Haunted London Underground

by David Brandon

  LIVERPOOL STREET

  Liverpool Street, as well as being a large, impressive and busy mainline terminus, is an important nodal point on the Underground being served by the tube Central Line and the Metropolitan, Circle and Hammersmith and City sub-surface lines. The first Underground trains here began running in 1875. They were operated by the Metropolitan Railway and at first ran into the Great Eastern Railway’s station. Soon afterwards they commenced running into the Metropolitan’s own station, then called ‘Bishopsgate’. In 1912 trains of the Central London Railway began to serve Liverpool Street.

  Liverpool Street Station stands on the site of the Bethlehem Royal Hospital which was founded in 1247 as the Priory of St Mary Bethlehem. It seems that the infirmary attached to the priory first started treating mental patients around 1377 although the methods they employed for therapy would strike us today as nothing less than barbaric. In 1676 the hospital moved to a site close by at Moorfields and it was then 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 other repulsive acts, all of which the patrons found highly diverting. William Hogarth (1697-1764) immortalised Bedlam when, in 1732-33, he painted a scene based on it as the eighth illustration in his pictorial saga The Rake’s Progress.

  Liverpool Street Station entrance from Bishopgate.

  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. However, an inconvenient little fact like that should never be allowed to get in the way of a good story. 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.

  Broad Street Station of the North London Railway was opened by 1865 adjacent to where the Great Eastern Railway Co. later opened its Liverpool Street Station. The building of Broad Street had required the disposal of huge numbers of human remains from a burial ground which stood in the way. Among the occupants had been John Lilburne (c.1614-1657), the radical political agitator who rose to prominence in the English Civil War, and Lodowick Muggleton (1609-1698), who founded a religious sect which he modestly named after himself and who argued, among other things, that the Devil became incarnate in Eve. They never had many adherents (although the last known Muggletonian, Philip Noakes, died in the late 1970s).

  In 1911-1912 engineers working on an extension of the Central London Railway came across densely packed masses of bones in the vicinity of Liverpool Street Station. Some years earlier, a passenger waiting for a train at Broad Street Station reported that a newspaper boy had casually asked him when he bought his paper if he would like a human skeleton as well.

  Is it not possible that the reports of horrible screaming heard around this complex of platforms and lines relate to one or more of the inmates of the nearby burial grounds, who are responding in the only way they know how to the disturbance of their resting place?

  MAIDA VALE

  As late as the early nineteenth century, Maida Vale was farmland with a few wooded areas and the occasional farmhouse. In the nineteenth century smart villas in sizeable grounds began to appear. The district began to be intensively developed for housing in the second half of the nineteenth century and by 1900 the mansion blocks which characterise Maida Vale were appearing, especially along the main arterial roads. In 1915 the Bakerloo Line Station opened, a tube station of course but actually built above ground.

  Nothing of the visible kind manifests itself at Maida Vale tube. However, there have been several witnesses who have talked about feeling invisible hands apparently placing their own hands onto the handrails as they have been coming up the escalators from platform to street level. The grip has been a firm one, pressing the hands down onto the rail but the feeling this strange sensation evokes is apparently not a fearful one. Rather, it is as if the person is being carefully and solicitously guided or steered for his or her own benefit.

  MARBLE ARCH

  Marble Arch on the deep-level tube Central London Railway opened on 30 July 1900. The line proved an immediate success with its passengers and quickly gained the nickname the ‘Twopenny Tube’, the twopenny flat fare proving to be a great draw. The Central London Railway can justifiably be described as the first modern tube line.

  There is talk of a mysterious figure at Marble Arch who rides up, but never down, the escalator. In 1973 a lady passenger alighted at platform level and then made her way in leisurely fashion towards the exit – she was in no hurry. 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 melee 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.

  Maida Vale Station. Watch out for the feel of an invisible hand as you hold the handrail on the escalator.

  Other users of the Central Line have had a similar experience at Marble Arch – always at times when the station is fairly quiet.

