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 seen 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 Street 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.
A variation on this theme is for the reflection to be that of a figure dressed in the clothes of a bygone era.
BANK
Bank Monument is one of the largest and most complex subterranean railway stations in the world. The station, which is named after the nearby Bank of England on Threadneedle Street, was opened in 1900 for the Central London Railway whilst Monument Station had been completed for the (Inner) Circle Line about 100 yards away in 1884. The City and South London Railway (later part of the Northern Line) tried to save on costs by excavating beneath St Mary Woolnoth Church to build the lift-shafts and station. After much objection the railway company bought the crypt for what is now the Northern Line booking hall, so the entrance that once led to the crypt now leads into Bank Underground Station. The bones of the dead were moved for reburial at the City of London Cemetery at Ilford in 1900.
Bank Station received a direct hit by a bomb in January 1941. It penetrated the road surface and exploded in an escalator machinery room killing fifty-six people and injuring sixty-nine. In 1982, as the station was closing, a worker who was walking across the ticket hall heard a banging coming from inside the lift despite the fact that he just checked it and knew that there was no one else around.
The most famous ghost associated with the station as well as the nearby Bank of England is reputedly that of Sarah Whitehead who has gained the nickname of the ‘Bank Nun’ (or in some cases the ‘Black Nun’). Construction workers building that part of the Underground first saw her in the late nineteenth century. Some years later a member of staff chased what he thought was an old lady locked in the station during the early hours of the morning. Just as he thought he had caught her up she disappeared down a corridor with no possible exit. Some years later an employee reported seeing a female figure which suddenly vanished. There have been further sightings up to recent times of the ghost of Sarah desperately searching for something or somebody.
The story of Sarah goes back to 1811 when her brother was charged with forgery and brought before the Old Bailey to stand trial. Her brother, Philip Whitehead, who is referred to as ‘Paul’ at the trial on 30 October 1811, was a former employee at the Bank of England. Whitehead had worked as a clerk in the cashier’s office at the bank but had resigned from his job on 2 August 1810. The crimes with which he was charged were against a number of businessmen and not the bank itself. The law took a very grave view of forgery and it was an offence for which the penalty was mandatory – judicial hanging. And so it was with Paul. At the age of thirty-six he was sentenced to death and subsequently executed.
His devoted sister Sarah had been taken to a house in Fleet Street and protected from all news of her brother. Anxious to find out about his whereabouts she set off to the Bank of England where a clerk who, presumably not knowing who she was, blurted out that her brother had received the death sentence. Stunned and shocked by this news, Sarah could not come to terms with what she had been told and it clearly affected her mind. Shortly after she took to visiting the bank on a regular basis dressed in black crêpe, veil and long dress, still asking for her brother. The staff nicknamed her the ‘Bank Nun’, but her visits were a source of pity as well as a nuisance to the bank. Staff and customers were made uneasy by her brooding presence.
Despite the bank trying to come to a financial arrangement whereby she would agree to stop hanging around the building, Sarah continued with her visits and loitered near the entrance consistently over the period between 1812 and 1837, attired in a heavy mourning dress which contrasted strangely with her painted cheeks. Her ghost, also dressed in black, was heard to be asking ‘has anyone seen my brother?’ Sarah was reputedly buried in the old churchyard of St Christopher-le-Stocks, which afterwards became part of the bank’s gardens.
Bank of England. The ‘Old Lady of Threadneedle Street’ is a refashioning of a Palladian building originally erected in 1734.
This is only one of several entrances to Bank Station, but it gives little idea of the extensive and confusing complex of passages below.
BETHNAL GREEN
Bethnal Green Station, which is on the Central Line between Liverpool Street and Mile End stations, was the scene of the worst civilian disaster of the Second World War. The East End of London had experienced heavy bombing raids during the war, but on 3 March 1943, 173 people (twenty-seven men, eighty-four women and sixty-two children) were killed and ninety-two injured in a crush whilst attempting to enter the station.
