The London Underground has also provided the setting for many novels and short stories. Clare Clark’s dark and gruesome murder story, The Great Stink (Viking 2005) is set in the sewers of mid-Victorian London just prior to the building of the London Underground. However, compared with films, fictional stories about supernatural Underground activity are thinner on the ground, which is surprising given the ominous and eerie subterranean setting of parts of the Underground.
One of the first ghost stories set on the Underground was by Sir Thomas Graham Jackson (1835–1924), a leading architect as well as a writer of ghost stories. In A Romance of the Piccadilly Tube the central character, George Markham, catches a crowded train at Piccadilly Station where he later witnesses a very grisly accident involving a man he knows who is swept under a passing train.
A commuter nightmare is the theme in the short story by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Non-Paying Passengers (1974) where the main character, Percy Fortesque, sees the ghost of his despised late wife Doris reflected in a train window.
In one of his last ghost stories, Bad Company (1956), Walter De La Mare opens with the chilling line, ‘It is very seldom that one encounters evil in a human face…’ The story opens with the narrator descending to one of London’s ‘many subterranean railway stations’ and describes the eeriness of the platform with its ‘glare and glitter, the noise, the very air one breathes affect nerves and spirits’. The story unfolds when the man boards the train and sits next to a cadaverous-looking old man whose appearance makes the narrator recoil in disgust. The haunting figure continues to lure the man to a decrepit London residence in order to reveal a last will and testament.
The Eighth Lamp by Roy Vickers appeared in The Novel Magazine in July 1916 – reproduced in Macabre Railway Stories (1982) edited by Ronald Holmes. It opens with the last train of the night on the Underground pulling into a fictitious Cheyne Road Station. We learn that ‘Cheyne Road station was wholly underground…and the regulations did not apply to it. There are eight lamps on each platform.’ Signalman George Raoul, ‘transferred from Baker Street’, sets about his work on the deserted station. As he walks past the third lamp on the platform he stops and shudders at the sight of a recruiting poster (the story was written during the First World War) with the ‘beckoning smile of a young soldier like a mirthless grin of a death mask’. George convinces himself it was the ‘new station that was doing it’. As he continues switching off each of the lamps we are told that George cannot look at a ‘Circle train without a faint shudder.’ By the time he reaches the fifth switch his nerve begins to falter. As he reaches the seventh lamp he is whistling to himself in order to allay his nerves as well as attempting to humanise the desolation. George finally approaches the eighth lamp and extinguishes it. He then waits within a couple of feet of the staircase, crouching. ‘He could not see more than a few feet in front of him, but he could hear, distinct and unmistakable, the rumbling murmur of an approaching train.’ Impossible, he thinks, no trains are running, but the sounds grow louder. The train appears but it has no lights and George can see that it is a Circle train. Despite telling people what he saw, it is difficult to convince them that a train was running at that time of night. For George the horror is only just beginning as he has to face the spectral force and the mystery behind it on his next shift.
South Kentish Town is an atmospheric and eerie short story by Sir John Betjeman (1906–84). It concerns a clerk, a regular traveller on the line, who mistakenly gets off a tube train on the Northern Line when the doors accidentally open at a disused station. To the man’s horror the train moves off, leaving him all alone on the pitch-black platform. Confused and obviously disorientated, he gropes around and locates the emergency spiral staircase, all 294 steps, up to the old station buildings at street level. As he nears the top he bangs his head on the floorboards of one of the shops where the station concourse used to be. He calls out but no one hears him. Utterly deflated, the man then gropes his way back down the seemingly never-ending staircase to the platform. The terrifying feeling of being trapped and not knowing how to escape from an awful predicament is superbly conveyed. Betjeman’s subtly understated tale taps into our fears of the dark and of being alone with untold possibilities of nasty things lurking, particularly in the bowels of this labyrinthine network. There was indeed a South Kentish Town Station on the Northern Line. It opened in 1907 and closed as early as 1924. Its red tiled exterior can still be seen at the junction of Castle Road and Kentish Town Road. It is currently used for commercial purposes.
Betjeman’s short story of a lone commuter has provided plenty of material for variations on this theme, although some of these have been much less subtle than South Kentish Town. The London Underground has provided a mass of fertile material for literature, film and TV, including many tales of the supernatural. Whilst the terrors of Betjeman’s unfortunate clerk were mainly in his own mind, other characterisations set on the Underground have produced more sinister phantoms and creatures that threaten those who dare to be alone.
John Wyndham (1903–69), a well-known science fiction writer whose work included Day of the Triffids, wrote a short story called the Confidence Trick. It involves a commuter, Henry Baider, who travels by Underground from Bank Station on his way home from the city. As the crowded train travels west, Henry suddenly realises that there are only three people in the carriage. Could they all have alighted at Holborn? The train goes faster and faster and Henry checks his watch. ‘Unusual. Nearly half an hour at full bat, without a station? It’s absolutely impossible’. A woman pulls the emergency handle but nothing happens. Midnight arrives when the train slows down and stops at a station. ‘It was something Avenue’, a woman said.’ A voice announces, ‘All change. End of the line.’ As they step onto the platform a horned creature with a tail, holding a trident, meets them. They follow the creature on what has become a train ride to Hell.
The Last Train (1975) by science fiction writer Harry Harrison is set in both the 1970s and the Second World War! The narrator comments, ‘I was on the Gloucester Road…and there was the tube entrance in front of me…I knew the station well…Fine bit of Victorian railway architecture…District and Circle Lines, name right up there in eternal ceramic tile.’ He enters the station and goes down the ‘dark and grim’ stairwell, and then realises he must have gone down an exit by mistake. He sees a stationary train and asks, ‘Why wasn’t the train moving?’ There were no crowds waiting for other trains. ‘Yet we just stood there and stood there and I looked around and felt this sudden, penetrating chill.’ He then notices a man reading a newspaper dated 8 December 1941. Could he be among the ghosts of that time?
London Revenant (2006) by Conrad Williams deals with the drop-outs who haunt the Underground. Among them is the ‘Pusher’ whose pleasure is to push people under trains as well as torturing people who live above ground. Tobias Hill’s Underground (Faber, 2000) takes the reader down long-lost tunnels, makeshift passages, locked and forgotten stations in search of a series of macabre murders. In Nicholas Royle’s The Director’s Cut (2000) a psychotic film-maker finds shelter in a disused station in between murdering passengers on the tube.