  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. Hanging days at Tyburn attracted huge crowds who came for the free entertainment provided by hearing the last dying speeches of the condemned felons and watching them in their death agonies. Those who were popular criminals and who went to their deaths with courage or even defiance were cheered by the crowds. Those found guilty of crimes that were disapproved of or who were visibly terrified of the ordeal they were about to undergo were scoffed at and abused. Although the bodies of some of those who met their death at Tyburn were taken away to be used by the surgeons for demonstration purposes, countless numbers were placed in unmarked burial pits close by and their remains have been unearthed from time to time during building work. It is believed that the body of Oliver Cromwell was among those unceremoniously dumped in one of these pits – minus its head, of course. A head said to be Cromwell’s is interred in a wall at Sidney Sussex College Chapel, Cambridge. The mystery of exactly what happened to Cromwell’s head is a conundrum which has fascinated historians and others for centuries.

  Large numbers of expensive flats and opulent mansions cluster around the Marble Arch and have views over the north-east corner of Hyde Park where the Tyburn scaffold and gallows stood. The exact spot is not known. Perhaps it is not surprising that there have been a number of reports from these affluent residents of the sounds of boisterous cheering and jeering. More striking have been the re-enactments they claim to have seen. These involve large crowds milling around the scaffold, always apparently dressed in the clothes of the eighteenth century. These apparitions, which are usually seen early in the morning, are fleeting and are followed by the appearance of mist.

  Station totem or name board at platform level. These familiar icons have developed over more than a century and the last time any alteration was made to the design was in 1972. Have any readers had spooky experiences leaving the platforms at Marble Arch and making their way up the escalators?

  MOORGATE

  In 1415 the wall of the City of London was
pierced to make the Moor Gate at a spot which edged a tract of somewhat marshy country called Moorfields. The idea was that the gate would improve communications via causeways to and from Islington and Hoxton. The gate was demolished in 1762. Moorgate Street, as it was then known, was built in the 1830s as part of a route connecting the City with London Bridge. The first trains started running to a station in Moorgate in 1865 when the Metropolitan Railway was extended from what is now Farringdon.

  Moorgate is a complicated Underground station. The sub-surface trains of the Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City Lines call at Moorgate, as do the tube trains on the Northern Line’s route via Bank. It hosts, in two entirely different parts of the station, National Rail trains currently operated by First Capital Connect. These provide services terminating at such places as Hertford North and Letchworth Garden City and also, during peak periods, trains to Bedford via St Albans and Luton. As far as King’s Cross the latter travel over what used to be called ‘The Widened Lines’.

  Those trains travelling to Hertford and Letchworth run along the tracks of the former Great Northern and City Railway as far as Finsbury Park. This was built as a tube railway but was unusual in being constructed to the main-line loading gauge. This route came to be known as the Northern City Line, having become part of the Northern Line in 1939. The northern terminus was cut back to Drayton Park in 1964. In the early 1970s, plans were afoot for the electrification of the British Railways suburban services out of King’s Cross and Moorgate and this included the Northern City Line. Late in 1975 this line was brought into the main-line system and converted to the overhead electricity pick-up system. 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.

  Moorgate Station.

  What happened was this. Just after a quarter to nine on the morning of 28 February 1975, a southbound train entered the terminal platform No. 9 without showing signs of decelerating and crashed at about 40mph into a thick concrete wall marking, literally, the end of the line. 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.

  Driver Newson was an experienced, conscientious and reliable man, known to be, if anything, ultra-cautious in his approach to work and absolutely scrupulous about observing all speed restrictions. The entrance to the platform at Moorgate had a 15mph speed limit. The driver had died in the crash, and immediately speculation erupted to the effect that he had been under the influence of drink or drugs or had fallen asleep at the controls. Taking pressure off the ominously named dead man’s handle would, of course, have brought the train to a swift halt. Was he bent on committing suicide and had he decided to take the train and its passengers with him? Tests on Newson revealed nothing untoward – nothing in his life outside work suggested a troubled mind. Nor was any technical fault found with the train or the signalling equipment.

  Seconds before the crash eyewitnesses 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 and the official inquiry found that the accident was solely caused by a lapse on the part of the driver. If this was the correct verdict then what caused the lapse in the first place?

  The mysteries surrounding this appalling catastrophe led some people to seek a paranormal explanation. Did Driver Newson see an apparition? As soon as discussion around this kind of possibility started, 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 1974-1975 and 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. They thought that the apparition was that of a line-maintenance worker who had been run down and killed by a train on this stretch of line some time earlier.