As the siren sounded at 8.17 that evening, hundreds of people ran from the darkened streets to Bethnal Green Tube Station where some 500 people were already sheltering. Within minutes 1,500 people had entered the shelter. Ten minutes later loud noises nearby panicked many of those who were still trying to enter the station. There was pushing, shoving and then a surge forward. The scene was absolute chaos, certainly not helped by the dimly lit and wet staircase. A woman near the bottom of the staircase slipped, leaving others to fall over, and within seconds over 300 men, women and children were crushed into the tiny stairwell. Rescuers found it almost impossible to help, and eyewitness accounts described the awful ‘screaming and hollering’ as people were ‘piled up like sardines’. The panic had been caused by a salvo of rockets fired a quarter of mile away at Victoria Park by an experimental new weapon, not by German bombs. The authorities had ‘forgotten’ to warn local people that these trials were going to take place. At the time the Ministry of Defence placed an embargo on any publicity and did not release information about the incident until 1946.
Plaque at Bethnal Green. In spite of efforts at the time to surround this disaster within a wall of secrecy, virtually everyone in London knew it had happened.
Entrance to Bethnal Green Tube Station; the scene of the mass fatalities.
Years later there were reports of noises similar to those of women and children screaming. In 1981 a station foreman was working late at Bethnal Green Station. He had seen to the usual tasks of securing the station and doing the paperwork when he heard the low sound of voices. As he stopped what he was doing the sound became more and more distinctive. It was the noise of children crying but it gradually grew louder and was then joined by the sound of women screaming. This went on for some ten to fifteen minutes until, overcome with fear, he left his office.
A plaque dedicated to those who lost their lives can be seen above the entrance to the station and a further monument is in the process of being erected.
BRITISH MUSEUM
The British Museum Station, which has long been a disused ‘ghost’ station, was located on Bury Place near to the museum and was opened in July 1900 by the Central London Railway to service what came to be known as the Central Line. With Holborn Station (opened in 1906) less than 100 yards away, it was decided in 1933 to combine the two stations, and the platforms at British Museum Station were taken out of service. During the Second World War the platforms were bricked up to protect those sheltering from passing trains, though it would appear that these walls were later removed. British Museum Station was used as a military administrative office and emergency command post up to the 1960s. In 1989 redevelopment of the area saw the demolition of the station at street level.
Just before its closure a rumour was circulated that the ghost of an ancient Egyptian haunted the station dressed in a loincloth and headdress. He would emerge late at night and walk along the disused platform wailing as he went. It was said the he was in search of a mummy, possibly a lost princess. As the story grew it caught the attention of a national newspaper who offered a cash reward for anyone who would dare spend a night in the station, although no one took up the challenge.
The ghost story was related to the curse of Amen-Ra’s tomb. Princess Amen-Ra, known as the ‘Unlucky Mummy’ because of the disasters associated with it, died in 1050 BC. The coffin of the Egyptian princess arrived at the British Museum in 1889 and the label on the lid read ‘Painted wooden mummy-board of an unidentified woman’. It should be noted that the British Museum claim that they only ever had the coffin lid, not the mummy.
However, the plot thickens. As the Titanic crossed the Atlantic in April 1912 the English journalist and passenger William T. Stead told a ghost story about an Egyptian mummy and the translation of an inscription on the mummy’s case. The inscription warned that anyone reciting it would meet a violent death. Worse still, the mummy was on the Titanic because it had been sold to an American archaeologist who arranged for its removal to New York. The story that circulated was that seven of the eight men who heard the story, and Stead himself as narrator, went down with the ship.
By 1980 the Washington Post (17 August 1980) made reference to it when attempts were being made to salvage remains of the Titanic: ‘Some hunters have spoken darkly of the famous mummy that was allegedly on board, saying it transferred the curse of all who disturbed its grave to the vessel’s maiden voyage and to all search efforts.’
The 1933 film Bulldog Jack added to the myth that the British Museum Station was haunted by an Egyptian ghost. The film, a comedy thriller starring Ralph Richardson, Fay Wray and Jack Hulbert, involved a plan to steal a valuable necklace, but this all went wrong once the robbers were in the British Museum. The film climaxes in an exciting chase on a runaway train in the London Underground, which also features a secret passage leading into a sarcophagus in the museum.
