The Royalist Earl had been executed in 1649 at Palace Yard, causing something of a sensation on the scaffold. He was a handsome man and dressed for his death in a white satin waistcoat and white satin cap, laced with silver. Handing the executioner £10, he instructed him to be careful of his clothes, adding, ‘And when you take up my head do not take off my cap!’ Whether the ghost’s head was seen wearing a white satin cap or not I do not know, but there were said to be three spots of blood on the side of the recess for the secret door from which the ghost emerged to walk slowly through the scenes of former triumphs — three spots of blood that nothing would ever efface.
The best-known ghost story associated with old Holland House, however, was related to John Aubrey, the antiquarian, in his Miscellanies published in 1696. He relates that the beautiful Lady Diana Rich, daughter of the Earl of Holland, walking in the fresh air of her father’s garden before dinner, ‘being then very well’, met with an apparition of herself, identically dressed, as if she were facing a looking-glass. About a month later, Aubrey says, the Lady Diana died of smallpox. And furthermore, he adds, that ‘’tis said that her sister, the Lady Isabella Thynne, saw the like of herself also before she died’. Aubrey states that he had these accounts from a ‘Person of Honour’, but he was a credulous man and his appetite for folklore and gossip make his miscellaneous writings somewhat unreliable. Yet in her history of Holland House, published in 1875, the Princess Marie Liechenstein adds that a third sister, Mary, married to the first Earl of Breadalbane, not long after her wedding, had a similar warning of her approaching death and that it was an accepted fact that whenever a mistress of Holland House met herself, death hovered about her.
KENSINGTON PALACE, KENSINGTON
Kensington Palace, so-named from the adjoining district, was purchased by King William III in 1689 for £18,000 from Daniel Finch, second Earl of Nottingham, and the king often held councils at the palace. It was the birthplace of Queen Victoria who was living there when she succeeded to the throne. Her nursery is amongst the rooms now open to the public. Queen Mary, consort of George V, was also born at Kensington Palace and it was the residence of Queen Anne, George I and George II. It was at this palace that King William III (1702) and his consort Queen Mary (1694), Queen Anne (1714) and George II (1760) all died.
George II and his consort Caroline of Anspach were devoted to the palace and the ailing king would often raise himself to gaze from the window of his room at the curious old weathervane with its conjoined cyphers of William and Mary, high up over the main entrance to the palace. Especially during his last illness in October 1760, the irritable and choleric king (who like the other exiled monarch at Kensington Palace, William III, preferred his native country to the one over which he was called to rule) would look towards the weather-vane, hoping for winds from the right quarter to speed the ships conveying long-overdue despatches from his beloved Hanover.
The despatches arrived at last, but too late for the king, who died on 25 October 1760, still struggling to watch the weathervane, and when there are strong winds blowing the ashen face of the king is still said to be seen gazing up at the weathervane as he did over 200 years ago. There lingers still an air of sadness about the old palace and it was not difficult to imagine that the ghost of the old king returns from time to time to the room in which he died.
Kensington Palace was later the residence of Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon and their family and also Prince Michael of Kent. When Princess Margaret was once asked whether she had ever seen the ghost of George II she replied, ‘I’m afraid not, but I live in hope.’
NORTH KENSINGTON
Many people have said to me that they can accept the possibility of ghosts (although the clothes ghosts wear are sometimes a problem) and stretching credence to the limit, most people accept the possibility (however remote) of animal ghosts, but ghosts of inanimate objects seem beyond possibility. Yet there is evidence for ghostly objects that bears examination and a case in point is the ghost bus of North Kensington.
The junction of St Mark’s Road and Cambridge Gardens, near Ladbroke Grove Station, was a dangerous one and the scene of many fatal accidents. It was here that the Number 7 buses turned quickly into Cambridge Gardens and many motorists not familiar with the area were forced to brake sharply and not a few had minor accidents until the borough council arranged for the removal of part of the garden of a corner house to facilitate safer driving.