  When this incident came to light, some ‘explained’ the disaster by saying that Driver Newson must have seen this apparition and been so startled that he momentarily lost concentration. Others said that the ghost the men saw earlier was a premonition of the impending disaster.

  Moorgate First Capital Connect suburban platform, formerly Northern Line and scene of the Underground’s worst disaster.

  QUEENSBURY

  The Metropolitan Railway opened its branch line to Stanmore late in 1932. About two years later Queensbury Station opened, at first a very basic shanty-like building. The route was transferred to the Bakerloo Line in 1939 and then became part of the Jubilee Line in 1979. Queensbury is a perfect example of the suburbs which sprang up so quickly in the inter-war years. In this case much of the development took place on what had previously been an aircraft factory and associated airfield belonging to the De Havilland Co.

  In the 1980s a sensation was caused when reports came in that the figure of Sir Winston Churchill had been seen on the platform at Queensbury, apparently waiting for a train. Disappointingly it was never reported whether or not he actually got on the train. Churchill, who had died in 1965, was no devotee of public transport so the idea that his spirit was lurking around the Bakerloo Line seemed a trifle unlikely. However, it could be explained by the fact that apparently he once lived nearby.

  Statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square. Made of bronze, it was unveiled in 1973.

  ‘The Allies’. Unveiled in 1995 to commemorate fifty years of peace since the Second World War, this sculpture shows Sir Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in relaxed and chatty mode. This work can be seen in New Bond Street.

  RICKMANSWORTH

  Rickmansworth, or ‘Ricky’ as it known to its aficionados, was a small and little-known market town of ancient origins when the Metropolitan Railway arrived in 1887. A few well-to-do people making their livelihood in London built their villas there over the next thirty years but it was in the 1920s and 1930s that Rickmansworth blossomed and grew – never too fast – as a model for ‘Metroland’. It drew well-paid professional and mercantile men who wished to combine the financial and other advantages that employment in a world city brought with residence in a socially exclusive and sylvan near-rural neighbourhood which nevertheless had quick and easy rail access to central London.

  Trains from Baker Street approaching Rickmansworth pass a substantial fan of sidings used for stabling rolling stock on the north side of the line. These are known as the ‘South Sidings’. Rail workers have long reckoned that one of the stabling roads in these sidings is haunted. Over the years, threatening noises have been heard and invisible but menacing presences sensed on this particular siding. Train crew waiting for signals to leave the sidings and take up service have heard carriage doors slide open and close but without human agency. Occasionally an indistinct figure is seen out of the corner of an eye. Stories circulate that the sidings are built over the site of an ancient monastery but research does not confirm this. What then is the cause of these disquieting experiences?

  SOUTH KENSINGTON

  This stylish district contains a collection of museums built on land bought with profits from the Great Exhibition which was held in nearby Hyde Park in 1851. Prince Albert had been a major supporter of this highly successful international trade fair and after he died in 1861, the Albert Memorial and Albert Hall were erected in his memory. With some degree of irony, the district around Exhibition Road with its museums and places of learning gained the informal name ‘Albertopolis’. The residential parts of South Kensington are characterised by up-market terraces of white stuccoed four- or five-storey mansion
s. There are many French eating places and French cultural events taking place in this area.

  South Kensington opened in 1868 as an intermediate station on the sub-surface line operated by the Metropolitan Railway from Gloucester Road to Westminster. In 1871 trains of the Metropolitan District Railway also began to call. In 1907 platforms were opened on the deep-level tube Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway. The station is now served by the Circle, District and Piccadilly Lines.

  The rather scanty details of an underground ghost relate to a sighting in 1928 in the sub-surface part of South Kensington Station. A passenger alighting from the last train 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. So far, so good. The next bit is puzzling. According to the witness both locomotive and human figure then vanished into the covered way close by. Since this had no rails, this is somewhat puzzling. What did he see?

  STOCKWELL

  Stockwell is a district of London south of the Thames which can aptly be described as ‘cosmopolitan’. The station opened as the southern terminus of the City & South London Railway tube in 1890. In 1900 this line was extended to Clapham Common and in 1926 to Morden. In 1971 Stockwell became an interchange station when the Victoria Line to Brixton began to operate.