The idea of an Egyptian ghost dressed in loincloth and headdress looking for a (dubious) mummy on the platform of a station somewhat stretches the imagination. Nonetheless, it is testimony to the power of the press to generate a good, but fictitious, story – something the press has long been very adept at doing.
COVENT GARDEN
Covent Garden Underground Station was opened on 11 April 1907 and is now on the Piccadilly Line. The platforms are accessed primarily by lift (an important point in relation to a ghostly experience which took place here). Moves are afoot (in 2009) to redevelop parts of the station to cope with the heavy use of commuters and tourists.
Covent Garden had a popular and influential minister in the Revd Dr John Cumming (1807–81) who spent much of his time preaching prophecies about the end of the world. In 1860 he commented that, ‘…the forthcoming end of the world will be hastened by the construction of underground railways burrowing into infernal regions and thereby disturbing the Devil.’
The area has a long association with the theatre and the oldest of these is the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. It was this association that provided one of the most famous ghosts of the Underground, that of actor William Terriss (1847–97). Terriss, whose real name was William Charles James Lewin, was a popular leading actor of melodramas as well as being a dapper and fashionable man known for sporting trademark white gloves and a cape. Despite him being the darling of audiences he clearly had enemies who envied his success. One particular enemy was Richard Archer Prince, jealous of the recognition that Terriss was getting.
Prince was a struggling actor who had become increasingly mentally unstable and had acquired the nickname ‘Mad Archer’. The last straw came on 16 December 1897 when Prince received a letter from the Actors Benevolent Fund (ABF) stating that they were ending the allowance they had been giving him. In his anger Prince went to the Adelphi Theatre where he knew Terriss had his own private entrance and waited for him to turn up for the evening performance. As Terriss entered, Prince ran towards him and stabbed him three times with a knife. A crowd quickly pounced on Prince whilst a doctor attended to Terriss, but the actor died a few minutes later. Prince had somehow convinced himself that Terriss had been responsible for the ending of the money he had received from the fund. A plaque on the wall by the stage door of the Adelphi Theatre commemorates Terriss. At his trial on 13 January 1898 the jury declared Prince to be guilty but not responsible for his actions, and he was sent to Broadmoor.
The ghost of Terriss reputedly haunts both the Adelphi Theatre and Covent Garden Station. Many staff at the station have reported incidents after it has been closed to passengers at night with the ghost manifesting itself in a number of ways. The sound of disembodied gasps and sighs, knockings in the lift and sightings of a ghost-like image of a man were some of the manifestations. Peter Underwood, probably Britain’s leading authority and writer on the paranormal, recorded in his book, Haunted London (1975), an account told to him by an Underground ticket collector, Jack Hayden. On a cold November night in 1955 after the last train had gone Jack was locking the gates when he suddenly saw a tall, distinguished man with a very sad face and sunken cheeks ascending the emergency stairs towards him. When Jack realised the man might be locked in, he shouted to him to wait and he would let him out. However, by the time Jack undid the gate the man was nowhere to be seen. Four days later Jack saw the man again wearing an old-fashioned grey suit and some light-coloured gloves. Jack asked the figure if he needed the cloakroom but he did not answer and just moved away and disappeared within seconds. Understandably Jack was reluctant to tell anyone of his experience for fear of ridicule. It was only another few days after the second sighting that Jack and one of the guards heard a screaming noise with no one apparently around to make it.
Jack described the ghost to an artist who drew an image of the man which was then passed on to Psychic News. They in turn looked through photographs which they showed Jack, who recognised the man he saw in the Underground. It was William Terriss. This story is also born out by a similar experience to that in a Channel 5 documentary, Ghosts of the Underground (2006). Another ex-Underground worker, a lift operator, described seeing a tall man in old-fashioned clothes in 1972. Like Jack Hayden, when he was shown a photograph of William Terriss, he instantly recognised it as the man he had seen.
Covent Garden Station opened in 1907 and has a typical Leslie Green-designed frontage. The distance between here and Leicester Square Tube is the shortest between any two stations on London’s underground system.
Has the ghost of William Terriss finally decided to rest forever?
