Be it summer or winter, daily the public pour in their thousands to Her Majesty’s Tower of London. Jostling across the causeways over the moat they surge through the archways, their bright clothes contrasting with the grey walls, their incessant chatter penetrating the remotest cells of the prison towers. They bring their own holiday atmosphere with them as they swarm across Tower Green. Here a crowd listens enthralled to a yeoman warder, their ‘Beefeater’ guide, or stands impressed by the impassive sentry. Yonder the babel of many tongues echoes from the Jewel House approaches as the queue ebbs and flows. Coach parties noisily follow their hurrying leaders, children dash in vain to catch the perambulating pigeon – the scene is alive, a whirlpool of colour, of chatter and happy activity.
Yet when the last tourist is shepherded out beneath the By ward archway and the shadows start to lengthen across Tower Green, it almost seems as if the grey stone buildings shake off the traces of the day’s artificiality.For night is the time for memories, and the Tower of London has indeed a surfeit of those. Happy ones, yes, of banquets and coronations, processions and merrymaking. But when the clouds scud across the moon and the wind sighs through the arrow slits, the fortress wraps its cloak of brooding isolation around itself, like an old enshawled woman staring into the embers. It is then that the evil memories of the past jostle to emerge.
Many have experienced the horror of those memories. A ghostly figure flits across the Green; footsteps ascend stairs untrodden by human feet; a luminescent cylinder hovers above a table; huge shadows of terrifying shapes appear on battlemented walls. Memories conjuring up the countless wretches who suffered the agony of thumbscrew and rack, who perished beneath the axe. Could they not return, to reproach and bewail?
This book gathers together some of the reports of apparitions seen, inexplicable noises heard. That there have been more, I do not doubt. Not everyone is brave enough to admit fear, the bloodchilling terror which turns one’s feet to stone, when one’s twentieth-century brain refuses to accept the sight, the sound, the sensation of … who knows?
I do not seek to explain them, nor even to comment on the truth of their ever happening. You may laugh when the sun is high over the turrets, giggle with your friends as you ascend the spiral stairs in the Bloody Tower – sneer if you must as you crowd round the scaffold site.
But when the midnight mists wreathe low to shroud the battlements – when the dark cavities of turret windows watch sardonically like half-closed eyes – when the wind, leaning gently on the oaken doors, causes pendant chains to swing and clank … scoff not, but speed your stride and look not back!