Before this was done there were many reports of a strange bus, with the lights on but with no visible driver or passengers, which raced down St Mark’s Road in the middle of the night when no scheduled bus was running. There was more than one case of a car crashing at this corner, the driver complaining bitterly that he was avoiding a bus that he found had disappeared when he turned to see what had become of it.
A member of the staff of a nearby garage reported that several motorists had remarked on how late the buses ran and told him that they had seen one after midnight in St Mark’s Road, and once he had been surprised to see a bus pull up at the garage late at night but when he looked again it was nowhere in sight. He had neither heard it arrive nor heard it depart.
Following one fatal accident, a Paddington inquest heard evidence for the phantom bus and discovered that dozens of residents claimed to have seen it and hundreds more believed in the startling apparition.
One resident of St Mark’s Road who lived near the junction told me that he and his wife had seen the bus at least half a dozen times and they often stayed awake at night till after one o’clock to see whether a crash or sudden screech of brakes would tell them that yet another night motorist had encountered the disappearing bus, where no real buses now run.
Another man told me that he had been crossing the road, his back to St Mark’s Road, when a car approaching the deserted junction suddenly veered to the side of the road and mounted the pavement before coming to a jolting halt. Thinking that the driver must have been taken ill, my informant hurried to the car to find the white and shaken driver swearing and cursing about the driver of a bus that had come round the comer quickly and forced him on to the pavement. He asked what had happened to the bus, but my informant told him that he had seen no bus and certainly the roads were now totally deserted.
After the junction had been altered and made more safe, the phantom bus ceased to run, so perhaps this is an example of a ghost with a purpose and when the dangerous comer was rectified there was no need for the ghost bus to put in an appearance.
THE OLD BURLINGTON, CHISWICK
The Old Burlington, Church Street, Chiswick, was once an Elizabethan alehouse that was frequented by Dick Turpin. He is reputed to have leapt from an upstairs window straight on to the back of faithful Black Bess and so evaded once again the Bow Street Runners, those forerunners of the Metropolitan Police. The ghost at the Old Burlington is called ‘Percy’ and he appears in a wide-brimmed black hat and long cloak. Previous occupants of the inn described him as ‘good-humoured and harmless’ and although there are occasional reports that he has been seen in the bar and at the back of the inn, no one seems afraid of this harmless shape from the past.
WALPOLE HOUSE, CHISWICK
Walpole House in Chiswick Mall has long been reputed to be haunted by the ghost of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, who died here from dropsy in her sixty-ninth year. She lived at the fine seventeenth-century house during the latter part of her life, in the company of her grandson Charles Hamilton, the son of one of her daughters by the Duke of Hamilton (whose father was killed in a duel by the ‘wicked’ Lord Mohun). Barbara Villiers married Roger Palmer in 1659 when she was eighteen and he was made Earl of Castlemaine two years later. She became mistress of Charles II within a year of her marriage and she had great influence with the king for about ten years — until he met pretty Nell Gwynne.
Created Duchess of Cleveland in 1670, Barbara Villiers’ influence faded with her beauty and her last years, during which she swelled gradually to ‘a mon
strous bulk’ were full of sadness as she spent more and more time remembering the gaiety and immorality of her youth. Five of her numerous children were acknowledged by Charles II and the sons became the dukes of Cleveland, Grafton and Northumberland.
She always wore high heels and the sound of her steps have been heard many times on the stairway where she would walk, gazing wistfully out of the tall windows of the drawing room. Sometimes she would raise her hands to the wide sky and beg for the return of her beauty. For two and a half centuries, that tap-tap of her heels and the appearance of her form have been reported from time to time at Chiswick House. These phenomena occur particularly on stormy, moonlit nights when the sad and bloated face has been seen pressed against the window, and the hands, clasped in despair, epitomize the forlorn plea that she repeated so often. After a while, the face is withdrawn from the window, the click of fading footsteps is heard for a moment amid the rain and wind and then silence reigns again over this house of memories.
