for which there seemed to be no rational explanation. It is interesting to recall that a former rector of St Bartholomew’s the Great once went into the church with some visitors and saw a monk preaching in the pulpit, gesticulating energetically and apparently addressing an invisible congregation, although no sound accompanied the experience.

The same rector used to relate the experience of a church worker who knew St Bartholomew’s for many years and, although familiar with the stories of ghostly forms and strange experiences, had never personally encountered anything she could not explain until one evening, having finished arranging flowers in the church for a wedding next day, she sat down for a moment. As she took a last look round the church in the gloom of an autumn evening, she suddenly thought that she caught sight of something moving near the fifteenth-century font. A moment later, something caught her eye near Rahere’s magnificent tomb and, ‘just for a moment’ (as she put it), she saw a smallish figure standing in the shadows, with his hat cocked at a rakish angle. The apparition, if apparition it was, soon disappeared, but the church worker always wondered whether it might have been the ghost of William Hogarth, the painter and engraver, who often wore ‘his beaver cocked with careless air’, according to a contemporary poet. Hogarth knew and loved St Bartholomew’s the Great and he was baptized in the font there.

ST JAMES’S CHURCH, CITY

In Garlick Hill, off Queen Victoria Street, stands St James’s Church, Garlickhithe, so-called, according to Stow’s
Survey of London
(first published in 1598), because in old times garlic was sold here. There was a church here in 1259 when Peter del Gannok was rector. This was rebuilt in the fourteenth century and after destruction in the Great Fire the present building was opened in 1682, having been built to the design of the great Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723). The church contains a mummified corpse that has been reported to ‘walk’ and there are other ghostly stories associated with this interesting church.

Inside a cupboard in the vestibule of the church there resided for many years the mummified body of a young man that was found during some excavations in 1839. The body was buried in a glass coffin near the altar of the fourteenth-century church, before it was destroyed in the Great Fire. Over the years, the corpse acquired the nickname of ‘Old Jimmy Garlick’, for nobody knows who the man was. It is possible that he was the first Lord Mayor of London (no less than six Lord Mayors were buried here); some people think he was a Roman general, for they were frequently embalmed, whilst others think he might be Belin, a legendary king of the ancient Britons. Experts seem satisfied that the relic is the calcified body of a medieval man but they are reluctant to date the remains. The man must have been important in his own time, for the coffin was elaborate and the body was almost certainly embalmed before burial and is still in perfect condition — the only known example of medieval embalming.

On occasions ‘Jimmy Garlick’, or a figure resembling him, has been seen in various parts of the church. One visitor was resting for a moment in one of the pews when something caught her eye and looking towards the altar she saw, on the north side, a figure in white, tall and silent, with arms folded and looking towards the tower end of the church where the projecting clock is surmounted by a figure of St James. At first the visitor took the figure to be someone connected with the choir or the church generally, but quickly became puzzled by the silence and stillness of the figure. It was gazing at a point behind her with such a fixed intensity that she turned to see what was there, and when she looked back again the white figure had vanished. She immediately went to the spot where the figure had appeared and made enquiries but could find no explanation for the silent form that she had seen.

A similar figure seems to have been encountered by the son of an American visitor to the church a few years ago. The visitor was accompanied by her two sons and while she and the younger boy were examining some of the memorials the older boy startled his mother by suddenly dragging her out of the church. He was in a terrified condition and had obviously seen something that had badly frightened him. He said that when he looked up one of the staircases to the balcony he saw the figure of a man, clad in what could have been a winding sheet, standing erect with his hands crossed. The face and hands of the form resembled those of a dried-up corpse. The boy was very frightened, as he had just come down from the balcony, mounting one side and descending the other, and it had been quite deserted. Neither the boy nor his mother had seen ‘Jimmy Garlick’ or knew about the mummified corpse until later when they were relating the boy’s experience.

Other reports of the occasional appearance of ‘Old Jimmy’s’ ghost include the evidence of a visiting priest, who saw, just for a second, a figure dressed in white in the nave, and a fireman during the Second World War who shouted repeatedly at the white figure he saw inside the church during an air-raid to take shelter, a figure which melted into nothingness when he eventually approached the north-east corner of the church. He could discover no explanation.

During the Second World War, ‘Jimmy Garlick’ had several narrow escapes from damage and destruction. Once, in 1942, a bomb grazed his case and penetrated to the vaults below the church but did not explode. Afterwards ‘Jimmy’ was reported to be seen inside the church more frequently, usually glimpsed only for a moment, and new manifestations occurred, including unexplained movements of objects and the appearance and disappearance of a phantom cat.

St James’s Church, Garlick Hill, boasts the mummified body of a young man, a ghost in a winding sheet and a phantom cat.