In his book, London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of the World’s Most Vibrant City, Steve Roud identifies the legends surrounding the Georgian house at 50 Berkeley Square as offering a scenario that ‘fits perfectly with how folklore works’.
The property had stood vacant and uncared for in the 1850’s and 1860’s, an affront to the elegance of the Square. It began to be talked about in society drawing rooms. In the early 1870’s there was correspondence about it in the journal, ‘Notes and Queries’. Lord Lyttelton wrote: ‘There are strange stories about it [the house], into which this deponent can’t enter.’ In December 1880 a letter was published in the journal recounting a story told to the correspondent by a ‘Mrs---’, who had heard it from a ‘Miss H---’. It told of a certain room in the upper reaches of number 50, which was being prepared for a guest by a maid working late. At the stroke of midnight, a piercing scream was heard from the room. Members of the household rushed upstairs to find the maid having convulsions at the foot of the stairs, and staring fixedly at a certain corner of the ceiling. She was taken to St George’s Hospital, where she died the next day.
The house guest then turned up and, hearing the story, he – as readers will already have guessed – ‘voted it all nonsense’. He insisted on sleeping in the room, and would ring on the servants’ bell if anything untoward occurred at midnight. ‘But,’ he added, ‘on no account come to me when I ring first; because I may be unnecessarily alarmed and seize the bell on the impulse of the moment. Wait until you hear a second ring.’
At midnight a single ring was heard from the room, which after a moment of silence became a cacophonous peal of bells. The householders hurried up to the room, where they found the guest lying in the same attitude as the maid. He survived his ordeal but would never speak of what he had seen.
Some correspondents pointed out that this account was suspiciously similar to a ghost story by Rhoda Broughton entitled ‘The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth’, which was first published in 1868, and reappeared in a collection of 1872 called Tales for Christmas Eve. That story concerns ‘32 ---Street Mayfair’. The maid exclaims ‘Oh my God, I have seen it!’, an utterance that would recur in many of the purportedly true stories about the house. When it comes to the turn of the bold young man, he goes ‘jumping up the stairs three steps at a time, and humming a tune’. But in this version it is he who is killed by the manifestation.
People continued to give their accounts of the house – or to make them up. Number 50 became a peg to hang a London ghost story on. There is the story of a room kept locked by the eccentric absentee landlord: every so often he would perplex the servants by turning up and locking them in the cellar while he spent a few hours in the room. And then there were the two sailors who broke into the house one night, and dossed down in one of the upper rooms. They saw a horrible shape moving stealthily about. One fled into the street just in time to see his companion leap screaming into the Square from the top storey.
Today, 50 Berkeley Square is the plush, tranquil home of Maggs Brothers, the antiquarian booksellers. I rang the bell and was admitted to the office. ‘Did you know this house had a reputation for being haunted?’ I asked one impeccably dressed young man. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. He walked over to a cabinet from which he produced a photocopy of the relevant chapter from ‘London Lore’, saying, ‘You can take this away with you if you like, sir.’ I don’t believe I’ve ever been given the brush-off in a politer way. Before leaving, I asked, ‘I don’t suppose anyone who works here has…you know…seen anything?’ The man shook his head and smiled, and told me which button to press to open the front door and exit the building.
GHOST TRAINS
A good railway journey ought to lull the passenger into a dream state: the hypnotic motion, the flickering images beyond the window, the closed, unknowable faces of the other passengers. When my train from the North East approaches King’s Cross, and glides through the soft gloom of those tunnels in which bells, like abandoned telephones, ring in relay for some mysterious operational purpose, I sometimes feel as though I am being roused from a long reverie.
