Shadows in the Steam

by David Brandon

  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.

  The mainline railway network of Greater London is one of extraordinary complexity. However, compared to the system in the provinces, London’s railways have escaped relatively unscathed from the welter of line and station closures which began during the First World War, continuing intermittently through the 1950s and then surging in the 1960s and ’70s, only to become thankfully much more intermittent since that time.

  There is something poignant about stations on which the lights have gone out forever. It is easy for us to imagine that the men and women who worked in these places, the passengers that went to and fro and perhaps even the trains themselves return in spectral form to the places with which they were once so familiar.

  There are a myriad such sites in London. A few suggestions might include the Seven Sisters to Palace Gates branch of the Great Eastern Railway, the branch from Nunhead to Greenwich Park, traces of the London, Chatham and Dover line from Nunhead to Crystal Palace High Level, the mothballed line between Epping and Ongar or the London & North Western Railway’s branch line from Harrow and Wealdstone to Stanmore Village. We can be sure that these and many similar places have their ghosts!

  CRYSTAL PALACE

  The district around Crystal Palace did have an underground railway of sorts, and a particularly interesting one. There have been reported sightings of ghosts associated with this railway.

  The Great Exhibition was held in Hyde Park in London in 1851. It was considered an enormous success at the time and unexpectedly large numbers of visitors flocked from all parts of Britain and many overseas places in order to enjoy the spectacle. Londoners and others took the Crystal Palace to their hearts and wanted it to stay in Hyde Park as a permanent fixture. However, this was impossible under the terms governing the staging of the exhibition and it was quickly dismantled when the exhibition closed. An enlarged version of the building was located at Sydenham Hill and the district round about quickly came to be known as ‘Crystal Palace’.

  The ‘ghost’ tram lines emerging into Kingsway from the old tram tunnel. It is well over fifty years since trams ran along these tracks.

  In 1864, about ten years after the relocation of the Crystal Palace, an experimental demonstration ‘pneumatic’ railway was built in the grounds. A passenger carriage ran on a broad-gauge track for a distance of 600 yards through a tunnel, quickly and silently. A return fare, expensive at 6d a time, proved no deterrent to those who wanted to sample this novel form of propulsion. The success of this small-scale operation encouraged a company to propose what would have been London’s first tube railway, one that would have run under the Thames. However, it was abandoned because of the financial crisis of 1866. The stub of this tunnel is apparently still in situ.

  A few years after its closure a myth developed that the carriage remained within the bricked-up tunnel at Crystal Palace and contained a grisly cargo of skeletal forgotten passengers. These physical human remains may have been unable to do anything about their predicament but their accompanying spirits were apparently highly indignant about being immured in this way and were waiting to exact revenge from the living. Traces of this tunnel could be seen for many years and in the early 1990s an edition of the New Civil Engineer carried an article with photographs taken many years earlier inside the tunnel. No abandoned carriage containing equally abandoned skeletons was to be seen, and if there were ghosts they chose not to manifest themselves. According to the article, no trace of the tunnel still survived. This has not prevented occasional reports of spectres in the vicinity.

  Between one and about five in the morning, the Underground system is closed and the current is switched off allowing an army of maintenance workers to patrol, check, fix and mend, to ensure that the next day’s services will be punctual and safe.

  The unmistakeable frontage of the closed station in Kentish Town Road.

  How spooky and atmospheric the labyrinth of tunnels, platforms, stairways, passages, sidings and shunting necks that make up the system must be when not in use. What lurks down there in the dark? Plenty of rats, for sure, but are there other entities, living and some perhaps deceased, that become active when the last passengers have been excluded for the night? Many stations have tunnels and passages that are sealed off from public use. What is behind those doors?

  At least the active stations come back to life in the morning to serve the needs of the capital but there are many stations on the underground system that have lain dormant for many years. Among former stations with substantial remaining evidence at street level are Aldwych, York Road, South Kentish Town and Brompton Road. Just visible from passing trains are parts of such stations as St Mary’s (Whitechapel Road), York Road, British Museum and City Road. Passengers may catch glimpses of some abandoned stations as the train passes through them. At least two stations have ghostly associations, Aldwych and British Museum, whilst South Kentish Town is the subject of an atmospheric and creepy short story by Sir John Betjeman (1906–84).

  The ending of mainline steam trains on British Railways in 1968 received extensive coverage in the media of the time, but no sooner had this happened than
stories started circulating that there were ghost trains on the London Underground! Steam-hauled passenger trains on the Metropolitan Line had ended in 1961 but London Transport had long used a small fleet of steam locomotives on engineers’ and various other departments’ trains on the sub-surface lines. There had always been something rather mysterious and surreptitious about these trains which mainly ran at night, and the unmistakeable sound and smell of steam locomotives at work in the witching hours began to create a new piece of London folklore. Ghostly steam trains were at large on the Underground!

  Deltic-class locomotive. The ghost of a locomotive of this class, No.55020 Nimbus, is said to haunt Hadley Wood Tunnel to the north of London on the East Coast Main Line.

  Since the 1970s there have been occasional reports of a ghostly steam locomotive which manifests itself on the Northern Line between East Finchley Station and the nearby Wellington Sidings. The stretch of line between Gipsy Hill and Crystal Palace is very hilly and between the two stations the line runs through Crystal Palace Tunnel. This tunnel is reputed to be haunted. Many years ago a track maintenance worker was run down and killed by a train in the tunnel. He was decapitated in the process. His ghost has been seen on many occasions wandering disconsolately around the tunnel apparently engaged in the search for his missing head.