Haunted London (3 page)

Miss Elizabeth Parsons subsequently married twice and died at Chiswick in 1806. In 1845 the coffin of ‘Scratching Fanny’ is said to have been opened and it was found that there was no discolouration or mouldering of the body, which could suggest that arsenic had in fact been the cause of death. In 1893, when three hundred and twenty-five coffins were removed from the crypt of St John’s, Clerkenwell, it was reported that one coffin was found to be stained with arsenic, but the coffin was not identified since it had no plate. In 1941, the church was reduced to a ruin by German bombs, and when the vaults were cleared there was no sign of Fanny’s coffin. Now the whole truth about the Cock Lane affair will never be known.

THE CONNAUGHT ARMS, E16

Hard by the dock gates in Connaught Road, E16, The Connaught Arms has the ghost of a mad woman who committed suicide. Her room could never be slept in and no matter how many times the room was tidied and put to rights, next day everything was thrown about the room just as it must have been during the woman’s last days. Once, a member of the staff went into the room and found it in chaos, and as he came out of the room he saw, facing him, a strange old woman with a wild look in her eyes. He had two dog with him and all three scampered down the stairs together as fast as they could to get away from the apparition!

GREYFRIARS CHURCHYARD

A quiet haunted spot in the City, one of those welcome patches of peaceful green among the multitude of buildings, is to be found in Newgate Street, by the ruined Christ Church: Greyfriars Churchyard. Christ Church was founded by the Grey Friars, formed by St Francis in Italy in 1209, who were known by three names. They were called Franciscans after their founder, Grey Friars from their clothing and Minor Friars because of their humility. Nine of the friars landed at Dover in 1223; five of them settled at Canterbury and the other four established themselves in London in 1228 and founded the great house of Grey Friars with its chapter house, dormitory, refectory, infirmary and church. The area came to be known as Greyfriars and afterwards as Christ Church or Christ’s Hospital — famous for its Bluecoat Boys. The church received rich patronage from Queen Margaret, second wife of King Edward I, and from Isabella, wife of Edward II, and Queen Philippa, consort of Edward III. John of Brittany, Earl of Richmond, gave jewels; Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, great trees from his forests; Dick Whittington, a library. Two hundred years ago, a writer (Thomas Pennant) stated: ‘No order of monks seems to have had the powers of persuasion equal to these poor friars... and there are few of their admirers, when they came to die, who did not console themselves with the thoughts of lying within these expiating walls; and if they were particularly wicked, thought themselves secure against the assaults of the devil, providing their corpse was wrapped in the habit and cowl of a friar.’

Greyfriars Churchyard, Newgate Street, harbours the ghosts of Isabella, the ‘she-wolf of France’ and the restless Elizabeth Barton, the ‘Holy Maid of Kent’.

Such a one was Isabella, daughter of Philip IV of France and wife of Edward II. When Edward neglected her for his favourite, Piers Gaveston, she returned to France and there collected an army, led by her lover, Roger Mortimer, and other barons.

Returning to England in 1326, she attacked and defeated the king, who was deposed, imprisoned and murdered. She and Mortimer ruled for a time, but in 1330, Edward III had Mortimer hanged and Isabella spent the rest of her life in retirement. The ‘she-wolf of France’ was buried in Greyfriars Churchyard, and, with audacious hypocrisy, had the heart of her murdered husband placed on her breast.

She is just one of the ghosts that haunt this historic spot, the burial place of three other queens and over six hundred people of nobility. Here also was buried Elizabeth Barton, the crazy ‘Holy Maid of Kent’, executed at Tyburn in 1534 for high treason. She hysterically and unsuccessfully opposed Henry VIII’s intention to divorce Catherine of Aragon, and inaccurately predicted that he would die within a few months if his marriage to Anne Boleyn took place. Her figure, wild and restless in the restricting habit of the Grey Friars, is said to be seen from time to time about the deserted churchyard.

