Haunted London

by Peter Underwood

  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.

  That October night he was at supper in the sitting room with his wife and their eldest child, a boy of seven. His wife’s sister was also present. The doors of the room were shut fast as the night was cold, and heavy, dark curtains were drawn across the two closed windows.

  Swifte was on the point of offering his wife a glass of wine when she suddenly exclaimed, ‘Good God! What is that?’ pointing above her husband’s head. He looked up and saw a cylindrical object, like a glass tube and about the thickness of his arm, hovering between the ceiling and the table. It appeared to contain a dense fluid, white and pale blue, and the two incessantly mixed and separated within the cylinder. Swifte and his wife watched the curious object for perhaps two minutes, and then it began to move slowly round the table, following an oblong path and passing in front of Swifte’s sister-in-law, his son and himself but pausing behind Mrs Swifte, near her right shoulder. Suddenly Mrs Swifte crouched down, covered her shoulder with both her hands and shrieked, ‘Oh Christ! It has seized me.’ Swifte quickly picked up his chair and struck out with it, whereupon the figure seems to have vanished. It later transpired that neither Swifte’s sister-in-law nor the little boy had seen anything unusual. Mr Swifte, in common with many people who have apparently paranormal experiences, had to face considerable scepticism from friends and other people but he adhered steadily to the belief that the phenomenon was supernormal in origin and related an identical account of the experience forty-three years later; a factual, unembroidered and convincing account that has puzzled investigators of psychic phenomena ever since.

  Martin Tower, which is not open to the public, was for a time the ‘doleful’ prison of Anne Boleyn and she slept in the little upper room where her ghost has been seen on occasions, seated in a dark comer. It is a sad and silent ghost that appears and disappears for a few moments at a time, quite unexpectedly and usually on autumn evenings.

  Sir Walter Raleigh too was lodged in the Martin Tower (then known as the Brick Tower) during one of his three imprisonments in the Tower of London. After falling into disgrace with Queen Elizabeth I following his intrigue with beautiful Elizabeth Throgmorton, one of the queen’s ‘maids of honour’, both Raleigh and Elizabeth were sent to the Tower in 1592. After eight weeks Raleigh and his lady were released and they were married shortly afterwards. With King James I, Raleigh again found himself unpopular and after being summarily dismissed from Durham House in the Strand, where he had long lived, he was sent to the Tower in 1604, charged with treason, and lodged in Beauchamp Tower. There, in a frenzy of despair he attempted to stab himself to the heart but was unsuccessful. However, ghostly gasps, perhaps those of Raleigh thinking that he was near death, have been heard in certain apartments of Beauchamp Tower, while in the area where a passage formerly led to the Bell Tower an unidentified male figure in Elizabethan costume was seen one afternoon by a Tower guide. The
passage was used as a promenade for prisoners.

  Raleigh was tried at Winchester and convicted but the death sentence was commuted and he was returned to the Tower and imprisoned in the Bloody Tower where George, Duke of Clarence is supposed to have been drowned in a butt of malmsey wine in 1478 in the dark and windowless room in which one of the portcullises was worked. In an adjacent chamber the two little princes are said to have been smothered to death in 1483. These deeds may have given the tower its name, unless the name derives from the fact that the mortar used in the building was tempered with the blood of beasts.

  Raleigh is thought to have been lodged in a cell ten feet by eight feet, in the thickness of the wall of the Bloody Tower, but his wife and son were allowed to live with him there from 1603 to 1615 and their second son, Carew, was born in the Tower in 1605. During this imprisonment of nearly thirteen years Raleigh frequently dined with the Lieutenants of the Tower and he was given the freedom of the garden. His principal walk was on the ramparts between the Bloody Tower and the timber-built Lieutenant’s Lodgings (now the Queen’s House) where he would show himself and converse with people passing by—a path still known as Raleigh’s Walk and haunted by his ghost on moonlit nights.

  The Queen’s House where, in the Council Chamber, the Commissioners ‘examined’ Guido Fawkes and his accomplices, is said to be haunted by inexplicable groans and the eerie screech and grind of instruments of torture that were used there long ago. The room with wall paintings depicting men inflicting and suffering torture has also long been reputed to be haunted but I have no precise details.

  After his release Raleigh made one more sea voyage of exploration and on his return he was arrested at Plymouth and once more confined in the Tower. He spent his last night in Westminster Hall and was executed in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, on October 29, 1618, so it would seem that the ghost of the great courtier, soldier, explorer and author walks where he lived and not where he died.

  ‘I have a long journey before me,’ he said as he mounted the scaffold and gently touched the axe, adding, ‘this is a sharp medicine but it will cure all ills.’ Even the headsman shrank from beheading so illustrious and brave a man, until Raleigh made his last remark, ‘What dost thou fear? Strike, man!’ After his head was shown to the crowds it was placed in a red leather bag and conveyed in a mourning coach to his wife. His body was interred in the chancel of St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, but his head was long preserved in a case by his widow who survived him for twenty-nine years, and after her death by his son Carew with whom it is said to have been buried at West Horsley in Surrey.

  Raymond LuIly, the alchemist, is reputed to have taken up residence at the Tower in the reign of Edward I, although Lully’s biographers express doubt that he ever visited England. It is said, however, that he performed in the royal presence the experiment of transmuting some crystal into a mass of diamond or adamant and the king is said to have made little pillars of the transmuted precious stone. It is not impossible that an atmosphere of occult power exists, or once existed, in parts of the Tower for in the circular and vaulted dungeon of the Salt Tower (nearly as old as the White Tower and once known as Julius Caesar’s Tower) there are a number of strange devices and inscriptions cut in the wall, including a circle with the signs of the zodiac for casting horoscopes. This was apparently drawn by Hew Draper, a wealthy tavern keeper in Bristol, who was committed to the Tower on an accusation of witchcraft against Sir William St Lowe and his lady, better known as Bess of Hardwick.. Draper ‘so misliked his science’ that he burned all his books but a distinct and disquieting atmosphere still lingers within these ancient walls.

