Haunted London Underground

by David Brandon

  The Northern Line northwards from Stockwell towards Oval is reputedly haunted by a figure looking like an old-fashioned workman. It is believed to be the ghost of a track worker who was killed by a train on this stretch of line sometime in the 1950s.

  TURNHAM GREEN

  The origins of Turnham Green Station lie with the London and South Western Railway. The shenanigans of the politics of London’s early railway promotion and building are extremely complicated but keeping it as simple as possible, the L & SWR came to a mutually helpful agreement with the long-forgotten North & South Western Junction Railway to build a line from the latter’s Addison Road, now Kensington Olympia Station, to Richmond. This line opened for passengers in 1869. In 1874, after an extension had joined Hammersmith to this line near the present Ravenscourt Park, District Line trains bound for Richmond began to serve Turnham Green. In 1879 District Line trains to Ealing Broadway also started calling.

  The station is on a viaduct and located a couple of hundred yards away from Chiswick High Street and it is near Chiswick Park and also Bedford Park. The latter can be described as London’s first garden suburb and was built between 1875 and 1881. Much of Chiswick is chic and for many years it has been a bustling, affluent suburb and a highly desirable address. On the face of it Chiswick would not seem to be very propitious territory for the supernatural. However, less than ten years ago there were a number of sightings of what was described as a ‘semi-transparent’ apparition walking by the side of the four-track section of line close to the station. A number of people saw it on different occasions and said that it was dark grey and wore a knee-length cape. Apparently it vanished if the witness looked away for a second. The only way to gain access to the track at the station would be to walk off the end of the platform, too risky an enterprise for most people but for a ghost – who knows? Can something disembodied be electrocuted? We wait with bated breath for the first ghost to be seen walking the line wearing high-visibility clothing.

  South Kensington Station, where a special steam locomotive was seen.

  Chiswick was actually an ancient Thameside fishing village with a church which was originally founded in the twelfth century; the area has several ghosts. Chiswick House boasts the ghost of the Duchess of Cleveland, one of the many mistresses of Charles II. The King was affectionately known, among other things, as ‘The Merry Monarch’. He was a compulsive philanderer, a fact which gained him another admiring nickname. This was ‘Old Rowley’. The original Old Rowley was an ancient goat, known far and wide for being exceptionally randy, who was familiar to tens of thousands of Londoners because for years he was tethered close to the Palace of Westminster.

  Other Chiswick hauntings include the ghost of a woman murdered in the late eighteenth century in a building which has subsequently been used as a fire station and then a police station. In 1956 a council house in Chiswick hit the headlines because of the poltergeist activity that was apparently taking place there. The Old Burlington pub claims to have been a favoured watering hole of Dick Turpin. The ghost who wears a wide-brimmed black hat and long cloak may have been an associate of Dick Turpin. Chiswick Warehouse, a huge furniture depository, contained a number of exceptionally cold areas with a menacing atmosphere which the employees were always unwilling to tarry in unless they absolutely had to.

  Stockwell on the Northern Line looking towards Oval and the haunted stretch.

  Turnham Green platforms looking westwards.

  Turnham Green looking towards Hammersmith. A ghost in severe danger of electrocution?

  VAUXHALL

  The Victoria Line took a long time coming. Plans had existed for this line as long ago as the 1940s but it only received parliamentary sanction in 1962. Most of the line opened in March 1969 and the extension south to Brixton on which Vauxhall is located opened in 1971. The engineers constructing the line encountered serious problems in the vicinity owing to the waterlogged nature of the soil and had to freeze it before it could be excavated.

  Vauxhall was famous for its pleasure gardens which dated back to the seventeenth century and were revamped in 1785, acting as a model for similar parks in several continental cities. They closed in 1859 by which time they had become shabby and disreputable, although they had once been exclusive and fashionable. In the nineteenth century the district became intensively industrialised and among the businesses was the Vauxhall Ironworks Co., which started building cars in 1903, relocated to Luton in 1905 and then took the name ‘Vauxhall Motors’ in 1907.

  While the line was being built, a mysterious figure described as being 7ft tall, wearing brown overalls and a cloth cap was seen on a number of occasions in the workings. At that height, he was bound to be a bit scary but he never allowed any of the bolder building workers to get too close to him. This ghost became eminent enough to have an article devoted to it in an edition of The People in December 1968. No conclusions were ever reached about who or what he was or what he was doing down there. If he was seen today, doubtless Health and Safety would hound him relentlessly to ensure that he put on a hard hat and high-visibility clothing.

  Vauxhall Station, where a mysterious 7ft-tall figure was seen by workmen during the building of the line in 1968.

  WEST BROMPTON

  This station opened on 12 April 1869. At first it was the terminus of a service of the Metropolitan District Railway from Gloucester Road Station which made use of running powers over the West London Extension Railway. This line was extended to Wimbledon in 1889.

  Now part of the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, some parts of Brompton are extremely fashionable. However, typically of London, not all of Brompton’s inhabitants regard themselves as the up and coming set and there are pockets of poverty and deprivation cheek by jowl with parts where conspicuous consumption is regarded as de rigeur by the well-heeled residents. The urban development of this part of London took place rapidly in the nineteenth century. Before that time the area consisted of fairly marginal agricultural land and containing a lot of market gardens to serve the vast demand provided by London so close by.