When the Franciscan Friars first came to England they wore russet-brown habits with a cowl, girded with cords and walked barefoot; later they reverted to the original grey dress of their founder. In the early hours of misty autumn mornings the form of a monk has been seen, walking placidly about the Greyfriars Churchyard, dressed in russet-brown; a figure that disappears when the sun is fully risen or when human beings approach too closely.

Yet another ghost at Greyfriars is that of Lady Alice Hungerford who poisoned her husband. It is recorded that she was led from the Tower to Holborn and there ‘put into a cart with one of her -servants, and thence to Tyburn’ and execution. Her form has been recognized because of her great beauty and natural dignity. She walked one summer evening, haughty and arrogant, and so frightened a night watchman who recognized her that he fled in terror and gave up his job next day. He had seen enough of the ghosts of Greyfriars Churchyard and he saw only one.

THE NAG’S HEAD, HACKNEY

The Nag’s Head, Hackney, was probably known to Jack the Ripper and it has certainly witnessed murder and suicide; at one time it had the dubious reputation of being the eeriest pub in London. Landlord Terry Hollingsworth, an ex-commando and amateur boxer, was sceptical of the haunting until he found taps turning on by themselves, furniture falling to pieces beneath him and other strange but inconclusive manifestations.

The ghost was finally seen by the barman, Tom Foord, when he went to the cellar one morning to fetch some crates. ‘She was a very old woman,’ he said, ‘with a grey shawl and a long, Victorian-like dress.’ Following a number of séances things seemed quieter, and the shawled woman has not been seen recently.

ODESSA ROAD, FOREST GATE

The occupants of Number III, Odessa Road, Forest Gate, saw no ghost at their house but said they ‘lived in terror for twelve years’. I was consulted in February 1969, and learned that Robert Chilvers and his second wife, Doris, were almost at the end of their tether. The retired railwayman, then aged sixty-seven, had moved to the house in 1946 with his first wife Maude, who had died ten years later. Three weeks after they married in 1957 Doris Chilvers was quietly listening to the radio when suddenly there was a loud bang and blue flames flashed up around the set. When they heard similar banging noises, which they were at a total loss to explain, and saw more frightening blue flashes near the television set, they promptly got rid of both the radio and television, but still, they told me, ‘It seemed the house was haunted.’ ‘Once our cat, Blackie, asleep on a chair, was suddenly whisked across the room in front of my eyes,’ said Doris. ‘It was as if some unseen hands had picked up the animal and taken it across the room.’ The cat, it seems, was terrified and ran out of the house. (Perhaps it had received an electric shock, I thought to myself!) Sometimes Doris felt something invisible push violently against her and she has found bruises where she has been ‘touched by unseen hands’.

Robert Chilvers thought that the disturbances, strange and eerie noises that echoed through the house at night, might be connected in some way with his first wife. He showed me holy pictures that he had found covered with scratches after a night of unrest.

Cats are very fond of sharpening their claws and although Robert and Doris thought that the blue flashes might be warnings, I suggested that they get the Electricity Board to carry out a thorough investigation. I heard no more about strange blue flashes and mysterious banging noises at Odessa Road.

OLD NEWGATE PRISON

Several ghosts were reported to haunt Newgate. One prison officer stated in a prison report in December 1891, that he was working late in his office situated near Dead Man’s Walk when he heard limping footsteps from the direction of the Walk. As he listened they became louder and clearer. At first the officer thought it must be the chief warder making his rounds, but the chief’s step was firm and military, whereas these footsteps were stealthy, uneven, occasionally with a drag to them: the shuffle of a limping man. The prison officer opened the grille in the doors that led to Dead Man’s Walk and was horrified to see, pressed close to the other side of the grille, the dead-white face of a man. As it swayed back from the grille the officer saw bruised skin around the mottled green throat, and his immediate thought was that the man had been hanged. As the face disappeared the officer opened the gate, but outside there was no trace of anyone or anything. Subsequently, this officer and others heard limping footsteps, but they were never able to discover any cause for the noises, which invariably ceased as soon as they set out to investigate. Sometime afterwards, the officer who had seen the face learned that the last man to be buried in Dead Man’s Walk was lame.

