Haunted London (7 page)

Stuart Martin, a novelist and journalist, studied the case and stated that in addition to the incidents recounted by ‘Cheiro’, Douglas Murray lost a large part of his fortune soon after the mummy case came into his possession, and that when the case was being photographed at a studio the photographer was puzzled and perplexed by an entirely different face that appeared on his photograph, a woman’s face with hatred and spite in every line. The photographer died soon afterwards, said Martin.

When the mummy case was sent to the British Museum the carrier who transported the case died a week later, but Martin maintained that once the mummy case was at the British Museum, residing among other embalmed bodies and mummy cases of Egyptian nobility, no more disturbances occurred.

The ghost-hunter Thurston Hopkins told me that he was convinced that at least thirteen people who handled the haunted mummy case met with sudden death or disaster. He said that a press photographer had taken a photograph of the mummy case at the British Museum and had returned next day to Sir Ernest Wallis Budge, Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum for thirty years, with the photograph which showed another woman’s face, so horrid and frightening that after leaving the museum, the photographer went home and shot himself. Hopkins always maintained that Wallis Budge, perhaps the most learned Egyptologist of modern times, was continually worried by reports from his staff about unexplained hammering noises and the sound of sobbing coming from the case containing the mummy. He said the case had an ‘extremely lurid record’ and wondering whether the priestess was not satisfied with her position and presentation, arranged for the mummy case to have a show-case to itself and a large ticket with a laudatory notice. Thereafter the mummy case was quiet.

Thurston Hopkins told me he had once interviewed a keeper in the Mummy Room who maintained that at dusk one evening he had seen a figure suddenly sit up in the empty bottom half of the mummy case of Amen-Ra and something with a horrible yellow face glided towards him with a sickeningly smooth movement, until he thought he was going to be pushed down a trapdoor. He sprang forward to protect himself only to find that his face and hands met nothing and the figure or form that he had seen had disappeared.

Kay Thomas, the daughter of a British Museum official, told Thurston Hopkins some of the many stories her father had related to her about curious happenings in the vicinity of the mummy case. Most of the museum cleaners seem to have been scared of some intangible influence and when one treated the case containing the relic disdainfully, his son died soon afterwards. Several museum workers were injured when the mummy case was being set in position and most of the men firmly believed that ‘she’ exerted a harmful influence. Eventually, the case was relegated to the basement; during the removal one man suffered a sprained ankle and within a week one of the section chiefs died at his desk at the museum.

Wentworth Day told me that Budge believed that the Arab who found the mummy fell dead in the tomb as soon as his hand touched the folds of bandages that had covered the mummy for over three thousand years. He said that when the mummy case was photographed, one photographer died suddenly and the other smashed his thumb and his son was badly cut in an accident; even a photographer’s assistant fell while adjusting the camera and cut his face. When a photograph was at length obtained it showed a livid and ominous woman’s face, full of menace and evil. A later owner no sooner had it in his home than every piece of glass in the house shattered.

Fascinating as several of these stories are, there is some doubt as to their authenticity. Archaeologist Margaret Murray was nearly a hundred years old when I talked to her about the haunted mummy case. She told me she had rather a fondness for the old wooden coffin-lid with its beautifully-painted scenes but she always used to refer to its evil reputation when taking her students round the exhibits at the British Museum and invariably some would refuse to enter the room containing the mummy case. Margaret Murray maintained that she originated much of the reputed history of the mummy case during the course of an interview which she did not take seriously. She was astonished to find the story retold as fact in later years but the story, in one form or another, still crops up from time to time. It is a part of haunted London and occasionally, even today, visitors to the Mummy Room at the British Museum maintain that they have odd sensations when they look too long or too hard at the mummy case of Princess Amen-Ra, exhibit 22542, case 35.