  Fans of such things consider Brompton Cemetery to be one of the London’s finest. It opened for business in 1840. It is now closed for additional interments except where old tombs are reopened for new occupants to be laid to rest. About 200,000 people have been buried in this cemetery. The inmates include many winners of the Victoria Cross: Sir Samuel Cunard (1787-1865), who founded the Cunard Steam Packet Co. in 1840; Jonathan Holt (1820-1887), who claimed fame on the basis of being the first Bishop of Rangoon; Percy Lambert (1881-1913), the first man recorded as having driven a car at over 100mph and who was eventually killed at Brooklands, perhaps not unexpectedly, given that he was trying to go even faster; Henry Mears, who died in 1912 and was a builder and the founder of Chelsea Football Club; Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928), the militant suffragette; and Samuel Smiles (1812-1904), the rather smug author of Self-Help which was a compilation of brief biographies of ‘great men’.

  West Brompton from the footbridge looking south towards Wimbledon on the District Line.

  Brompton Cemetery.

  Side elevation and Leslie Green design work in Cottage Place SW3. Brompton Road Station on the Piccadilly Line closed in 1932. This station was always poorly used and was replaced when new exits were built at nearby Knightsbridge Station.

  The curious traveller will find the cemetery adjacent to West Brompton Underground Station. You could almost fall out of one into the other. Perhaps it is this proximity which has something to do with the ghost which has been seen at the station by many people and on many occasions although, apparently, only early in the morning and late at night, times when the station is not at its most frequented. He strides purposefully along the platform, looking for all the world just as you would expect a workman of the late Victorian or Edwardian period to look. However, as soon as the witnesses rub their eyes to make sure of what they are seeing, he vanishes.

  4

  OTHER HAUNTINGS

&nbs
p; BAKERLOO LINE

  In the vicinity of Elephant and Castle and various other Bakerloo Line stations, especially Baker Street, there have many reports from passengers who were sitting and gazing into space only to look up and catch a glimpse of the reflection of another passenger sitting next to them. This would be all well and good except that the passengers making these reports were sitting at the time with unoccupied seats on either side of them. The vast majority of such reports concern trains going northwards.

  The Bakerloo is not unique in producing this strange phenomenon but none of the other lines can compete with it for the number of occasions on which travellers have had this rather disconcerting experience. The nearest rival seems to be the Piccadilly Line near Earl’s Court.

  A variation on this theme is for the reflection to be that of a figure dressed in the clothes of a bygone era. What is to be made of that?

  JUBILEE LINE

  Since the Underground began being built in the nineteenth century, old burial grounds have been disrupted and the bones of the dead disturbed. In more recent times one such disruption has been that of the Cross Bones burial ground at Redcross Way, between London Bridge Station and Borough Station. The burial ground was excavated by archaeologists between 1991 and 1998 as a result of the extension to the Jubilee Line.

  The Cross Bones graveyard lies behind a vacant plot of land enclosed by London Underground boards. Building work in the 1920s led to the exhumation of many bones, as did work in the 1990s for a new substation for the Jubilee Line. The report The Cross Bones Burial Ground (Museum of London Archaeological Service 1999) and excavation was conducted by MoLAS on the medieval burial ground. It provided a final resting place for the poor of St Saviour’s Parish in Southwark. The parish supported several burial grounds including Deadman’s Place (now Park Street) which was originally used for the interment of large numbers of victims of the plague.

  The gates to the Cross Bones burial ground, Redcross Way Southwark.

  Mementos placed on the gates of Cross Bones burial ground.

  A plaque at Cross Bones graveyard noting the reference to the ‘Winchester Geese’ – prostitutes who lived and worked from houses owned by the Bishop of Winchester.

  Notice on the gates of Cross Bones graveyard requesting respect for the thousands of dead buried there.

  The area around Southwark and Bankside was well know for its ‘stews’ or brothels and London historian John Stow (1525-1605) wrote in 1603 that the graveyard was used for ‘single women’ – prostitutes referred to at the time as ‘Winchester Geese’ because they lived in and operated from dwellings owned by the Bishop of Winchester. Many graveyards became prey to the activities of the resurrection men – body snatchers – and Cross Bones was no exception. These men would steal freshly buried bodies and sell them to surgeons who sought specimens for their anatomy classes at nearby Guy’s Hospital. By the nineteenth century the area was overcrowded and disease infested as well as a popular haunt for criminals. Not surprisingly many paupers were interred in the burial ground. It was closed in 1853 because it was not only overcrowded but also a threat to public health.

  Archaeologists from MoLAS eventually removed 148 skeletons – only a small fraction (less than 1 per cent) of those buried at this site. The bodies were piled on top of each other with most buried in cheap coffins in the ill kept and unconsecrated burial ground.