Another reported ghost at Newgate was that of the evil Mrs Dyer who was seen by one chief warder in what had been called the women felons’ yard. She was the notorious Reading baby farmer who was executed on 10 June 1896, for the murder of a number of babies whom she was paid to adopt. The babies were strangled and thrown into the Thames at Caversham, whilst she continued to draw the money for their keep. The oily and horrible old woman had actually smiled at her trial as witness after witness related stories of the most appalling cruelty. As she passed the chief warder on her way to the execution shed she had turned and looked into his face and said quietly, ‘I’ll meet you again one day, sir.’

During his last week at Newgate, before the old prison was closed, the chief warder happened to be in the vicinity of the women’s yard when he thought he heard a movement out in the darkness. He looked through a glass observation window and, although the yard seemed to be deserted, the last words of Mrs Dyer suddenly came into his mind: ‘I’ll meet you again one day, sir.’ The next moment he saw a form loom up out of the blackness, and he recognized the dark, glittering eyes and the thin, merciless lips of old Mrs Dyer. Subjective hallucination perhaps? It might have been had not other warders and visitors reported fluttering footsteps and the dark form of an old woman in the women’s yard at dead of night at a time when there were no women convicts in the prison, female prisoners having been lodged in Pentonville for some years by that time.

I recall too Thurston Hopkins, a Sussex man and friend of Rudyard Kipling, who studied ghosts, telling me about something in the chapel, deep in the heart of Newgate. Hopkins often visited the prison and explored the massive buildings with their dark stone corridors, frightening galleries and deep dungeons. The gloomy chapel was reached by a flight of stone steps and footsteps echoed eerily as one walked down them; even the chapel floor seemed impregnated with evil. One night a prison chaplain was alone in the chapel when suddenly the black curtains of the condemned pew swished back to reveal the outline of a man in a black coat with powdered hair, his skull-like face gaunt and vivid in the dim light. Weeks later, Hopkins told me, the chaplain saw a portrait of Henry Fauntleroy, a banker and forger who had been executed at Newgate in 1824, and immediately the priest recognized the singular features he had seen in the chapel.

St Andrews-by-the-Wardrobe, Queen Victoria Street, has a haunted bell that used to toll of its own accord whenever a rector died.

ST ANDREW-BY-THE-WARDROBE, CITY

St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe in Queen Victoria Street has, or had, a haunted bell. The name of the church is derived from the king’s wardrobe (i.e. storehouse), which stood close by until the Great Fire and is commemorated by Wardrobe Place entered from Carter Lane. It was here that the Master of the Wardrobe kept ‘the ancient clothes of our English Kings,’ says Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), ‘which they wore on great festivals; so that this Wardrobe was in effect a Library for Antiquaries, therein to read the mode and fashions of garments in all ages.’ In 1604, William Shakespeare purchased some scarlet cloth for a tunic to attend the state entry of King James I into London. After the destruction of the Wardrobe in the Great Fire, and the death of the then Master, the office was abolished, and the houses on the west side of the quiet little court probably date from the early eighteenth century. On the south side of Number I Wardrobe Place there is a stone shield on a rounded base and tapering stem, resembling an ancient battle-axe; the origin and history of this curiosity is unknown. In the tower of St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe (rebuilt by Wren in 1692) stood the bell named Gabriel that was cast at Worcester some five hundred years ago, and a bell that was removed from the doomed belfry of Avenbury church in Herefordshire in 1937. Generations of Avenbury people held the belief that whenever a parson of Avenbury died, the bell would toll of its own accord, and several witnesses say that this happened when the last two vicars of the town died.