From a well-known story of a ghostly
hitchhiker, which quite frankly reeks of urban legend, to a chilling tale of one
man's struggle to live with a malevolent force. Here are five ghost stories from
the City of London. Number 19 St. James's place in the St.
James's district was once the home of two sisters; Ann and Harriet Pearson. Having spent most of their lives together the pair became inseparable and were devoted
to one another. Ann Pearson died in 1858 and her sister
lived on the house alone for the next six years. In November of 1864, while
Harriet was visiting Brighton, 54 miles away on the southeast coast,
she became unwell and demanded to be returned home. She was rushed back to
London and there she was cared for by her housekeeper, Eliza Quinton, and two of her nieces; Miss Coppinger and Miss Emma Pearson. Also in the house watching over Harriet for the next few weeks was her nephew's wife,
Mrs. Pearson. On the night of December 23rd Miss Coppinger and Emma Pearson
went to bed, leaving Mrs. Pearson to watch over the now gravely ill Harriet.
The two women, whose room was opposite, left their door open and candles burning
in the hallway, in case they were called during the night. At around 1:00a.m.
both women were roused from their sleep. When they turned to face the open
doorway and looked out into the candle-lit hallway, they saw the figure of a woman
wearing a shawl and a black cap, walk past their room and into the bedroom across
the hall where Harriet lay. Moments later in a fit of fear Mrs. Pearson ran out of
Harriet's bedroom. The three women congregated, and all said that they had
recognized the apparition as the late Ann Pearson, and agreed it was likely
that she had come for her dying sister. They then woke the housekeeper and told
her what they had seen. Miss Harriet Pearson died five hours
later at 6:00a.m. on December 24th, 1864. Before she died, she told the four women
who had cared for her in the last weeks of her life, that she too had seen her
sister that same night. This next story concerns British author and broadcaster, James Wentworth Day. He was probably best known for his literary works on English
farming, country affairs, motor sports and his years as editor of the long-running
Country Life magazine. But he was also a paranormal investigator, and wrote
numerous books about his experiences and methods. Born in Exning in Suffolk, on England's south east coast, he spent many years in London. It was here in the mid
1930s that he leased an apartment on King Street in Hammersmith while working in the city. This large high-ceilinged 17th century building had a pine-paneled
entrance hall and a black-and-white tiled floor. The large first floor living
room, according to Day, was "full of sunshine and grace", and he felt content
and full of optimism when he first walked into his new vocational home. But
he would later make the statement "I have leased a curse." Eager to explore, he bound
up the stairs to the second floor, into the two rooms that would be his living
space. But once inside the second floor living room, he felt an overwhelming
feeling of dread. A feeling that emanated from the far left corner of the room. In
that corner there was a small fireplace, and next to it a door, which led into a
dressing room. He said that he felt something was staring at him from the
corner; an unseen presence that was full of hatred and pain. He stared back,
attempting to prove himself wrong and shake the uneasy feeling, but it remained.
During the first two weeks of his stay, his strained marriage fell apart, and
Day moved out, unable to face living there whilst
dealing with his loss. Eventually though, for reasons unknown, he did return. His
once temporary lease was made permanent and he remained there for the next two
years. Over that time James Wentworth Day said that he rarely
had a good night's sleep. He suffered emotionally, physically and
financially. And when he returned home at the end of the day, he rarely found
solace. Something was always there, he felt, watching him from the dark corner
of that room. Then his home was burgled, and he lost every valuable item he had; mostly family heirlooms. None of them were recovered, and they were not insured. Soon after this the china shop, which now occupied the ground floor, went bankrupt
and closed down. The wine business that took over the shop soon suffered the
same fate. James Wentworth Day's brother, sister,
godson and goddaughter visited him from Ireland for a while. He
had hoped that their presence would raise his spirits, and maybe even drive
out the evil presence. For a time he admits things did improve, and the
malevolent force disappeared. That is until one evening when Day returned home late. His family were out on a hunting trip and weren't due to return
until the next day. He was expecting to be alone. When he entered his living room
and turned on the light, he again became conscious of that evil something. This
time it felt stronger, and the feeling of being watched was overwhelming. At that
point he heard a loud piercing scream from the top floor. It was his
goddaughter. He rushed to her aid, and when he entered the bedroom, she was sat
on the bed, clutching the bed sheets close to her face and sobbing
uncontrollably. The 19-year-old explained that she had returned home early and
gone into the second floor living room. She said that she had seen something by
the fireplace, something black, staring at her from the corner of the room.