WESTMINSTER CATHEDRAL, VICTORIA
In July 1966, the cathedral official in charge of sacred vessels and vestments of this English Roman Catholic Metropolitan church, reported seeing a ‘black-robed figure’, which disappeared near the high altar as the sacristan approached. It actually disappeared before his eyes, seeming to melt into nothingness. A spokesman at Cardinal Heenan’s London residence said afterwards that ‘an extensive search of the cathedral, both inside and outside, failed to yield any clue and police dogs failed to pick up any scent.’ ‘Officially’ the statement continued, ‘we do not support the theory that it was a ghost but that possibility has been mentioned.’ After including this report in my Gazetteer of British Ghosts, published in 197I, I received a letter from a reader who stated that she personally knew four people who had seen unexplained figures in Westminster Cathedral, but the subject was frowned upon by the cathedral officials.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LONDON GHOSTS, SOUTH OF THE RIVER
THE ANCHOR TAP, BERMONDSEY
An elusive ghost haunts The Anchor Tap, Bermondsey, where successive licensees have reported objects disappearing and reappearing in the oddest places. The ghost is called ‘Charlie’, a name that has no more reason than the ghost’s actions.
BATTERSEA
In 1956, fifteen-year-old Shirley Hitchins of Battersea was plagued by poltergeist phenomena for about a month. The disturbances began when a key (which did not fit any of the locks in the house in Wycliffe Road) suddenly appeared on Shirley’s bed.
Soon afterwards she was reporting that her bedclothes were being tugged from her as she lay in bed; knockings were heard; rappings and tappings sounded about the house and furniture moved of its own accord.
One night, in an effort to obtain a good night’s rest, Shirley slept with a neighbour, Mrs Lily Love, who said afterwards, ‘She spent a night with us but none of us got any sleep because of the noise. We were all very scared.’
Alarm clocks and china ornaments moved without being touched by human hand; a poker flew across a room; Shirley’s wrist watch was pulled off her arm and fell to the floor. One night, her father, Walter Hitchins, a London Transport motorman, decided to sit up with his brother and watch for developments. After Shirley had gone to bed in her mother’s room all was quiet for a while and then came the tapping that seemed to originate from the bed that Shirley was occupying. The rappings went on for a long time. Then Shirley, who was still awake, said that the bedclothes were being pulled from her, and her father and his brother took hold of the clothes and felt them being tugged with considerable force. Shirley’s hands were outside the bedclothes.
While this was going on both men and Shirley’s mother saw that the girl was being lifted bodily out of the bed. She was rigid and about six inches above the bed. They lifted her out and stood her on the floor. Shirley explained that she felt a powerful force pushing into the centre of her back and lifting her up. She did not know that her body was rigid. This levitation occurred only once.
The mysterious rapping even followed Shirley on buses when she went to her work at a West End store and, distressed by lack of sleep, she was sent to the firm’s doctor who was sceptical — until he too heard the raps. As with most poltergeist cases, the disturbances abated and then ceased, without anyone being able to explain what had caused them.
