The Metropolitan Railway opened for business on 10 January 1863 with 30,000 passengers on the first day, and was viewed as an engineering marvel at the time. It was the first underground railway in the world and it ran from Bishop’s Road at Paddington to Farringdon. With over 270 stations and 253 miles of track carrying millions of people every year, the London Underground system is predictably crowded, claustrophobic and at times uncomfortable. However, it is also a defining part of London’s identity, recognisable by its distinctive logo, map and architecture, and it has served the transport needs of the capital for nearly 150 years.
Not surprisingly it has inspired many stories, and anyone who has stood on a platform on an Underground station late at night will appreciate what an eerie place it can be with its labyrinth of subterranean tunnels and passages and just a hint that unseen entities may be lurking down there. As with the main line railway system, the Underground has experienced various closures and has its share of abandoned stations. As a train speeds along, passengers may catch a glimpse of one of the fabled ‘ghost stations’, the train’s bright lights reflecting off begrimed tiling on the platform. The building of and extension to parts of the system have entailed encroaching on old burial grounds and plague pits, and again ghost stories have arisen in connection with these. Ghosts do not take kindly to being disturbed.
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.