Over the years, staff who work on the Underground at night have often reported strange incidents such as unexplained noises and sightings, sudden and sharp drops in temperature, creepy feelings of unease and even sightings of people who had died years earlier, sometimes in accidents on the line. Both staff and passengers have reported phenomena which include a faceless woman, a 7ft human figure, the ghosts of actors, a woman in black, the dreadful screams of a thirteen-year-old girl who was murdered in the eighteenth century, reflections in carriage windows of someone not corporeally there, screams of women and children who were crushed to death in a disaster during the Second World War, semi-transparent apparitions, tales of troglodytes and even a screaming Egyptian mummy.
The ‘Underground’ is actually something of a misnomer because only about 42 per cent of the system actually runs below the surface. The network grew up, at least until the early 1930s, in a largely piecemeal fashion, but it has evolved to become an essential part of the capital’s infrastructure. The need for the system originated with the chronic road traffic gridlock which had developed on the surface by the middle of the nineteenth century.
The line that ran the four miles from Paddington to Farringdon, going on to form the nucleus of the Metropolitan Railway, was built just below street level using what became known as the ‘cut-and-cover’ method. This method may have caused temporary chaos for traffic but it reduced the potential costs involved in the compulsory purchase of many of the buildings that lay on or around the path of the projected route. Steam locomotives hauled the early trains and, because the line was in a relatively shallow trench open to the air for much of the route, some of the smoke and steam dissipated. However, the poisonous and almost impenetrable fug in stations such as Baker Street, which were entirely subterranean, caused travellers to cough, splutter and complain, and for this reason early underground train travel was certainly not for the faint-hearted. The smoky atmosphere of the stations and the dimly-lit trains provided a fruitful field of operation for the light-fingered criminal fraternity.
In spite of apocalyptic predictions that the building of underground railways would disturb the Devil who would then wreak his revenge on those foolish enough to travel on subterranean lines, the route from Paddington to Farringdon was an almost total success. This stimulated further development and other lines followed. The building of these lines prompted urban development and a complex network of lines was created linking suburban and rural areas to the city and to Central London. There was no sense of the need to create a co-ordinated system between the companies that developed the early lines and so some parts of Greater London, particularly south of the Thames, have always been distant from the Tube although they usually came to be served adequately by the impressive network of surface electrified lines which we tend to associate with the Southern Railway Co. In 1933 control of a unified underground system passed into the hands of the London Passenger Transport Board which set about a programme of extensions to the tube system and modernisation of rolling stock, stations and other facilities. Developments since the war have been few and slow in coming, but the Victoria Line, opened throughout in 1972, and the Jubilee Line Extension in 1999 have set new standards for automation and efficient operation.
This statue of Sir John Betjeman at St Pancras depicts the poet with his trademark shopping bag gazing up in awe at the station’s magnificent cast-iron roof, the widest in Britain.
Without question the London Underground has had an enormous social, economic and cultural impact on the metropolis. It has provided a ready means for people to get around quickly and easily, it has connected the disparate collection of ‘villages’ which constitutes London and stimulated the growth of vast tracts of London’s inner and more distant suburbia including, of course, the ‘Metroland’ affectionately mocked by Sir John Betjeman (1906–84). In addition, the Underground has assisted the regeneration of areas of inner-city decay such as the Bermondsey district of south-east London with, in this case, the building of the Jubilee Line. The Underground has given the world the immortal diagrammatic map of the system, originated by Harry Beck in 1932. It has expressed itself in stations of the highest architectural merit such as Park Royal and East Finchley and the monumental headquarters block of 55 Broadway Street with its sculptures by Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein. It has also given us the distinctive glazed terracotta station fronts which are the colour of oxblood and the Art and Crafts faience work of the architect Leslie W. Green. The deep-level tubes played a heroic role sheltering Londoners during the Blitz. Elsewhere some stations and unopened tube tunnels were used as subterranean factories producing such things as aircraft parts. Others became control centres for the war effort. The Underground is absolutely a part of London’s fabric. Life would be very different without it, and much worse.
There has of course also been a debit side. The building of the sub-surface lines was extraordinarily disruptive and often meant that people lost their homes, most frequently those who could not afford expensive legal counsel to contest compulsory purchase orders. Many burial sites had to be disturbed and human remains laid to rest elsewhere, something about which many people were uneasy. The Underground has had its share of drama including murders, suicides, tragic accidents and, more recently, terrorist bomb attacks.
London’s many disused underground stations generate growing interest. These ‘ghost stations’ with their long-abandoned platforms, cold, darkened tunnels and the nagging suggestion that something horrible might be lurking down there provide ideal settings for reports of hauntings and paranormal phenomena. Even many of the stations still in regular use are spooky first thing in the morning and last thing at night when few passengers are about and trains less frequent. What happens on the platforms and in the passages when no living entities are there? The deep-level tube stations in particular contain doors sealed off to access by the general public. What secrets do those doors conceal?
