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.