The ghostliness of our railways has of course declined since the end of steam. British literary atmosphere in the classic era came from real fires, and steam locomotives were essentially real fires on the move, carrying with them their own mystery and metaphor in the form of the cloud of steam. The grimy diesel-hauled carriages of my own boyhood still had some possibilities. There were dimmer switches above the seats, for instance, so that passengers might set the atmosphere to their liking. But the modern network is over-rationalised. You can’t get off a train without being warned that the ‘platform surfaces’ might be slippery; and all trains must be painted yellow at the front, so you can see them coming from a long way off. This is very unghostly, since the stealthiness of trains was part of their deadly glamour. In nineteenth century fiction trains were very often the instruments of death. In Dombey and Son (1846) by Charles Dickens, the villain, Carker, is run over by a train: a ‘red-eyed monstrous express’. It ‘licked up his stream of life with its fiery heat.’ In The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope (1876) the villain, Lopez, is ‘knocked to bloody atoms’ by a shrieking Scottish express going at ‘a thousand miles an hour’.
The worst decade for railway accidents was the 1860’s, when train numbers and speeds were outstripping safety provision. The worst of the decade occurred at Abergele in Wales, where runaway paraffin wagons – vehicles obviously emanating directly from some signalman’s nightmare – collided with the Irish mail train from Euston. Thirty-three people were instantly immolated. Charles Dickens himself had always been wary of trains, and it is as though he brewed up a smash out of his own tremendous imagination. In 1865, he was riding on an express from Folkestone to London that was derailed on a bridge at Staplehurst in Kent. Ten passengers were killed; Dickens’s health and nerves were permanently undermined, and on subsequent train journeys he always clutched the armrests of the seat, feeling the carriage was ‘down’ on the right hand side. Shortly after the accident he wrote one of the earliest, and best, railway ghost stories, ‘The Signalman’.
This sallow, neurotic functionary is practically in his tomb when the story begins, inhabiting as he does a signal box sunk in a dank cutting, where he is fixated on the adjacent tunnel mouth, and a glimmering red signal light. The narrator observes, ‘So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.’ The signalman is tormented by a precognitive vision of a railway accident, and in an essay called ‘Blood on the Tracks: Sensation Drama, Railways and the Dark Face of Modernity’, Nicholas Daly sets the story in the context of Victorian railway accidents. Daly discovers in the popular perception of them something ‘qualitatively different…they occur in “machine time”, not human time. Human agency cannot usually move rapidly enough to intervene, and there are few rescues. In fact, such incidents are often too quick for the eye, and perception takes place after the event: if you see it, you are still alive.’ It is this dimension that Dickens captures. The signalman sees the accident happen before it takes place. Here, as in the connection between spiritualism and radio, ghostliness is drawn from modernity rather than medieval demonology; or rather, the two are combined.
In the case of several nineteenth- or early twentieth-century railway accidents, the agency of a novelist is not in fact required. Straightforwardly factual accounts of the accidents read like ghost stories.
The Fall of the Tay Bridge
This occurred at the very ghostly time and on the very ghostly date of 7pm on Sunday December 28th, 1879. Naturally, a thunderstorm was raging. The Tay Bridge, which had been completed the year before, was the longest bridge in the world. It was latticed, like an infinitely prolonged and meandering seaside pier, and was frightening like a pier: both massive and whimsical, so that you wouldn’t want to stand on the top and l
ook down through the boards at the churning waters beneath. The doomed train was heading north to Dundee. At St Fort, at the south end of the bridge, all the seventy-five passengers’ tickets were collected. This was a purely practical consideration: it was easier to collect the tickets while the passengers were still aboard the train than at Dundee, when they would all be disembarking. But it is hard to resist imagining some precognitive element here as well. The tickets, revealing place and approximate time of purchase would be used in the identification of the dead. (Some railway official would later make a collage of them all, and a reproduction of it appears on the first page of Railway Ghosts, edited by J.A. Brooks (1985). The tickets are arranged in a diamond shape, with photographs of four of the deceased placed in the four corners of the sheet of paper. It looks like the work of a disturbed seven year-old.)