There are many reputedly haunted Underground stations and lines. For example, in the 1960s and ’70s many motormen dreaded being held up by signals on the section between Holborn and Chancery Lane. Workers reported that when their trains drew to a halt at adverse signals they would suddenly become aware that in the partial light shed by the carriage lights behind them they were sharing the driving cab with an uninvited guest. This indistinct figure was apparently staring fixedly ahead through the cab front windows and standing just a foot or two away from them. As soon as the train moved off when the signals changed, the figure vanished.
Other haunted stations include Becontree where, in 1992, the ghost of a faceless woman with blonde hair was seen standing on the platform. Commuters and staff at the Elephant & Castle Underground Station have seen a young lone female late at night entering the carriage of a tube train and then inexplicably vanishing. At Hyde Park Corner in the early 1970s two maintenance workers on the night shift were amazed to hear the sound of the escalator in motion, given that they had just switched the power off. There was no living being there to turn the power back on. In 1951 an electrician was engaged in maintenance work on the platform at Ickenham Station when he saw the ghost of a middle-aged woman dressed in old-fashioned clothing. The woman, who gestured for him to follow her, was believed to have fallen from the platform and been electrocuted many years earlier. Several witnesses have talked about feeling the presence of invisible hands at Maida Vale Station as they were coming up the escalators from platform to street level. In the 1980s at Queensbury the figure of Sir Winston Churchill was allegedly seen on the platform, apparently waiting for a train.
Elephant & Castle Station. Although these underground passages are well-lit, they can be eerie and menacing early in the morning or last thing at night when few people are about.
Train crews on trains have seen an indistinct figure on the line from Baker Street as it approaches Rickmansworth. In 1928 a passenger alighting from the last train at South Kensington found himself alone on the platform whereupon he reported having see
n a spectral steam locomotive on the track with the figure of a man standing next to it. An old-fashioned-looking workman reputedly haunts the tunnels around Stockwell. It is believed he was a track worker who was killed by a train on this stretch of line sometime in the 1950s. In the 1990s there were a number of sightings of what was described as a ‘semitransparent’ apparition walking by the side of the four-track section of line close to Turnham Green Station. At West Brompton Underground Station the ghost of a late Victorian or Edwardian workman strides out purposefully before vanishing.
What follows is a selection of London Underground stations where experiences of supernatural activity have been reported. Some of these cases are reasonably well known, others less so (readers may wish to look at a more detailed account by the authors in The Haunted London Underground published in 2008 by The History Press).
ALDGATE
Aldgate Station dates from 1876 and is on the Circle Line between Tower Hill and Liverpool Street as well as being the eastern terminus of the Metropolitan Line. It famously features in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, The Bruce-Partington Plans, and in September 1888 the Jack the Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes was murdered nearby in Mitre Square. The station was badly damaged by German bombs during the Second World War, and in July 2005 one of the four in the London suicide bombings exploded on a Circle Line train as it left Liverpool Street and was approaching Aldgate Station, killing seven innocent people and inflicting awful injuries on others.
Aldgate Station was built immediately next door to St Botolph’s Church which contains the site of one of the biggest plague pits in London, where over 1,000 plague victims were buried in the graveyard in the space of just two weeks in September 1665. Altogether over 4,000 bodies were buried at Aldgate. Daniel Defoe, in his A Journal of the Plague Year, described the gruesome horrors at Aldgate:
… they dug the great pit in the churchyard of our parish of Aldgate. A terrible pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it. As near as I may judge, it was about forty feet in length, and about fifteen or sixteen feet broad, and at the time I first looked at it, about nine feet deep; but it was said they dug it near twenty feet deep afterwards in one part of it… Into these pits they had put perhaps fifty or sixty bodies each; then they made larger holes wherein they buried all that the cart brought in a week… At the beginning of September, the plague raging in a dreadful manner, and the number of burials in our parish increasing to more than was ever buried in any parish about London… they ordered this dreadful gulf to be dug – for such it was, rather than a pit…the pit being finished the 4th of September, I think, they began to bury in it the 6th, and by the 20th, which was just two weeks, they had thrown into it 1,114 bodies when they were obliged to fill it up.
A well-known story relating to the station concerns a track worker who was working a late shift at the station a few years ago. The man suddenly slipped as he bent over the rails and came into contact with the 20,000-volt conductor rail, which caused a massive surge of electricity to pass through his body. The shock knocked him unconscious and he was fortunate not to be killed. One of his co-workers nearby saw the incident but also witnessed a most eerie sight. Just seconds before the man touched the live rail his colleague saw the figure of a half-transparent old woman gently stroking the man’s hair. The old woman was believed to have been killed during the Second World War by falling onto a similar rail.