There have been no reported sightings of the ghost of Wiliam Terriss since. From the 1960s traffic congestion had become a huge problem and the area was threatened with major redevelopment, but a public outcry pressured the Home Secretary, Robert Carr, in 1973 to give listed building status to many of the surrounding buildings. It may be that William’s ghost came to rest but as changes to develop the station are due to take place it may provoke the ghost of Terriss into a new burst of activity.
FARRINGDON
Farringdon Station is located close to Smithfield Market and is famously haunted by the ghost of thirteen-year-old Anne Naylor, who was brutally murdered in the eighteenth century. The station was opened in January 1863 as the terminus for the original Metropolitan Railway from Bishop’s Road, Paddington – the world’s first underground railway. This area has witnessed tournaments, duels, the huge Smithfield meat market nearby, the debauchery and rowdiness of Bartholomew Fair (1133–1855) and executions, both hangings and burnings. It is also the site of a plague pit. Smithfield is one of London’s most historic districts, but seems relatively unvisited by tourists.
In 1758 Anne Naylor and her sister, along with five other girls from parish workhouses, were apprenticed as milliners to Sarah Metyard and her daughter, Sarah Morgan Metyard. Anne was described as being of a sickly disposition and found the work difficult and could not keep up with the other girls. She was singled out by the evil Sarah Metyard and daughter who punished her with barbaric and repeated acts of cruelty, made all the worse when she tried to escape. Some of the other girls saw Anne’s body tied with cord and hanging from the door. They cried out to the sadistic women to help her but Anne only received more beatings with a stick and hearth brooms. Poor Anne was locked up alone, bruised, exhausted and starved, and within a few days she died. Her body was carried into the garret and locked up in a box where it was kept for upwards of two months, until it had putrefied and was crawling with maggots.
Eventually the mother removed the body, tried to cut it into pieces and then carried it to what is now Charterhouse Street – close to Farringdon Station. She was unable to get rid of the body parts and she dumped them in the grate of a sewer. The remains were later discovered by a night-watchman who reported it to the ‘constable of the night’.
Four years had passed after Anne’s murder and it seemed that she would be denied retribution and justice for her brutal murder. It was, however, the continual disagreements between the mother and daughter which proved to be their downfall. The young Sarah Metyard wrote a letter to the overseers of Tottenham Parish informing them about the murder and both mother and daughter were subsequently arrested. The Metyards were also indicted for the wilful murder of Mary Naylor, Anne’s sister, aged eight years.
Both mother and daughter were sentenced to be executed at Tyburn (near to where Marble Arch now stands) and then taken to the Surgeon’s Hall to be dissected in public, a form of aggravated punishment. On Monday 19 July they were led from Newgate Prison in a cart on the two-mile journey to Tyburn. The mother was described as being in a fit during the journey and left ‘this life in a state of insensibility’. As for her daughter, she wept incessantly from leaving Newgate until the moment of her death on the scaffold. After the execution both were ‘conveyed in a hearse to Surgeons’ Hall, where they were exposed to the curiosity of the public, and then dissected.’
One would like to believe that Anne Naylor found peace but it appears her tormented soul wanders Farringdon Station where she has been nicknamed the ‘Screaming Spectre’. Over the years there have been regular reports of the ghost of Anne, the sound of her screams echoing down the platform, and passengers claiming to hear the screaming of a young girl as the last train leaves the station at night.
Farringdon frontage. This is a very historic station, being the city-end of the world’s first underground railway. The building here dates from 1923.
Commuters and others claim to have witnessed a ghost in Farringdon Station’s passages and platforms.
The boarded-up and inconspicuous entrance to the Highgate Tunnel on the former Alexandra Palace branch.
The ‘Ally Pally’ Branch. This footpath was fashioned out of the old Great Northern Railway branch line to Alexandra Palace. This is a spooky place on a dark night. No wonder ghost trains are heard.
JUBILEE LINE
From the start the building of the Underground has frequently disrupted old burial sites. In more recent times one such disruption has been that of the Cross Bones burial ground at Redcross Way, between London Bridge Station and Borough Station. The burial ground was excavated by archaeologists between 1991 and 1998 as a result of the extension to the Jubilee Line.