Something tied up. The next morning, Day's family returned and prepared to go back
to Ireland. He explained what had happened. They all
agreed that something was very wrong with the place and attributed it to all
the bad luck he had been having. "Even you are beginning to look haunted", his sister
said. For James Wentworth Day this was the last straw. He finally gave up his
lease. Something he admitted he should have done a long time ago. He lost money
for cutting the lease short, but that didn't bother him. He was glad to see the
back of the place. Some years later he was visited by a friend from Canada. Keen
to show his friend the city and relay some historical anecdotes, he took his companion to his old haunt, King Street. As they walked together they
passed an old man who they recognised as a former butler to one of the houses in
the neighbourhood. He greeted him, introduced his friend, and asked the old
man to tell them a historical tale from old King Street. Happy to oblige, the old
fellow walked with them for some time, telling stories of the buildings that
lined the street, and the people who had lived there over the years. As they
approached the house that James Day used to live in, the old man stopped,
pointed his walking stick towards the house, and said "that building there is
the unluckiest house in the whole of London. It has brought nothing but bad
luck to whoever has lived there. In actual fact, it is haunted." It was then
that he told a tale of the house that James Wentworth Day had never heard
before. He explained that 200 years ago, when the
house was still relatively young, a man lived there with his personal servant.
The specific details of what occurred in that house, the old man admitted, were not
fully known, but what is known is that one day the occupants disappeared from
the neighborhood without a trace, leaving no clue as to where they had gone. After
a while the matter was investigated, and on the second floor living room, the
decomposing body of the servant was found. He had been garroted with a rope
and tied to a chair. His eyes bulged from their sockets, and his now swollen black
tongue hung grotesquely from his mouth. The head of the household was never traced and the person or persons responsible were never found. That dead man, the old-timer went on, still
sits in the corner of that room to this day. He said that many people have felt
an evil or tortured presence in that room, and some have, on occasion, even
reported seeing a black apparition lurking in the corner.
He explained that he'd seen people come and go from the house for the last 50
years, and no one, even those who hadn't reported anything sinister, ever
prospered during their time there. It is truly cursed. A year after this chance
meeting on King Street, World War II broke out, and the bombs began to fall on
London. During the Blitz the old cursed building was lost. The area has since
been rebuilt, and today an unremarkable modern building stands in its place. London's Heathrow Airport began life in
1929 as a small airfield known as a Great Western Aerodrome. Then in 1944, an expansion operation began. The new expansion was intended to cater for
military planes during World War II, but by the time it was complete the war had
ended. However, new plans for a civil airport took over, and the expansion
continued. In 1946 it was eventually reopened as London Airport. But barely
two years into his new life the airport experienced a tragedy. At around 9:15p.m. on the night of March 2nd 1948, a Douglas DC-3 plane, operated by Sabina
Airlines of Belgium, crashed in foggy conditions. All three crew members and 17
of the 19 passengers died. It was the first major air disaster to take place
at the airport. The story goes that during the cleanup operation, a
well-dressed man stepped out of the fog and approached the rescue team. He told
them that he was looking for a briefcase which had been lost in the crash. When he
was told by the confused staff to inquire after the cleanup was over, he
disappeared back into the fog. It has been said that soon after this, the same man's corpse was found amongst the plane's wreckage. In 1970, a police inspector named Leslie
Alton, received a report that the tower's radar had spotted a person walking along
one of the runways. Inspector Alton, who had worked at the airport for twenty
years, rushed to the runway along with his team.
On arrival he radioed back to the tower. They told him that he should be able to
see the person, because as far as they could see, he or she was stood right next
to him. When Alton replied that he could see no one, the tower confirmed that the
person was directly behind him, adding that his squad car was close to running
them over. For some time the mystery person continued to show up on the airport's
radar, but try as he might, Lesley Alton found no one in the vicinity. The search
was eventually called off. Although most say that the man or apparition hasn't
been seen for many years, in 2014 prior to the airing of Sebastian Baczkiewicz'
BBC radio play, entitled Ghosts of Heathrow, one Airport employee, who didn't give his name, spoke to the station and said that he'd worked at the airport for
29 years. He claimed that there were as many as
seven reports of the mystery man during his time at the airport, by various
pilots who truly believed that they had seen a man walking along the runway as
they came in to land. It's unknown of course if this was the same apparition or if it was a ghost at all. There is the glaring
difference between these alleged recent sightings and the 1970 sighting. That
being that the radar tower in 1970 reported seeing the figure, but the men
on the ground did not. The airport worker speaking in the clip I just
played, says the opposite. After reading some of the reports made immediately after the 1948 crash, I found out that the plane's wreckage burst into flames
and had been incinerated, along with the dead, leaving them unrecognisable. So the
part of the story which states the corpse of a mystery man, who was seen
following the crash, had been found amongst the planes wreckage is doubtful.
