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Understandably Heaven was always the preferred destination to Hell or Purgatory and it was believed that certain people got there faster than others and did so without suffering the pains of Purgatory. Amongst those fast-tracked in this way were religious martyrs.
Sources such as funeral sermons, condolence letters, printed broadsheet epitaphs and inscriptions on tombs and monuments give details about the assumed destination of the deceased. The epitaph of John Jarret, a grocer from Southwark who died in 1626, read ‘to heaven he is gone, the way before, Where of Grocers there is many more.’
Despite the best attempts of Protestants to abolish ‘Popish superstitions’, many people continued to believe in ghosts. Accounts of sightings of the deceased coming back to haunt the living were common among all classes.
A particular example of an apparition returning to warn someone of her impending death concerned the Duchess of Mazarine. The Duchess was one of the mistresses of Charles II and also a friend of Madame de Beauclair, mistress of James II. Many years after the Duchess died, her spirit visited Madame de Beauclair who recorded that her old friend looked ‘on me with her usual sweetness [and] said, “Beauclair, between the hours of twelve and one this night you will be with me.”’ Needless to say Beauclair died at the predicted time.
When the famous Tyburn gallows at the crossroads of Edgware Road and Oxford Street was mysteriously uprooted in 1678, there was much speculation about who or what had caused it to collapse. A partly humorous pamphlet, The Tyburn Ghost: Or the Strange Downfall of the Gallows, explained that the
most probable opinion is that it was ruined by certain Evil Spirits, perhaps the Ghosts of some who had formerly suffered there; for if persons killed retain so great an Antipathy against their Murderers, that scarce a Physician dares come near his expired Patient, lest the corpse should fall-a-Bleeding … it is reported … that there was seen last Tuesday-evening a Spirit sitting on one of the Cross-beams with its neck awry, making a strange noise.
In 1679 it was reported that the ghost of a midwife who had lived in Holborn returned to confess to the murder of two illegitimate children. These examples are clear evidence that efforts to root out belief in ghosts had been largely unsuccessful.
In more pragmatic tones Samuel Johnson stated a hundred years later that the existence of ghosts is a ‘question which after five thousand years is yet undecided.’ Johnson went further by stating that the possibility of such spectres was essential to the immortality of the soul. More critical was Henry Bourne, writing in Antiquitates Vulgares in 1725, who commented that stories of ghosts and spirits were nothing more than the ‘Fears and Fancies, and weak Brains of Men.’ Reformers continued to despair of the gullible multitude who were still prepared to accept such beliefs and those beliefs were fuelled by stories of ghostly apparitions in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays as well as the popular broadsheets, periodicals and coffee houses.
The Great Plague of 1665 generated many stories of ghosts around the lanes and alleys, particularly where known plague pits lay such as those at Finsbury Fields, Shoreditch, Smithfield, Moorfields, Bishopsgate Street, Stepney, Whitechapel and Aldgate. Bank tube station is reputed to be built on the site of a plague pit and has many associated tales of ghosts haunting the area.
One later tale, unrelated to the plague, was that of Sarah Whitehead who died in 1840 and who haunts the Bank of England. She is said to appear every twenty-five years wearing a black hooded cloak. She was the sister of an employee at the Bank, Philip Whitehead, who was found guilty of forgery and subsequently hanged in 1811. She was so distressed by his death that she not only lost her reason and believed that her brother would reappear, but also that the Bank owed her a fortune. When she died she was buried at St Christopher-le-Stocks which used to be adjacent to the Bank.