The Cross Bones graveyard lies behind a vacant plot of land enclosed by London Underground boards. Building work in the 1920s led to the exhumation of many bones, as did work in the 1990s for a new substation for the Jubilee Line. The medieval burial ground provided a final resting place for the poor of St Saviour’s Parish in Southwark.
The area around was well known for its ‘stews’, or brothels, and London historian John Stow (1525–1605) wrote in 1603 that the graveyard was used for ‘single women’ – prostitutes referred to at the time as ‘Winchester Geese’ because they lived in and operated from dwellings owned by the Bishop of Winchester. By the nineteenth century the area was overcrowded and disease-infested as well as a popular haunt for criminals. Not surprisingly many paupers were interred in the burial ground. It was closed in 1853 because it was not only overcrowded but also a threat to public health.
Cross Bones Graveyard.
As more sites are disturbed increased sightings of ghosts are reported; particularly accounts of phantom monks walking the tracks have begun to emerge. However, attempts are made to respect the remains of the dead in such burial sites. For example, Southwark Council was refused planning permission in 2002 for three office blocks to be erected on the graveyard, and future plans hold out the hope that an area will be reserved to serve as a Cross Bones memorial park.
KENNINGTON
Kennington, which opened in 1890, was an intermediate station on the City & South London Railway, the world’s first electric tube railway. A feature of Kennington which is little-known to the travelling public is the Kennington Loop. This was built as a means of ensuring that the paths of trains on both the southbound routes of the Northern Line do not conflict where they come together at Kennington. After ensuring that all passengers have been detrained, the drivers of the terminating trains then advance into the single-line tunnel which plunges under the Morden route and then literally loops back on itself so that northbound Charing Cross line trains are now facing in the right direction without having caused any conflicting traffic movements.
Most train crew do not like the Loop. Its sharp curves mean that the wheels emit a loud and irksome flange-squeal accentuated by the narrow confines of the tube. More sinister, however, are the frequent reports from train crews about the threatening atmosphere in the Loop. Although passengers are never allowed to travel round the Loop, the men and women working trains along this piece of line are sometimes seriously disconcerted by not always being sure they are alone. The worst place for mysterious sounds and an evil atmosphere is when the empty trains are standing at the signal awaiting clearance to enter the Charing Cross platform. Tube trains are, of course, one-person operated, but a number of drivers who have followed procedure and ensured that all passengers have alighted at the southbound side platform, have heard the sound of doors between the carriages being opened and closed while their trains were waiting at the signals to enter the Charing Cross platform. Who or what opened and closed these doors?
The line from the Charing Cross direction disappearing into the Kennington Loop.
Stockwell. This may look like any other tube station but what secrets lurk in the tunnel on the left?
LIVERPOOL STREET
The first underground trains began running from Liverpool Street Station in 1875. The station stands on the site of the Bethlehem Royal Hospital which was founded in 1247 as the Priory of St Mary Bethlehem. In 1676 the hospital moved to a site close by at Moorfields and it began to be known as ‘Bedlam’. It made a lot of money from allowing paying visitors to watch the antics of the inmates and to egg them on to perform obscene and repulsive acts, all of which the patrons found highly diverting.
The station precincts are supposedly haunted by the screams of a woman said to have been incarcerated in Bedlam in the 1780s although by this time the hospital had of course moved to Moorfields. Apparently this woman maintained a vice-like grip on a small coin despite every attempt that people made to persuade her to give it up. However, when she died some mean-minded member of staff stole it and she was therefore buried without her talisman. The screams are those of this former inmate whose ghost is presumably looking for the coin or trying to settle accounts with the person who stole it.
LONDON ROAD DEPOT
Few of the travelling public know of the existence of the London Road Depot of the Bakerloo Line. It stands near to St George’s Circus in the Lambeth district south of the Thames. It is hidden away from prying eyes below street level but is open to the elements. The depot remains in use for stabling rolling stock.
Bakerloo Line staff have provided many reports of strange noises and unexplained appearances around the depot and most especially in the connecting tunnel. In the sidings in the small hours of the morning repeated metallic-sounding tapping noises have been heard as if an old-fashioned wheel-tapper was at work. This has happened on innumerable occasions at times when no maintenance work was being done on the rolling stock. More disturbing have been the shadowy figures seen passing hither and thither in the sidings, often disappearing into the entrance tunnel. Witnesses have never managed to get a good look at them – the apparitions keep their distance and have been described as ‘blurred round the edges’. The appearance of these figures is apparently more disconcerting and puzzling than actually menacing. Was there a burial pit in the vicinity which was disturbed when the Bakerloo Line was built?