It's likely that the 1948 disaster, coupled with the dramatic story of a
mystery man stepping out of the fog on a dark night looking for a briefcase, may
well have been used as a convenient backstory to add credence to the
sighting of an alleged ghost. But the fact remains that there are accounts of
a spectre having been seen on Heathrow's runways. If it wasn't the restless remnants of a 1948 crash victim, then who or what was it? The Blackwall Tunnel consists of two
tunnels that run beneath the River Thames. The first of which, and the one
which features in this story, was completed in 1897, after the city saw a
growing need for traffic to flow more freely across the Thames from south to
north. It saw its fair share of tragedy during its construction, and inevitably
during its time in service. This case, probably the most well known on the list,
concerns a motorcyclist, who in October of 1972, picked up a young male
hitchhiker in Greenwich, near the entrance of the original northbound
tunnel. The story goes that the young man gave his Essex address to the
motorcyclist before they began their journey. Once through the tunnel, the
motorcyclist turned back to speak to the passenger, but he was gone. Convinced that he had fallen from the vehicle somewhere in the tunnel - although one might think
the rider would have felt a sudden jolt or lightness of the vehicle if he had - he
rode back to find him. The rider made the journey back and forth twice before
giving up the search. There was no frantic commotion in the
tunnel as he'd expected, and no one lay in the road. There was no sign of the
young man at all. It was as if he had never been there. Thinking that his
fallen passenger may have found his way home by other means, he rode to the house
in Essex the next day to find out what happened. When he arrived, he was told by
the occupants of the home that the young man had died years earlier.
It's unknown who the motorcyclists spoke to, or what their relationship was with
the young man. Or even if the scene of his death was the Blackwall Tunnel, which
makes this tale frustratingly vague, but creepy nonetheless. There are a few
variations in this story depending on where you read it. Some say the passenger
was not a young man, but a young woman. Some say they were hitchhiking near the
entrance to the tunnel, while others say they thumbed a ride inside the tunnel
itself. When author Peter Underwood wrote about the story in 1975, he gave no mention of how the phantom passenger died, while many other
retellings claimed that it was the ghost of another biker who had died in a road
accident years before. This particular part of the story probably originates
from an event that apparently happened in 1960, but the link wasn't brought to
public attention until more than three decades later. It occurred in 1960 at
Blackwell Lane, which is little less than a mile south of the Blackwall Tunnel
entrance. This account was taken from a letter to the Fortean Times. It was sent by a
Mr. Roy Dent, and featured in a 1994 issue of the magazine.
Roy Dent states in the letter that he and his wife were living at his
father-in-law's house at the time. He wrote that late one rainy evening they
were all sat in the front room when they heard a sudden screech of tyres, followed
by a loud crash. When Mr. Dent's father-in-law went out to
investigate, he found the remnants of an accident. The
motorcyclist had skidded in the rain, hit a curb, and was thrown into a road sign
which killed him instantly. A few nights later, Mr. and Mrs. Dent were woken at
around 2 a.m., by what he described as an identical sequence of sounds. When they
went to investigate, the usually busy road, even at that hour, was empty and
quiet. This story, according to newspaper
reports, was taken very seriously at the time because it, and I quote, "involved
people of the highest social position." It allegedly occurred one December evening in 191. A vicar of a Kensington Church had just finished overseeing the
evening's choir practice, and as he walked down the aisle on his way out of the
building, a distressed looking woman stepped out of the pews. She approached
him and told him that a gentleman she knew had requested his presence
immediately, and that he needed to accompany her to a house nearby. after a short conversation the vicar agreed, and accompanied the woman to the nearby home in a cab. On arrival they rang the doorbell and a butler answered. The vicar
explained that he was there to see a gravely ill man who had requested his
presence. Looking shocked, the butler said that he must be mistaken. There was no
one in the house who was unwell. The vicar explained that the lady had told
him that the owner of the house, whose name was not given, requested to see him
as a matter of urgency. When the vicar turned to the woman for confirmation, she
was gone. He found himself looking down an empty pathway leading to a quiet dark
road. There was no sign of her or the taxicab. The butler, now concerned, looked
at the vicar as if he was a practical joker. But then the owner of the house
stepped out of an adjoining room and asked the man what he wanted. He said "I
have been told that you wanted to see me urgently, and that you are seriously ill."
The owner of the house then asked who had given this information. The vicar
gave a description of the woman. The man said he had no such friend or
acquaintance, but seeing as he was here, he should come in and talk about another
matter. Both men entered the living room, and the
owner of the house explained that, although he was feeling well, he admitted
that he had been planning on contacting the vicar on another matter. The vicar stayed for an hour, and it was arranged that his new acquaintance should come to the church after service the next
morning to discuss the matter further. The next morning, however, the man did not show up. Now concerned about his well-being, the vicar returned to the
house. He was greeted at the door by the butler who explained that his master had
died the night before, shortly after he had left. He then showed him to the
bedroom upstairs where the dead man lay. On a table in the middle of the room was
a photograph of the same woman who had begged the clergyman to follow her the
night before. "Who is that?" the vicar asked. That, sir, is my master's wife, who died 15
years ago.
I was up till later than I wish to say last night reading up on spooky tales of London 😂 have also seen this video previously (im a sceptic but one of those very interested ones). I came across some good ones here on reddit..
Off topic-ish but I want to know more about a story I came across about a bus route in Enfield (I think) which some drivers refuse to take at night because theres a particular stop off at a cemetery where a girl in white has been seen multiple times 👻 anyone heard of it?