As the train approached the bridge, the signalman at the southern end, Mr Barclay, had to give the driver of the engine a token – a pass giving him the right to traverse the single line. Such was the strength of the wind flying off the Firth that Mr Barclay had to approach the engine on all fours, and he retreated to his signal box in the same way. I imagine Mr Barclay, and his colleague Mr John Watt, standing in the box and looking into the brightly lit compartments as the train made its way onto the bridge. Picture the illuminated tableaux as they succeed one another: a single man reading in one compartment; a couple talking animatedly in another; a family disporting themselves variously in the third. I then imagine Mr Barclay and Mr Watt moving to a different window in the signal box, in order to watch the tail lights of the train as it progressed along the bridge.
They reported that a gust of wind shook the signal box; it was accompanied by a flash of dazzling light from the bridge…after which the tail lights of the train had gone. A sailor had been watching the train from a ship moored in the Firth. That same blast of wind had made him look away momentarily, and when he looked again there was no train and a gap in the bridge. Now if that blast of wind had been a literary device, it would have been a brilliant one. The same tasteful indirectness is evident elsewhere. A man called Maxwell, watching the lights of the train from his house on the north shore, saw three streams of fire fall from the bridge at the moment of the great gust, while villagers at Newport, north of the bridge, saw the water stop running from their taps, the main carrying the supply over the bridge having broken.
Seeing that their communication instruments had gone dead, Barclay and Watt struggled down to the shore of the Firth. ‘As they stood there the moon momentarily broke through the flying cloud wrack and by its fitful light they saw to their horror that all the high girders had gone.’ I quote L.T. C. Rolt, from his classic account of railway accidents, Red For Danger (1955). Rolt was a trained engineer, who also wrote some engaging memoirs, but I think he might have had the talent for a ghost story or two, as well.
Those railway officials at the south end of the bridge hoped the train had made it to the north, and vice versa. After the gap in the bridge became evident to the signalman at the north end of the bridge, he thought he saw a light on the south side of the gap – which he believed was the train retreating to St Fort and safety. It was never established what light he had really seen.
The locomotive – NBR 224 – lay at the bed of the Firth for three months, and sank twice more during the salvage operation. But it was discovered to be in good condition when brought to the surface, and it was returned to service. For years no driver would take it over the new Tay Bridge. Not until, on December 28th 1909, a crew – driver and fireman surely both arch-sceptics where the supernatural was concerned – worked the engine on the very same Sunday evening service as had ended in disaster exactly thirty-three years before. The men who drove number 224 had a nickname for her: ‘The Diver.’
The accident formed the background of a folk tale written up as a ghost story by the Scottish writer Sorche Nic Leodhas. In ‘The Man Who Missed The Tay Bridge Train’ (1972) a young man lying ill in bed sends his ‘fetch’ – or his own living soul – to warn his lifelong friend not to board that particular train.
The Hawes Junction Crash
The railway accident that rivals the fall of the Tay Bridge for ghostliness occurred at Hawes Junction on the Settle-Carlisle stretch of the Midland Railway at the surpassingly ghostly time of 5am in the morning on Christmas Eve, 1910. Once again, the thunder storm had been laid on, and the gothic backdrop was in place. The Settle-Carlisle line runs through some of the wildest, most vertiginous landscape in Britain. When you travel along it, your ears pop as they do on an aeroplane. But the Johnny-come-lately Midland Railway was determined to have its own route to Scotland, and this was the only pathway left, the more sensible routes having been taken by its rivals. If this really were a ghost story, then the board of directors – urbane sophisticates in top hats – would have encountered a gnarled local during one of their fact-finding trips to the site of the proposed route. ‘Begging your pardon sirs, but you can’t be thinking of building a railway through these parts – the hills don’t want it, and the hills will have their revenge!’