  West of the Salt Tower the thirteen-foot-thick walls of the Wakefield Tower harbour the ghost of King Henry VI, stabbed to death as he knelt at prayer. His wan form has been seen outside the chamber where the murder took place. Nearby hang portraits of past Keepers of the Record Room, some of whom reported seeing the ghost.

  Tower of London. The Queen’s House, where the ghost of Anne Boleyn walks, her heels clicking sharply on the hard ground.

  A menagerie of wild beasts was kept at the Tower from a very early date, the last animals being removed to the Zoological Gardens in Regents Park in 1834. King Henry I kept lions and leopards and Henry III added to these. Edward III took much pride in the collection and successive monarchs attended combats of the wild beasts, including bear baiting. Perhaps a remnant of these cruel times survives in the form of a ghost bear that has been encountered within the Tower precincts from time to time.

  One report states that a sentry saw the figure of a huge bear near a door in the Martin Tower. Marshalling his courage, the soldier promptly thrust at the enormous form with his bayonet, but the blade went clean through the phantom creature and struck the door. As the hairy form began to advance towards him, the sentry fainted. Another guard, hearing the sound of the bayonet against the door, hurried across and found the senseless body of his companion but of the mysterious bear there was no sign. The unfortunate man revived to some extent in the main guardroom, but his nerves were completely shattered and he died two days later. Over and over again he repeated the story of his terrible ordeal. A doctor verified that he was not under the influence of drink and only minutes before his experience, a fellow-guardsman had passed the sentry and exchanged a few words with him, so he was certainly not asleep. And for two days the bayonet remained embedded in the stout oaken door.

  Most of the English kings from William the Conqueror to Charles II used the Tower as a palace. Henry VIII often held court there and, in great pomp, he received all his wives before the weddings. Two of them returned to the Tower to die on Tower Green, Anne Boleyn in 1536 and Catherine Howard in 1542.

  There were two places of execution: Tower Hill (under the authority of the government of the city) and Tower Green, within the Tower walls. Today Tower Green is a spot of poignant and hallowed memory. The place of execution was marked off and railed by command of Queen Victoria. Those who were ‘untopped’ (as Anne Boleyn’s daughter put it) included Lord Hastings in 1483; Jane, Countess Rochford (sister-in-law of Anne Boleyn) in 1542; Lady Jane Grey in 1554; Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex in 1601; and Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, daughter of the Duke of Clarence, in 1541. It is the ghost of the latter that sometimes reappears in a spectacular way on the anniversary of her execution.

  The Countess of Salisbury, beheaded on the orders of Henry VIII, was a reluctant victim. On the morning of the execution she was forcibly carried to the scaffold, screaming and fighting in a frenzy to escape and the fearful scene of the execution itself is said to be re-enacted in all its harrowing detail each anniversary. Then, according to reports, her ghost is seen, screaming with terror, running panic-stricken round and round the spot where the scaffold once stood, pursued by a ghostly masked executioner, heavy axe in hand, who finally overtakes the terrified woman and ‘chuckling diabolically’ slowly hacks off her head with repeated dreadful blows.

  Lady Jane Grey entered the Tower as Queen of England but less than three weeks later she became a prisoner together with her young husband, and she saw his headless body carried past her on the morning that she knew she too must die—is it unlikely then that her ghost returns to this storehouse of memories? Her ghost was last seen as recently as 1957, on February 12 to be exact, the 403rd anniversary of her execution.

  Guardsman Johns, a young Welshman on duty at the Tower stamped his feet that cold and wintry morning as a nearby clock chimed the hour of three. Suddenly a rattling noise alerted his attention and as he looked up towards the battlements of the Salt Tower, forty feet above him, he saw silhouetted against the dark sky, a ‘white shapeless form’ that moulded itself into the likeness of Lady Jane Grey. As the startled soldier shouted for assistance, another guardsman saw ‘a strange white apparition’ at the same spot, a hundred yards or so from the red-brick, seventeenth century Gentleman Jailer’s House which stands on the site of a previous structure where Lady Jane Grey was imprisoned an
d where.she saw her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley, go to his execution. ‘The ghost stood between the battlements,’ Guardsman Johns said afterwards. ‘At first I thought I was seeing things, but when I told the other guard and pointed, the figure appeared again.’ An officer of the regiment stated, ‘Guardsman Johns is convinced that he saw a ghost. Speaking for the regiment our attitude is “All right, so you say you have seen a ghost. Let’s leave it at that”.’

  Another guardsman on duty at the Tower saw a ghost in February, 1933. He said afterwards that he saw the white form of a headless woman near the Bloody Tower. The figure seemed to float towards him and then simply disappeared. Years afterwards, a Guards officer (who happened at the time to be training for the British Olympic Games) became aware, as he approached the Bloody Tower archway in Water Lane, that he was encountering a ‘most queer and utterly distasteful atmosphere’. He saw nothing but was overcome with terror. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end and he could think of nothing except how to get away from the place as quickly as possible. Next moment (it seemed) he found himself on the steps of the officers’ mess, three hundred yards away, bathed in perspiration and panting heavily. Yet he could recall nothing of his frantic sprint (probably in record time!), only the agony and terror of that moment near the Bloody Tower, which he had previously passed scores of times without any ill effects.