In the eighteenth century, sightings of ghosts ran paradoxically alongside Enlightenment attacks on superstition. Visitors to the city, such as the French Enlightenment writer and traveller Pierre-Jean Grosley, commented on the great fear of ghosts among Londoners. In 1779 thirty-five-year-old Lord Lyttleton of Berkeley Square was visited by a woman in white, one of many women he seduced, who told him that he would die within three days. Three days later Lyttleton died, thereby causing much gossip and prompting Samuel Johnson to declare that it was the ‘most extraordinary thing that has happened in my day.’ In 1746 Counsellor Morgan was executed but he later returned to a Council meeting at Westminster to bring revenge on those present. It was told that the ghost of Morgan made a haunting appearance after midnight walking awkwardly and accompanied by an ‘awful odour’. He then proceeded to address the meeting and the effect on those present was so great that a pamphlet reported: ‘they have never been in their senses since.’
The story of the Cock Lane Ghost of 1762 has been well documented. The house at No. 20 Cock Lane in Smithfield not only attracted large crowds of Londoners but also became a national wonder. William Kent and his ‘wife’ Frances came to London to seek lodgings. Richard Parsons offered to rent them a room in his house in Cock Lane. Kent confided that he and Frances were not married and that he had in fact eloped with his late wife’s sister. Kent loaned Parsons, an alcoholic, a large sum of money but when Parsons could not pay him back things turned nasty. Strange knockings and sounds were heard at the house, which Parsons attributed to the ghost of Kent’s wife. Parsons evicted Kent and the pregnant Frances. The latter contracted smallpox three months later and died. She was placed in a sealed coffin in the crypt of St John’s in Clerkenwell. The haunting at Cock Lane continued and a medium explained that this was the spirit of Frances, returning to inform the world she had been poisoned by Kent and that he should be hanged for murder. The crowds bayed for Kent’s execution whilst Parsons exploited the situation by charging people to attend séances at the bedside of his ‘possessed’ eleven-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Parsons.
A commission, which included Samuel Johnson, was appointed to investigate the events. Johnson spent a night in St John’s next to Frances’s coffin in the hope of hearing tapping. When the events at Cock Lane were eventually exposed as a fraud, Parsons, his wife, several neighbours and a newspaper editor were arrested and punished. Parsons was imprisoned and condemned to stand in the pillory three times at the end of Cock Lane. Perhaps surprisingly, it is believed that the crowd treated him with compassion on these occasions.
The churchyard of Christchurch Greyfriars in Newgate is the site of an ancient burial ground where the remains of ‘the she-wolf of France’, Queen Isabella, wife of the English King Edward II, lay. She instigated, with her lover Roger Mortimer, the murder of the King in September 1327. Isabella died in 1358 and was buried at Greyfriars, with the heart of Edward II. Her ghost is said to move amongst the trees clutching the heart of her murdered husband. Another ghostly figure in Greyfriars is that of Lady Alice Hungerford who also murdered her spouse. In 1523 she was executed by being boiled alive. As with Isabella, her ghostly figure has been sighted in the cloisters and aisles of the monastery.
The Tower of London is a notorious site for ghostly sightings and is considered one of the most haunted buildings in Britain. Among its eminent ghosts are Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey and the two boy Princes, Edward and Richard, generally believed to have been put to death there.
A frequent theme in paranormal circles is that of the ‘doppel-ganger’. This is a ghostly duplicate of the living observer, constituting a portent of their own death. One story from the seventeenth century relates to Lady Diana Rich, the young and beautiful daughter of the Earl of Holland. She was walking in the garden of her father’s house in Kensington when, to her horror, she spotted her absolute likeness. She was dead from smallpox within a month. If that was not enough, she had a sister who had the same experience shortly before she too suffered an untimely death and followed her sister to the grave.
