Spooky London
what is documented, what is folklore, and where each of them happened
There is a version of spooky London that consists entirely of ghost stories, and it is much less frightening than the documented version. The city executed people in public for six hundred years at a crossroads now occupied by a traffic island. This page takes the best-known haunted places and says, for each one, what the records support and what was added later.
Sourced, traditional, invented
Three categories, and they are worth keeping apart. Sourced means there are records: court rolls, parish registers, newspaper reports, inquest findings. Traditional means the story is old and widely repeated but rests on nothing checkable. Invented means somebody made it up recently, often for a tour.
Almost every site below has all three attached to it. The documented layer is usually the grimmest, which is why the folklore tends to be about ghosts rather than about what actually happened to the people whose ghosts they are said to be.
The places
The Tower of London documented
Tower Hill EC3
Documented: seven private executions on Tower Green, including Anne Boleyn in 1536 and Lady Jane Grey in 1554, and eleven spies shot at the Tower during the two world wars. Traditional: Anne Boleyn walking the White Tower, the two princes, the White Lady at the Salt Tower. The historical record is thoroughly kept and considerably worse than the ghost stories.
Tyburn documented
Marble Arch W1
Documented: public hangings at the Tyburn gallows from the twelfth century until 1783, on the site now occupied by the traffic island at Marble Arch, with crowds in the tens of thousands. A plaque in the road marks it. This is the most consequential site in this list and the one almost nobody stops at, because it is a triangle of paving in the middle of a junction.
Whitechapel and the Ten Bells part folklore
Commercial Street E1
Documented: the 1888 murders in Whitechapel and Spitalfields, and the inquests that followed, which are in print and freely readable. Traditional: that two of the victims drank at the Ten Bells on Commercial Street. The pub is real and of the right date; the association rests on very little, and the pub's own name was changed to capitalise on it for a period before being changed back.
Hyde Park part folklore
Victoria Lodge and Hyde Park Corner W2
Documented: the pet cemetery behind Victoria Lodge, begun in the 1880s and holding several hundred small graves, locked and read through the railings. Also documented: the park's south-east corner is a short walk from Tyburn. Traditional: the assortment of ghost stories attached to both, none of which has a source older than the tours that tell them.
Highgate Cemetery documented panic
Swain's Lane N6
Documented: a genuine moral panic. In 1970 press coverage of an alleged vampire at Highgate drew crowds of hundreds to the cemetery on a single night, led to vandalised graves and a court case, and is well recorded in newspapers of the time. The panic is a fact of British social history. The vampire is not.
Questions
Which of these is genuinely the grimmest?
Tyburn, without much competition. Public executions took place there for something like six centuries, drawing enormous crowds, and the site is now a traffic island with a small plaque. Nothing in the ghost-tour repertoire comes close to the documented scale of it.
Was there really a Highgate Vampire?
There was really a panic. Newspaper coverage in 1970 produced a mass gathering at the cemetery, damage to graves and a prosecution, and all of that is documented. What there was no evidence for, then or since, is a vampire. It is a good example of a modern legend whose social history is far better attested than its subject.
Are the Ten Bells connections to 1888 established?
Not really. The pub existed and stood in the right area at the right time, and it has long been said that two of the victims drank there. The evidence for the specific claims is thin and much of what circulates was firmed up by later writers and tour operators. The murders themselves are exhaustively documented; the pub association is not.
Can all these places be visited?
Tyburn, Whitechapel and Hyde Park Corner are public streets and free at any hour. Highgate Cemetery charges admission and the West Cemetery is by guided tour. The Tower charges and is busy. The Hyde Park pet cemetery cannot be entered at all and is looked at through the railings.
Elsewhere on this site: London oddities, the seven noses of Soho.