In December 1994 Shannon John, an attractive young American student, was one of a school group who came to this country to study Tudor history. In London they indulged in the inevitable round of sight-seeing, visiting such national institutions as the National Portrait Gallery, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Bank of England and then like so many others, they came to the Tower of London. But when the list had earlier been compiled of places the group just had to see, little did Shannon and her family imagine in their wildest dreams that this was going to be an experience they had never expected – for only yards from the office blocks and speeding traffic of modern London, there, among the crowds of tourists on Tower Wharf, someone from a bygone age was very, very close to Shannon!
I first became involved in the story when my colleague Yeoman Warder Brian Harrison, knowing of my research and subsequent books on the Tower’s ghosts, forwarded a letter to me from Shannon’s father, Mr Arthur D John of Redlands, California in which he enclosed a photograph of Traitors’ Gate taken by his daughter and enquired whether we could account for the gloved hand which mysteriously appeared in the picture.
To say that I was intrigued is putting it mildly, for while I had on record many cases in which spectres had apparently appeared to people, ghostly sounds heard and even inexplicable odours, incense etc., smelled, this was the first occasion of which I was aware, of such a manifestation being reportedly captured on film! Caution of course was necessary that it was not a hoax, a technical malfunction, a double exposure or the like, and on discussing it by phone with Mr John I was reassured that it was indeed a bona fide request for enlightenment and not a stunt for publicity (if it were, it would have appeared in American newspapers and not queried at all with the Tower authorities, who would have simply dismissed it as such). A print of the picture providing few clues as to whether it was genuine or not, Mr John offered to send the original roll of film, as the negative concerned and those immediately adjoining it were of course essential for evaluation.
The ghostly hand at Traitors’ Gate
On its receipt, I accepted the risk of being greeted with ribald scepticism and invited not only military photo-interpretation experts for an assessment, but later also the manufacturers of the film, they having the specialist equipment necessary to investigate the authenticity or otherwise of the negative. This they did thoroughly, over a lengthy period, and although they were necessarily wary of attributing the hand as being of supernatural origin, their conclusions can be summed up as follows;
1. ‘The hand was not the result of a double exposure’. Comment: this was also confirmed by study of the other negatives on the roll.
2. ‘Despite enlarging, then darkening the picture to varying degrees, the hand was still visible, surrounded by a strange glowing halo, especially round the thumb, this resembling the electro-fluorescent photographs interpreted by some as the ‘aura’ which surrounds us all, its colour signifying our mood e.g. blue for sadness, orange for happiness.’ Also, as will be seen by the illustration, while the railings are out of focus, the end of the sleeve itself, the wrinkles in the material and the outline of the fingers are clearly delineated, yet both are the same distance from the lens.
Comment: point taken.
3. ‘The image of the hand was present in the scene when the photo was taken and had not been subsequently superimposed by computer or any other method.’
Comment: obviously an undisputed technical conclusion. Mr John also stressed that Shannon did not have the technical knowledge required to fake a picture in that way.
5. ‘A hand could have intruded and been captured by the flash to give that luminescent effect, a known but rare phenomenon.’
Comment: Shannon said that there were only herself and a friend in the immediate area and she did not use the flash on her ‘point and press’ camera. Nor is the lacy Tudor or Stuart style cuff worn by the ‘hand’ the usual fashion adopted by touring students! Even had someone obtained a sleeve as a joke, the wearer would have instinctively curled their fingers round the railings in the picture. Close examination shows that this is not the case. If the hand is of an era long since gone, the fingers could not have curled round the railings anyway, because they weren’t there, having only installed about a century ago to prevent people falling into the water below.
Several questions remain unanswered and are probably unanswerable anyway. The posture of the hand itself is unusually awkward, as attempts to curl the fingers in that manner, yet keep the thumb line straight, will demonstrate. Was the owner of the hand a man or a woman? Was he or she wearing a glove? – there appears to be wrinkles on the first finger and no thumb nail is visible. Was it a coincidence that the manifestation occurred where it did, at Traitors’ Gate, the entrance through which the doomed victims were brought, to face lengthy incarceration or even death beneath the axe? It was certainly at the precise spot where, as I recounted in my book Beefeaters of the Tower of London, at 7.30a.m. on 11 March 1980 a passer-by witnessed and described in great detail a procession of Tudor-clad men and women, the men bearing pikes, the women resplendent in dresses studded with pearls and diamonds, one carrying a prayer book with a cross on it, the party passing slowly, as if in a barge, under Traitors’ Gate and proceeding into the Tower. Had he seen a phantom re-enactment of the moments when Queen Katherine Howard, accompanied by four ladies and conveyed in a small boat rowed by four men, passed under Traitors’ Gate on 10 February 1542, Katherine dying beneath the axe later on Tower Green? My informant reported that his attention was first attracted by a flickering haze of blue light beneath the archway; could it have been a glow similar to that which surrounded the ‘hand’? So whose hand was it? We will never know. I have only one regret – that Miss Shannon John wasn’t standing back sufficiently far enough to film whoever was on the Other’ end of the sleeve!
Skeleton found near The Lanthorn Tower