Another apparition in the area is that of a nun. She is thought to have been connected with a nearby convent school.
MARBLE ARCH
Marble Arch on the deep-level tube Central London Railway opened on 30 July 1900. Marble Arch stands close to the spot where at least 50,000 people met their deaths between the twelfth century and 1783. This was Tyburn, London’s main place of public execution.
There is talk of a mysterious figure at Marble Arch who rides up – never down – the escalator. In 1973 a lady passenger alighted at platform level and then made her way towards the exit. It was a quiet time of the day and she was the last person to alight from the train and the last onto the escalator. Letting the escalator move her, she was nearly at the top when she became uneasy, aware of a figure that had noiselessly stolen up right behind her. Not liking to turn her head round completely, out of the corner of her eye she saw what she described as a man, all in black, with a trilby and long, expensive-looking overcoat. His presence so close behind her was menacing. She looked ahead again as she moved off the escalator but then, succumbing to the need to satisfy her curiosity, she turned round again for a proper look. The figure had vanished! As she plunged into the comforting mêlée of people outside the station in Oxford Street she knew someone or something had been there, but she was left wondering where it had come from and where it had gone.
One of the station name boards at platform level. The last time any change was made to this familiar design, seen all over the underground system, was in 1972.
Other users of the Central Line have had a similar experience at Marble Arch – always at times when the station is fairly quiet.
MOORGATE
In 1415 the wall of the City of London was pierced to make the Moor Gate, but the gate was eventually demolished in 1762. The first trains started running to a station in Moorgate in 1865 when the Metropolitan Railway was extended from what is now Farringdon. The Northern City Line part of the station was the scene of the worst ever accident involving a train on London’s Underground. The reason why the disaster occurred has never been satisfactorily established.
Just after a quarter to nine on the morning of 28 February 1975, a southbound train entered the terminal platform No.9 without showing any signs of decelerating, and it crashed at about 40mph into a thick concrete wall. A massive rescue and recovery operation was launched, working in appallingly hot and confined conditions. It took over four days to bring all the bodies out. Forty-three people died. Seventy-four were seriously injured.
The driver was an experienced, conscientious and reliable man. Eyewitnesses seconds before the crash said that they had seen him in his cab, upright and looking fixedly ahead, apparently unaware of the wall of death towards which he was careering in such a headlong fashion. The verdict was accidental death. The mysteries surrounding this appalling catastrophe led some people to seek a paranormal explanation. Did the driver see an apparition? It was probably inevitable that people would appear announcing that they had seen ghosts in this part of Moorgate Station. Others declared that the station had a history of hauntings and strange apparitions. Certainly during the winter of 1974–75, shortly before the disaster, a gang of engineers on the night shift in the Northern City tunnels at the approach to Moorgate saw a figure in blue overalls approaching them. As it got nearer they saw that his face bore a look of appalled horror, but before they could see him too closely, he vanished. All were unanimous in stating that they thought it was the apparition of a line maintenance worker who had been run down and killed by a train on this stretch of line some time earlier. Some believed the disaster was caused by this apparition which had startled and distracted the driver. Others said that the ghost the men had seen earlier was a premonition of the impending disaster.
VAUXHALL
The Victoria Line was a long time coming. Most of the line opened in March 1969 and the extension south to Brixton on which Vauxhall is located opened in 1971.
The platform now served by suburban trains operated by First Capital Connect which witnessed the horrors of the Moorgate disaster.
While the line was being built, a mysterious figure described as being at least 7ft tall, wearing brown overalls and a cloth cap, was seen on a number of occasions in the workings. At that height he was bound to be a bit scary, but he never allowed any of the bolder building workers to get too close to him. This ghost became eminent enough to have an article devoted to him in an edition of The People in December 1968. No conclusions were ever reached about who or what he was or what he was doing down there.