Passengers have reported other unexplained occurrences such as the sound of footsteps in the early hours of the morning although there has been no visible sign of anyone, and also strange and mournful whistling. The latter appears to be a common occurrence on the Underground and one explanation suggests this is due to the presence of infrasound – sound with a frequency too low to be heard by human ear.
Aldgate Station opened in 1876 on the Metropolitan Line and was extensively rebuilt at street level in the mid-1920s.
Two psychologists at Coventry University, Vic Tandy and Tony Lawrence, wrote a paper called ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ for the journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Tandy appeared on a Channel 5 programme, Ghosts on the Underground (2006), in order to examine phenomena at London Underground stations where high levels of supernatural activity had been recorded. One of their conclusions was that escalator motors, moving trains or wind from the tunnels can produce distorted sounds, particularly on deep-level tube stations, which may give rise to some of the stories about spooky phenomena.
ALDWYCH
Aldwych is a disused station and therefore could also justifiably be described as a ghost station. The station has been used as the location for TV and film productions such as Death Line (1972); V for Vendetta (2006); Atonement (2007); and the horror film Creep (2004). The TV programme Most Haunted devoted a whole programme to Aldwych in 2002.
Aldwych was formerly on the Piccadilly Line and was the terminus of a short branch from Holborn until it was closed in September 1994. It is located on the Strand and was opened as the Strand Station (it changed its name to Aldwych in 1917) in November 1907, running a shuttle service for city workers and for theatre-goers. During the Second World War the branch was closed with the operational platform being used as a public air-raid shelter, and the disused platform and running tunnel were commandeered to house some of the valuable artifacts from the British Museum, including the Elgin Marbles. The station has two entrances – one on the Strand and another around the corner on Surrey Street. Both are instantly recognisable for what they are.
Aldwych Station was built on the site of the Royal Strand Theatre, which was demolished to make way for it. One of the ghosts is associated with the theatre and has been seen lurking around the station platform. The Royal Strand Theatre went through various changes of name and renovations during its history, but it finally closed on 13 May 1905. The female ghost that haunts the station is rumoured to be that of an actress who did not enjoy her last curtain call. ‘Fluffers’, the workers who used to clean the accumulation of dust from the tunnels, particularly the human hair and skin cells, reported being scared by a figure, possibly female, who appeared on the tracks at night in the vicinity of Aldwych tube. Who is the ghostly actress? There are a number of contenders. Some say it may be one of the female cast involved in the last show staged at the theatre, Miss Wingrove. It was not a success and closed down abruptly after only a week. Equally, it could have been any one of the many actresses who appeared in the seventy years of the theatre’s history.
The TV series Most Haunted failed to cast any further light on the mystery although they acknowledged that Aldwych did seem to have a particularly high level of paranormal activity. The team suggested that there were two female and one male ghost. The name Margaret was mentioned with a possible middle name or other name of Estelle and a surname sounding like Bryce or Bright.
We can only speculate at the identity of the actress. Frances ‘Fanny’ Kelly (1790–1882) opened at the Strand in February 1833 in which she was advertised as playing twenty different characters. Frances makes for a likely candidate especially because some descriptions of the Aldwych ghost said she appeared in many guises! Although Fanny Kelly was successful elsewhere, she failed at the Strand. She was the first to devise and perform a one-woman show, and when she retired from the stage in the 1830s she founded a drama school for women in Dean Street, Soho. Her popularity on stage brought her many admirers. On two occasions, in London and Dublin, two different men tried to shoot her whilst she was on stage! Sadly she lived out her later years in relative poverty and died just before receiving a monetary prize associated with the Literary Fund award conferred on her by Queen Victoria. Did she ever get over her failure at the Royal Strand Theatre?
The Strand Entrance to the closed Aldwych Tube Station. No, you’re not seeing things! The station was opened in 1907 as ‘Strand’, and was renamed ‘Aldwych’ in 1915. For much of the Second World War Aldwych was used by Westminster City Council as a public air-raid shelter.
The Surrey St
reet entrance to the former Aldwych Tube Station.
It might well be that the ghost was a lesser-known figure who never quite made a career on stage but who looks desperately for applause or that elusive last curtain call.
BAKERLOO LINE
In the area of Elephant & Castle and various other Bakerloo Line stations, especially Baker Street, there have been 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 claim to have had this rather disconcerting experience. The nearest rival seems to be the Piccadilly Line, near Earl’s Court.
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