  As more sites are disturbed increased sightings of ghosts are reported, particularly accounts of phantom monks walking the tracks have begun to emerge. However, attempts are made to respect the remains of the dead in such burial sites. For example Southwark Council were refused planning permission in 2002 for three office blocks to be erected on the graveyard and future plans hope that an area will be reserved to serve as a Cross Bones memorial park.

  Another excavation was the Cistercian monastery of St Mary Stratford Langthorne which once stood on land south of the new Jubilee Line station at Stratford. The site of the old abbey, which was all but destroyed in the dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1540, now lies under the Jubilee Line. 647 burials were found in the cemetery. The Black Death struck the abbey in the fourteenth century. Excavations between 1973 and 1994 recorded large parts of the cemetery as well as the monastic church. The skeletons found were in shallow graves and, prior to the building of the Jubilee Line, a number of Cistercian monks from Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands removed some of the bones for reburial at the Sutton Coldfield Abbey.

  5

  CLOSED RAILWAY STATIONS

  The mainline railway network of Greater London is one of extraordinary complexity. Compared to the system in the provinces, London’s railways have escaped relatively unscathed from the welter of line and station closures which began in the First World War, continued intermittently through the 1950s and then surged in the 1960s and 1970s, only to become thankfully much more intermittent since that time.

  There is something poignant about stations on which the lights have gone out for ever, about track formations whose rails have been uprooted but where the impressions of the sleepers can still be seen, about railway viaducts that no longer carry trains, long-forgotten goods depots or even about rusted rails stretching into the distance through luxuriously rampant vegetation, never to witness the passing of another train.

  It is easy for us to imagine that the men and women who worked in these places, the passengers that went to and fro and perhaps even the trains themselves return in spectral form to the places with which they were once so familiar.

  There are a myriad of such sites in London. Those with a liking for ghosts, railways and industrial archaeology could make intelligent use of maps and reference books and find many places that would reward exploration. A few suggestions might include the Seven Sisters to Palace Gates branch of the Great Eastern Railway, the branch from Nunhead to Greenwich Park, traces of the London, Chatham and Dover Line from Nunhead to Crystal Palace High Level, the mothballed line between Epping and Ongar or the London & North Western Railway’s branch line from Harrow & Wealdstone to Stanmore Village. We can be sure that these and many similar places have their ghosts!

  CRYSTAL PALACE

  The district around Crystal Palace is deep in that enclave of south London that has never been served by the London Underground system. It did, however, have an underground railway of sorts and a particularly interesting one. There have been reported sightings of ghosts associated with this railway.

  Crystal Palace pneumatic railway in 1864.

  The Great Exhibition was held in Hyde Park in London in 1851. It was an international trade fair set up by the British for two main reasons. Firstly, it was a showcase for the products of British manufacturing industry which was then rightly thought of as being the ‘Workshop of the World’. It was hoped that it would boost Britain’s already burgeoning export trade. Secondly, and rather naively, it was hoped that bringing the nations of the world together as trading partners in a spirit of mutual amity might reduce the possibilities of future wars. The Great Exhibition was considered an enormous success at the time and unexpectedly huge numbers of visitors flocked from all parts of Britain and many overseas places to enjoy the spectacle.

  The exhibition was housed in a striking and highly innovative prefabricated building made largely of glass and iron and inspirationally nicknamed ‘The Crystal Palace’. Londoners and others took the Crystal Palace to their hearts and wanted it to stay in Hyde Park as a permanent fixture. However, this was impossible under the terms governing the staging of the exhibition and it was quickly dismantled. The pieces were stored but eventually a consortium of what would now be called ‘venture capitalists’ re-erected an enlarged version of the building at Sydenham Hill to be an exhibition hall, the centrepiece of an amusement and entertainment complex. The district round about quickly came to be known as ‘Crystal Palace’.

  It proved to be a great attraction for several decades. In 1864, about ten years after the relocation of the Crystal Palace, an exp
erimental demonstration ‘pneumatic’ railway was built in the grounds. This was a development of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s unsuccessful atmospheric railway in south Devon. A pas-senger carriage ran on a broad gauge track for a distance of 600yds through a tunnel, quickly and silently. A return fare, expensive at 6d a time, proved no deterrent to those who wanted to sample this novel form of propulsion. The success of this small-scale operation encouraged a company to propose what would have been London’s first tube railway. It would have run from Whitehall to Waterloo and work even began on the building of the tube tunnel but was abandoned because of the financial crisis of 1866. The stub of this tunnel is apparently still in situ.

  In due course the ‘pneumatic’ railway closed but before long a myth developed that the carriage remained within the bricked-up tunnel and contained a grisly cargo of skeletal forgotten passengers. These physical human remains may have been unable to do anything about their predicament but their accompanying spirits were apparently highly indignant about being immured in this way and were waiting to exact revenge from the living.

  Traces of this tunnel could be seen for many years and in the early 1990s an edition of the New Civil Engineer carried an article with photographs taken many years earlier inside the tunnel. No abandoned carriage containing equally abandoned skeletons was to be seen and if there were ghosts, they had kept themselves to themselves. According to the article, no trace of the tunnel survived. This has not prevented occasional reports of spectres in the vicinity. The site of the Crystal Palace is, after all, a place of ghostly memories.