Haunted London (28 page)

That October night he was at supper in the sitting room with his wife and their eldest child, a boy of seven. His wife’s sister was also present. The doors of the room were shut fast as the night was cold, and heavy, dark curtains were drawn across the two closed windows.

Swifte was on the point of offering his wife a glass of wine when she suddenly exclaimed, ‘Good God! What is that?’ pointing above her husband’s head. He looked up and saw a cylindrical object, like a glass tube and about the thickness of his arm, hovering between the ceiling and the table. It appeared to contain a dense fluid, white and pale blue, and the two incessantly mixed and separated within the cylinder. Swifte and his wife watched the curious object for perhaps two minutes, and then it began to move slowly round the table, following an oblong path and passing in front of Swifte’s sister-in-law, his son and himself but pausing
behind
Mrs Swifte, near her right shoulder. Suddenly Mrs Swifte crouched down, covered her shoulder with both her hands and shrieked, ‘Oh Christ! It has seized me.’ Swifte quickly picked up his chair and struck out with it, whereupon the figure seems to have vanished. It later transpired that neither Swifte’s sister-in-law nor the little boy had seen anything unusual. Mr Swifte, in common with many people who have apparently paranormal experiences, had to face considerable scepticism from friends and other people but he adhered steadily to the belief that the phenomenon was supernormal in origin and related an identical account of the experience forty-three years later; a factual, unembroidered and convincing account that has puzzled investigators of psychic phenomena ever since.

Martin Tower, which is not open to the public, was for a time the ‘doleful’ prison of Anne Boleyn and she slept in the little upper room where her ghost has been seen on occasions, seated in a dark comer. It is a sad and silent ghost that appears and disappears for a few moments at a time, quite unexpectedly and usually on autumn evenings.

Sir Walter Raleigh too was lodged in the Martin Tower (then known as the Brick Tower) during one of his three imprisonments in the Tower of London. After falling into disgrace with Queen Elizabeth I following his intrigue with beautiful Elizabeth Throgmorton, one of the queen’s ‘maids of honour’, both Raleigh and Elizabeth were sent to the Tower in 1592. After eight weeks Raleigh and his lady were released and they were married shortly afterwards. With King James I, Raleigh again found himself unpopular and after being summarily dismissed from Durham House in the Strand, where he had long lived, he was sent to the Tower in 1604, charged with treason, and lodged in Beauchamp Tower. There, in a frenzy of despair he attempted to stab himself to the heart but was unsuccessful. However, ghostly gasps, perhaps those of Raleigh thinking that he was near death, have been heard in certain apartments of Beauchamp Tower, while in the area where a passage formerly led to the Bell Tower an unidentified male figure in Elizabethan costume was seen one afternoon by a Tower guide. The passage was used as a promenade for prisoners.

Raleigh was tried at Winchester and convicted but the death sentence was commuted and he was returned to the Tower and imprisoned in the Bloody Tower where George, Duke of Clarence is supposed to have been drowned in a butt of malmsey wine in 1478 in the dark and windowless room in which one of the portcullises was worked. In an adjacent chamber the two little princes are said to have been smothered to death in 1483. These deeds may have given the tower its name, unless the name derives from the fact that the mortar used in the building was tempered with the blood of beasts.

Raleigh is thought to have been lodged in a cell ten feet by eight feet, in the thickness of the wall of the Bloody Tower, but his wife and son were allowed to live with him there from 1603 to 1615 and their second son, Carew, was born in the Tower in 1605. During this imprisonment of nearly thirteen years Raleigh frequently dined with the Lieutenants of the Tower and he was given the freedom of the garden. His principal walk was on the ramparts between the Bloody Tower and the timber-built Lieutenant’s Lodgings (now the Queen’s House) where he would show himself and converse with people passing by—a path still known as Raleigh’s Walk and haunted by his ghost on moonlit nights.