Several theatres including the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, the Adelphi Theatre and the Palladium have their spectral regulars, as do many pubs. The
Spaniard’s Inn in Hampstead dates from 1585 and is reputed to be haunted by a number of ghosts including Juan Porero who died in a duel over a woman and whose body is buried in the garden; the highwayman Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard – the petty criminal and multiple prison escapee who was executed at Tyburn in 1724. The Grenadier in Belgravia is the assumed home of the ghost of a young guards officer who was flogged to death following the discovery that he had been cheating at a game of cards. He is particularly active around the anniversary of his death in September. The Gatehouse in Highgate dates back to 1306 and is haunted by Mother Marnes, who was murdered for her money. At the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich, built in 1837, a man is often seen sitting in the bar wearing Georgian dress. The Morpeth Arms in Pimlico, near the Tate Britain, was originally built in 1845 close to the Millbank Prison. A plaque records the story of a prisoner who was reputed to have tunnelled for months hoping to escape, but became trapped in the vaults beneath the pub and died. The Langham Hotel in Portland Place is haunted by the ghost of a Victorian doctor who committed suicide at the hotel after murdering his wife, and also the spirit of a German Prince who committed suicide by hanging himself from the balcony.
In the area of Tavistock Square and Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, a set of footprints are said to commemorate a tragic story from the eighteenth century. The first sighting of these imprints was recorded in 1778 in a letter from a Thomas Smith to John Warner. It concerned a duel between two brothers in 1686 over a woman and the letter commented that ‘the print of their feet is near three inches in depth and … the number of [prints] may be about 90.’ In the middle of the nineteenth century, the poet Robert Southey claimed to have counted twenty-six footprints. Garlick Hill in the City of London has been the location for the sighting of a grey figure holding its hands across its chest looking toward the altar of the church of St James Garlick Hythe. The ghost, who was nicknamed Jimmy Garlick, reputedly belonged to a mummified body found in 1855 in the vaults. Amongst various people to whom the corpse is ascribed is Dick Whittington whose cat is also said to haunt the church.
In 1803 the locals in Hammersmith were frightened by reports of a ‘malevolent ghost’. The white figure, which emerged from the gravestones, chased a pregnant woman who later died from shock. The spectre also frightened many other people as well as numerous animals. It was thought to be the ghost of a man who had committed suicide by cutting his throat a year previously. As the incidents continued, Francis Smith came to the belief that the ghost was someone playing a prank and he decided to wait for the joker. When he suddenly saw a figure walking towards him he shot at it with a gun but only succeeded in hitting and killing an unfortunate bricklayer, Thomas Millwood. Smith was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to a one-year prison sentence. A real hoaxer, James Graham, who went out wearing a white sheet, was actually arrested. Nonetheless sightings of the Hammersmith ‘ghost’ continued to be reported for many years after and on two occasions hoaxers were arrested.
The nineteenth century saw an upsurge of interest in activities such as spiritualism and mesmerism, and a culture that embraced death through ritual, art and literature. Such interest was reflected in the growth of societies and clubs dedicated to making contact with the dead. The Ghost Club, established in 1862, is one of the oldest existing organisations associated with psychic matters. It was formed by a group of London gentlemen with the intention of exposing fraudulent mediums, but also to investigate psychic phenomena. Its members have included the philosopher C.E.M. Joad, the biologist Julian Huxley and the novelists Algernon Blackwood and Sir Osbert Sitwell.
Although the work of people such as Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) and Franz Mesmer (1734–1815) provided earlier possibilities of direct personal knowledge of the afterlife, the history of modern spiritualism dates from the mid–nineteenth century in America and developed in England from the 1850s. Spiritualist churches and ‘home circles’ began appearing in Britain in 1865 and the British National Association of Spiritualists (renamed in 1884 as the London Spiritualist Alliance and now known as the College of Psychic Science) was founded in London in 1873. Despite the fact that many fraudulent people were attracted to the movement, it also attracted many genuine and notable members including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) and the physicist Oliver Lodge (1851–1940).
Premature Burial
The dread of being buried alive found expression in literature and burial instructions, such as those left by Lord Chesterfield in a letter to his daughter-in-law on 16 March 1769: ‘All I desire for my own burial is not to be buried alive’. Perhaps the most famous story is that by Edgar Allen Poe (1809–1849), The Premature Burial (1844), in which the sense of absolute terror is vividly portrayed in the book: ‘The unendurable oppression of the lungs – the stifling fumes of the damp earth – the clinging of the death garments … We know nothing so agonising upon earth – we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost Hell.’