In fact, the whole story seems to rest on a series of misunderstandings, as the Keeper of the Department of Egyptian Antiquities told me in December 1972. Mr Douglas Murray and Mr W. T. Stead stated that they had knowledge of an Egyptian mummy that had been brought to England by a lady and placed in her drawing room. Next morning everything that was breakable in the room was found smashed to pieces. When the mummy was moved to another room the same thing happened. The lady’s husband then took the object to the top of the house and locked it in a cupboard. That night sounds of heavy footsteps tramped up and down the stairs all night and forms transported heavy articles from the upper floors to the ground floor; strange lights flickered up and down the stairway, accompanying the forms that shook the staircase with their weight-or power. Next day all the servants resigned in a body.

It was about this time (1889) that Mr A. F. Wheeler presented to the British Museum a very handsome inner cover from a mummy case of a great lady, a Princess of Amen and a member of the College of Amen-Ra at Thebes. This valuable object was accepted by the museum authorities and placed on exhibition in the First Egyptian Room, where it remained until 1920.

Mr Douglas Murray and Mr W. T. Stead studied the coffin lid and felt that the expression on the face of the cover was that of a living soul in torment and they tried to obtain permission to hold a séance in the Egyptian Room with the object of bringing relief to the entity concerned. Their views and opinions were published in many newspapers and readers recalled the mummy that was said to smash crockery and furniture and gradually the coffin lid in the British Museum became associated with the disturbances; a new and curious incident being added with each publication of the story.

Later, the story gained a fresh lease of life with reports that the museum authorities were receiving so many complaints about the dire effects of the coffin lid on show in the Egyptian Room, that it had been moved to the basement. It was claimed that several members of the museum staff had died as a result of handling the coffin lid and that Sir Wallis Budge had been instructed to negotiate the sale of the terrible object to a wealthy American. The cover was said to have been shipped on the Titanic (causing the ship to strike an iceberg) but bribery had saved the lid from being lost. In America calamities and ill-fortune followed in the wake of the coffin lid and it was then sold to a Canadian who took it to Montreal where it continued to cause misfortune for everyone who came in contact with it, until the owner decided to send it back to England on the Empress of Ireland, which sank in the St Lawrence River, taking with it the Egyptian coffin lid.

In 1934, Sir Wallis Budge felt it necessary to announce that the British Museum never possessed mummy, coffin or cover that had any of the reputed attributes. The Trustees never gave any order for the removal of the cover — exhibit 22542 — to the basement, although during air-raids in the First World War, it was moved to a place of safety. The British Museum Trustees have no power to sell any object in their charge, still less has a keeper the right to dispose of anything, whatever the circumstances. Finally Sir Wallis stated categorically, ‘I did not sell the cover to an American. The cover never went on the Titanic. It never went to America. It was not sold to anyone in Canada, and it is still in the First Egyptian Room at the British Museum.’ Later, the coffin lid was moved to the Second Egyptian Room where it still resides, an object of speculation, awe and wonder to many visitors if not to the museum authorities.

Sir Wallis Budge (1857-1934) translated the famous Egyptian Book of the Dead, considered to be of divine origin having been written entirely for the dead by the god Thoth. It is filled with spells and incantations for the preservation of the mummy and for everlasting life. Budge, in private if not in public, certainly believed in Ancient Egyptian magic and the power of their dead. He has been quoted as saying, ‘Never print what I say in my lifetime but the mummy case of Princess Amen-Ra caused the war.’ An enigmatic statement that he refused to enlarge upon. Today, the coffin lid is labelled, ‘Mummy cover from the coffin of an unknown princess from Thebes; XXIst Dynasty. About 1050 BC. Presented by A. F. Wheeler, 1889.’

THE COLISEUM THEATRE, ST MARTIN’S LANE

The Coliseum used to have a soldier ghost that dated from the First World War. The uniformed figure used to walk down the dress circle gangway and turn into the second row, just before the lights were lowered for a performance to begin. The figure was recognized as a soldier who spent his last evening on leave at the theatre and the ghost was first seen on October 3 1918 — the date that the soldier was killed in action.