The Queen’s House where, in the Council Chamber, the Commissioners ‘examined’ Guido Fawkes and his accomplices, is said to be haunted by inexplicable groans and the eerie screech and grind of instruments of torture that were used there long ago. The room with wall paintings depicting men inflicting and suffering torture has also long been reputed to be haunted but I have no precise details.

After his release Raleigh made one more sea voyage of exploration and on his return he was arrested at Plymouth and once more confined in the Tower. He spent his last night in Westminster Hall and was executed in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, on October 29, 1618, so it would seem that the ghost of the great courtier, soldier, explorer and author walks where he lived and not where he died.

‘I have a long journey before me,’ he said as he mounted the scaffold and gently touched the axe, adding, ‘this is a sharp medicine but it will cure all ills.’ Even the headsman shrank from beheading so illustrious and brave a man, until Raleigh made his last remark, ‘What dost thou fear? Strike, man!’ After his head was shown to the crowds it was placed in a red leather bag and conveyed in a mourning coach to his wife. His body was interred in the chancel of St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, but his head was long preserved in a case by his widow who survived him for twenty-nine years, and after her death by his son Carew with whom it is said to have been buried at West Horsley in Surrey.

Raymond LuIly, the alchemist, is reputed to have taken up residence at the Tower in the reign of Edward I, although Lully’s biographers express doubt that he ever visited England. It is said, however, that he performed in the royal presence the experiment of transmuting some crystal into a mass of diamond or adamant and the king is said to have made little pillars of the transmuted precious stone. It is not impossible that an atmosphere of occult power exists, or once existed, in parts of the Tower for in the circular and vaulted dungeon of the Salt Tower (nearly as old as the White Tower and once known as Julius Caesar’s Tower) there are a number of strange devices and inscriptions cut in the wall, including a circle with the signs of the zodiac for casting horoscopes. This was apparently drawn by Hew Draper, a wealthy tavern keeper in Bristol, who was committed to the Tower on an accusation of witchcraft against Sir William St Lowe and his lady, better known as Bess of Hardwick.. Draper ‘so misliked his science’ that he burned all his books but a distinct and disquieting atmosphere still lingers within these ancient walls.

West of the Salt Tower the thirteen-foot-thick walls of the Wakefield Tower harbour the ghost of King Henry VI, stabbed to death as he knelt at prayer. His wan form has been seen outside the chamber where the murder took place. Nearby hang portraits of past Keepers of the Record Room, some of whom reported seeing the ghost.

Tower of London. The Queen’s House, where the ghost of Anne Boleyn walks, her heels clicking sharply on the hard ground.

A menagerie of wild beasts was kept at the Tower from a very early date, the last animals being removed to the Zoological Gardens in Regents Park in 1834. King Henry I kept lions and leopards and Henry III added to these. Edward III took much pride in the collection and successive monarchs attended combats of the wild beasts, including bear baiting. Perhaps a remnant of these cruel times survives in the form of a ghost bear that has been encountered within the Tower precincts from time to time.

One report states that a sentry saw the figure of a huge bear near a door in the Martin Tower. Marshalling his courage, the soldier promptly thrust at the enormous form with his bayonet, but the blade went clean through the phantom creature and struck the door. As the hairy form began to advance towards him, the sentry fainted. Another guard, hearing the sound of the bayonet against the door, hurried across and found the senseless body of his companion but of the mysterious bear there was no sign. The unfortunate man revived to some extent in the main guardroom, but his nerves were completely shattered and he died two days later. Over and over again he repeated the story of his terrible ordeal. A doctor verified that he was not under the influence of drink and only minutes before his experience, a fellow-guardsman had passed the sentry and exchanged a few words with him, so he was certainly not asleep. And for two days the bayonet remained embedded in the stout oaken door.

Most of the English kings from William the Conqueror to Charles II used the Tower as a palace. Henry VIII often held court there and, in great pomp, he received all his wives before the weddings. Two of them returned to the Tower to die on Tower Green, Anne Boleyn in 1536 and Catherine Howard in 1542.