As it was, hundreds of navvies died during the construction of the fantastical viaducts and tunnels that the project required, and many crashes occurred after the line opened…
At Hawes Junction on that Christmas Eve, a harassed signalman let the St Pancras to Glasgow sleeper run into two engines he’d left standing on the line. He did not see the crash but a whistle was heard amid the storm, and a vague yet somehow decisive far-off rattle; a shepherd on a hillside saw a single flash of flame. The signalman turned to a colleague and said, ‘Go to Bence [station master at Hawes Junction] and tell him I am afraid I have wrecked the Scotch Express’, for which calmness of phrasing he earns my admiration.
The accident, in which nine people were incinerated, occurred just beyond the north end of Moorcock tunnel, near the highest point of the line. A couple of years ago, I spent a night alone in the station house at Dent, which is the stop just south of the accident site, and far remote from the village after which it is named. The house is now a holiday home, very comfortably furnished. But after the last train of the evening had gone, as the light faded and the wind rose, I became very conscious of the blackened railway sleepers that had been placed upright in the ground on the embankment above the station a hundred years ago to form a snow barrier. These lowered over the house, and they seemed subtly closer to it when I awoke suddenly at three o’clock in the morning than they had done at midnight when I’d turned in. I’m not sure that I would fancy renting Dent station on Christmas Eve, at least not alone.
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The term ‘ghost train’ is – or was – used to describe a train which runs to test a schedule, or to keep a line clear of snow. Its most famous fictional use was in the title of Arnold Ridley’s comedy-thriller play of 1923, inspired by a night he’d spent at Mangotsfield Station in Bristol, having missed the last train. The supposed train is a cover for gun running, and the station master’s best line – delivered wide-eyed, and intended to frighten the occupants of the waiting room: ‘Whatever it is, it never starts out at Truro, and it never runs into St Anne’s. If it be a natural thing – where do it come from, and where do it go?’ – killed for good the possibility of anyone writing a serious ghost train story.
Ridley went on to play Private Godfrey in Dad’s Army. I once attended a Dad’s Army special evening at the National Film Theatre, and this included a clip of Ridley being interviewed on tv about his play. He was very cynical about it, and much more ferocious than the mild-mannered and effete Private Godfrey. He said the play was just an attempt to supply the kind of rubbish that people appeared to want, a remark probably informed by the fact that his theatre company had gone bust in 1925, prompting him to sell the play for a pittance, only to see it become a staple of British theatre, and twice filmed.
A lyrical, and true ghost train account appears in a collection called The Phantom Goods Train and Other Ghostly Tales from the Track
s (1989), edited by W. Barry Herbert. It chronicles a series of sightings between 1917 and 1919 along a stretch of track from Dunphail to Dava in Morayshire. The percipients reported a very bright light, of unknown origin, and one man saw, riding beside the Plough constellation in the night sky, the image of a steaming locomotive pulling four cattle trucks. There is no particular pay-off to the story, but thirty years before, a train of forty cattle trucks had burned at Dava station, and all the cattle had been killed.
Ghost trains were popular in funfairs in the interwar period, successors to the magic lantern phantasmagorias that featured in fairs from the late Eighteenth century. We think of ghost trains today as raucous thrill rides, but they were often satirical. The setting might be a moribund country halt, but rather than the station staff being merely slovenly and unhelpful they turn out to be cackling skeletons. A feature of the funfair ghost train might be the occupation of one seat by a suspiciously corpse-like passenger (a dummy of same I mean, of course), and the proximity to strangers that rail travel involves is one theme of railway ghost stories. This proximity was all the greater in the days when a passenger waiting on a dark and deserted platform could have resort to a waiting room.
Walter de la Mare’s story, ‘Crewe’, which appears in his collection On The Edge (1930), begins, irresistibly to my mind, ‘When murky winter dusk begins to settle over the railway station at Crewe its first-class waiting room grows steadily more stagnant. Particularly if one is alone in it. The long-grimed windows do little more than sift the failing light that slopes in on them from the glass roof outside… And the grained massive black-leathered furniture becomes less and less inviting.’
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