COVENT GARDEN UNDERGROUND STATION

In November 1955, following reports that the ghost of William Terriss had been seen here, I talked with several of the station staff and learned that peculiar happenings had been experienced in the immediate area of the station for some time. For the previous three years, engineers and gangers working on the line had complained of a ghostly figure in one of the tunnels after the station was cleared at night. There were echoing footsteps, occasional sighs, gasps and loud banging noises, which the workmen, long used to working in isolated conditions underground, had never previously experienced.

I talked with a foreman ticket-collector, Jack Hayden, who had been at the station for nine years. He told me that one night after he had locked all the gates of the station, and was making a final check that the platforms were deserted, he suddenly noticed a tall and distinguished-looking man walking along the west-bound subway and climbing the emergency spiral stairs. Hayden quickly telephoned upstairs and told the booking-office clerk to apprehend the man coming up the stairs. Hayden himself took the lift up and met a puzzled clerk, who said no one had emerged from the stairs. Together the two men searched the spiral stairs from top to bottom and all parts of the station but there was no sign of the mysterious stranger.

A few days later, Hayden was having a meal around midnight in the staff mess-room at the station, which is just below ground level. The last train had gone and Hayden knew that the station was deserted, yet suddenly a door opened and he saw the same tall man standing looking in at him. This time he noticed the old-fashioned cut of the man’s grey suit, his old-style shirt collar and his light-coloured gloves. Thinking that some passenger must have lost his way, Hayden asked the man what he wanted, but instead of answering, the figure moved out of view. Hayden quickly moved through a communicating door that gave him an uninterrupted view of the whole passage where the figure had stood, but there was no sight or sound of the man he had seen.

Covent Garden Underground Station, where the ghost of actor William Terriss has been seen more than a dozen times.

Four days later, at midday, he and Rose Ring, a station worker, were in the mess-room together when they both heard a loud scream and the next moment Victor Locker, a nineteen-year-old porter, burst into the room gasping that he had seen a strange-looking man standing in a corner of the next room and when he had moved towards the figure to ask what he was doing, he had experienced the feeling of something pressing down heavily on to his head and the man had vanished in front of his eyes. Subsequently, Locker added that the man he saw was wearing ‘funny-looking clothes’ and pale gloves. When Jack Hayden described the figure he had twice seen, the porter agreed that it was the same figure that had frightened him. Locker asked for a transfer and left Covent Garden Station shortly afterwards.

Subsequently, Eric Davey, a foreman at Leicester Square Station told me that he was satisfied that there was something strange at Covent Garden Station. He was clairvoyant and had been aware on several occasions of an unseen presence in the mess-room there. Furthermore, he believed that the spirit was trying to give a name sounding something like ‘Terry’. When Hayden was shown a photograph of William Terriss, he immediate1y stated that Terriss was the man he had seen. William Terriss always wore light-coloured gloves.

Over the next ten years the ghost was seen more than a dozen times and when Hayden left the station in 1965 he said the apparition invariably appeared during November and December and always looked exactly the same, and it usually appeared near a wall. He spoke to it several times but it never answered. The last time he saw it, late one November night in 1964, he was walking down the spiral stairway when he encountered the ghost walking up the same stairs. He hurried past the silent figure that did not seem to notice him and almost fell down the last few steps. But the knocks, the footsteps, and the feeling that he might see the figure at any time was all becoming too much of a strain and so he asked for a transfer and left the station. However, the ghost still walked, and inexplicable footsteps have been reported on many occasions, especially on Sundays when the station is closed to the public, and usually the footsteps seem to come from just within the tunnel that runs from Covent Garden to Holborn. The figure of William Terriss (if William Terriss it is) was seen several times by a signalman, a station master, an engineer and other workers in March 1972. Small wonder that some of the station staff at Covent Garden refuse to use the mess-room there.