There were two places of execution: Tower Hill (under the authority of the government of the city) and Tower Green, within the Tower walls. Today Tower Green is a spot of poignant and hallowed memory. The place of execution was marked off and railed by command of Queen Victoria. Those who were ‘untopped’ (as Anne Boleyn’s daughter put it) included Lord Hastings in 1483; Jane, Countess Rochford (sister-in-law of Anne Boleyn) in 1542; Lady Jane Grey in 1554; Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex in 1601; and Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, daughter of the Duke of Clarence, in 1541. It is the ghost of the latter that sometimes reappears in a spectacular way on the anniversary of her execution.

The Countess of Salisbury, beheaded on the orders of Henry VIII, was a reluctant victim. On the morning of the execution she was forcibly carried to the scaffold, screaming and fighting in a frenzy to escape and the fearful scene of the execution itself is said to be re-enacted in all its harrowing detail each anniversary. Then, according to reports, her ghost is seen, screaming with terror, running panic-stricken round and round the spot where the scaffold once stood, pursued by a ghostly masked executioner, heavy axe in hand, who finally overtakes the terrified woman and ‘chuckling diabolically’ slowly hacks off her head with repeated dreadful blows.

Lady Jane Grey entered the Tower as Queen of England but less than three weeks later she became a prisoner together with her young husband, and she saw his headless body carried past her on the morning that she knew she too must die—is it unlikely then that her ghost returns to this storehouse of memories? Her ghost was last seen as recently as 1957, on February 12 to be exact, the 403rd anniversary of her execution.

Guardsman Johns, a young Welshman on duty at the Tower stamped his feet that cold and wintry morning as a nearby clock chimed the hour of three. Suddenly a rattling noise alerted his attention and as he looked up towards the battlements of the Salt Tower, forty feet above him, he saw silhouetted against the dark sky, a ‘white shapeless form’ that moulded itself into the likeness of Lady Jane Grey. As the startled soldier shouted for assistance, another guardsman saw ‘a strange white apparition’ at the same spot, a hundred yards or so from the red-brick, seventeenth century Gentleman Jailer’s House which stands on the site of a previous structure where Lady Jane Grey was imprisoned and where.she saw her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley, go to his execution. ‘The ghost stood between the battlements,’ Guardsman Johns said afterwards. ‘At first I thought I was seeing things, but when I told the other guard and pointed, the figure appeared again.’ An officer of the regiment stated, ‘Guardsman Johns is convinced that he saw a ghost. Speaking for the regiment our attitude is “All right, so you say you have seen a ghost. Let’s leave it at that”.’

Another guardsman on duty at the Tower saw a ghost in February, 1933. He said afterwards that he saw the white form of a headless woman near the Bloody Tower. The figure seemed to float towards him and then simply disappeared. Years afterwards, a Guards officer (who happened at the time to be training for the British Olympic Games) became aware, as he approached the Bloody Tower archway in Water Lane, that he was encountering a ‘most queer and utterly distasteful atmosphere’. He saw nothing but was overcome with terror. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end and he could think of nothing except how to get away from the place as quickly as possible. Next moment (it seemed) he found himself on the steps of the officers’ mess, three hundred yards away, bathed in perspiration and panting heavily. Yet he could recall nothing of his frantic sprint (probably in record time!), only the agony and terror of that moment near the Bloody Tower, which he had previously passed scores of times without any ill effects.

Anne Boleyn’s ghost has been reported many times and in many different parts of the Tower. At a meeting of The Ghost Club in 1899, Lady Biddolph related that a phantom lady with a red carnation over her right ear had been observed looking out of a window at the Tower. She added that the description of the apparition tallied with that of Anne Boleyn herself and it was at the window of Anne’s room at the Tower that the figure was seen. In 1972 a nine-year-old girl ‘saw’ the execution of Anne Boleyn on Tower Green. The girl visited the Tower for the first time with her parents when they were on holiday in London from their home in the north of England.