BETHLEHEM HOSPITAL, LAMBETH (DEMOLISHED)
The old Bethlehem Hospital was haunted when it stood at the comer of St George’s Road and Lambeth Road, having been moved there from Moorfields in 1815 where it had stood since 1675. Before then it had stood on the present site of Liverpool Street Station — the hated ‘Bedlam’, a home for the mentally afflicted and one of the ‘sights of London’, open to anyone who cared to promenade and poke fun at the unfortunate inmates. Edward Oxford was confined to Bedlam for trying to shoot Queen Victoria in 1840; Jonathan Martin, who set fire to York Minster in 1829; Margaret Nicholson, who tried to stab George III (she died at the institution after forty-two years’ confinement); James Hadfield died there after being confined for thirty-nine years for shooting at George III at Drury Lane Theatre; all were restricted behind gates decorated with figures of Raving and Melancholy Madness. Today, the Imperial War Museum occupies the site, and parts of the building date back to ‘Bedlam’ as the shape of some of the rooms reveal, and it is not difficult to imagine the shackled and chained patients groaning and screaming in their agony of despair. During the Second World War, a detachment of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force was stationed in Harmsworth Park with barrage balloons. An officer has recounted that the crews — girls from different parts of the country who knew nothing of the history of the building where they had sleeping quarters — were so frightened and complained so bitterly and repeatedly about groaning noises, shrieks and the sound of rattling chains, that in the end they were taken out of the building and the few men then working there were put inside. However, the same thing happened, and eventually, as no one would sleep near the building because of the noises, Nissen huts were put up in the grounds.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century, a handsome young Indian lodged for a time at the house of a merchant near London Bridge, where a pretty young girl named Rebecca fell head over heels in love with him, fondly thinking that he felt the same way about her.
She was sadly shocked one day when her ‘prince’ packed up his things and prepared to leave. Although no word had ever been spoken on either side Rebecca couldn’t believe that he was really going away or that he didn’t really love her as much as she felt she loved him.
She helped with the luggage and then stood on the threshold of the house, hoping and longing for some sign of affection. Instead, she felt a sovereign slipped into her hand and the light of her life disappeared for ever. Reality was such a shock that her brain gave way and she was committed to Bedlam where the harsh treatment of those days soon killed the body that had no will to live.
Ever since she had been given the sovereign, she had never again opened the hand that held it and when she died it was still clutched fast in her dead fingers, a fact that did not escape the keen eye of a keeper who managed to prise open the cold fingers and steal the golden coin. Consequently, Rebecca was buried without the one thing that she prized above everything, the thing that had belonged to the person she really loved.
Soon after her death the form of a wan and miserable ghost began to haunt the old hospital, seemingly looking for the stolen coin. For years afterwards keepers, inmates and visitors would catch an occasional glimpse of the pathetic Rebecca, silently searching and fading into oblivion whenever she was approached.
THE BISHOP’S HOUSE, SOUTHWARK
Dr Mervyn Stockwood, Bishop of Southwark, twice saw the ghost that haunts, or haunted, the Bishop’s House. This is an elderly woman, sad-looking and silent, who is always seen in one particular part of the house. The bishop, who was sensitive in a psychic sense, not infrequently knew the main contents of a letter before he opened the envelope and sometimes found tha
t he knew what a person was going to say to him before the visitor spoke. Dr Stockwood was interested in psychical phenomena for over twenty years and regularly practised silent meditation. He wrote articles about the subject in The Times and addressed the Society for Psychical Research. He once told me that he believed the ‘ghost’ at his house to be the tangible expression of a memory that became identified with a particular place. An interesting theory that could account for a number of similar ‘hauntings’.
The bishop discovered that an old Polish woman had died in the Bishop’s House. She had fled from her native land and had always been most unhappy in England. He feels that it might be the ‘memory’ of this sad old lady who walked along a corridor and appeared in one room, which she had occupied during her unhappy sojourn in Southwark. Dr Stockwood was quite happy with his ghost. She did no harm, but his cook became very worried about the apparition and — deciding that it would be easier to get a new ghost than a new cook — he performed a service of exorcism, and did not see the ghost again.
CENTURY CINEMA, CHEAM
There is, or was, a haunted cinema in South London: the Century at Cheam where members of the staff and visitors have heard noises that they could not account for. When the cinema was built in the 1930s a workman disappeared mysteriously without collecting his wages. His lunch-bag and hat and coat were found hanging on a nail near the part of the building that became the stage. He seems to have disappeared without trace and there was speculation as to whether something happened to him that never came to light.
Haunted London Page 16