Poe’s chilling story of premature burial reflected and reinforced a fear that had become pervasive among sections of society during the nineteenth century. Taphephobia – the fear of being buried alive – was mirrored in literature, medical journals, newspapers and in real-life stories. The fears were so real that anti-premature burial campaigns emerged. But what generated these fears? An important factor was the problem of actually defining death. Until at least the seventeenth century when a person died the signs of death were taken to be a cessation of the heartbeat and arterial pulsations. It was common for people not to be examined by a medical practitioner after death. Even in the nineteenth century there were doctors who were incompetent at diagnosing death. The difficulties of diagnosing death provided fuel for well-meaning alarmists who, on the scantiest of evidence, claimed that many people were being buried alive.
Jacques-Bénigne Winslow (1669–1760), the Danish anatomist, argued that the determining signs of death were too uncertain to be relied upon and that the onset of putrefaction was the only reliable indicator that an individual had died. From this conclusion he suggested that people were in imminent danger of being buried alive. He recommended a number of measures to ensure the certainty of death. For example, ‘the individual’s nostrils were to be irritated by introducing sternutaries, errhines, juices of onions, garlic and horseradish.’ He also suggested that gums were to be rubbed with garlic, and the skin be stimulated by the use of ‘whips and nettles,’ limbs could be violently pulled, and the ears shocked ‘by hideous shrieks and excessive noises’; warm urine might also be poured into the mouth. Failing these attempts the corpse might have the soles of the feet cut with razors and then long needles pushed under the toe-nails. Few people aping death would cope with these tests.
There were many cases of people who were believed to be dead but then discovered to be alive, fortunately before they were to be buried. John Stow recorded a case of a man executed for a felony in February 1587. He was taken to the Surgeons Hall near Cripplegate for anatomical dissection and found to be alive, although he only lived for a further three days. Anne Greene was ‘executed’ at Tyburn in 1740 only to recover in the anatomy theatre. Anne lived on for many years.
Judgement concerning death was often left to non-medical persons and a hasty burial was not uncommon, particularly at the time of epidemics when there was a desire to be rid of a body as quickly as possible. This was particularly so during the bubonic plague of 1665 when 68,576 deaths were recorded. This figure would certainly be much higher if unrecorded deaths were added. During the plague, a butcher in Newgate Street escaped a premature burial because the corpse bearers, either through an oversight or negligence, had not removed him from the room in which he died. During the night he recovered and came downstairs complaining that he felt cold. Doubtless his appearance gave his family quite a turn. He was more fortunate than many unlucky souls who must have been taken off in a cart to be dumped unceremoniously into one of London’s plague pits. In his Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe recor
ds a scene which could almost be out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail: a cart was being taken to Mill Hill with a pile of bodies to be disposed of when the driver heard someone shouting ‘Hey, where am I?’ On investigating the cry, the driver found a man among the tangle of bodies who asked ‘I ain’t dead am I?’
A less fortunate victim was Lawrence Cawthorne, a butcher in Newgate Market, who fell ill and was quickly buried. It was when people heard muffled screams and scratching coming from the tomb in the chapel where he was buried that Cawthorne’s dreadful fate was discovered. When the body was retrieved his shroud was torn to shreds, his eyes were swollen and, according to the version in The Most Lamentable Account and Deplorable Accident which … Befell Lawrence Cawthorne, his brains were ‘beaten out of his head.’ His premature burial had stemmed from the greed of his landlady who stood to inherit Cawthorne’s belongings. In her haste to despatch him she had quickly placed him in the tomb as soon as it was evident that he had fallen seriously ill. An account in A Full and True Relation of a Maid Living in Newgate Street in London (1680) records the tragic event of a sixteen-year-old maid who had lived in Newgate Street. She cried and screamed for four days from her burial place in a London cemetery but attempts to rescue her were sadly in vain.