Haunted London Underground Read online

  HAUNTED

  LONDON

  UNDERGROUND

  HAUNTED

  LONDON

  UNDERGROUND

  DAVID BRANDON & ALAN BROOKE

  Frontispiece: Emergency stairs, Wapping. The brickwork dates from the original opening of the tunnel prior to being adapted for railway use. (© Pendar Sillwood)

  First published 2008

  Reprinted 2009, 2010 (twice), 2011, 2013

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © David Brandon & Alan Brooke 2011, 2013

  The right of David Brandon & Alan Brooke to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 5407 5

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1London and its Underground Railways

  2A Few Words about Ghosts

  3Haunted Underground Stations A to Z

  4Other Hauntings

  5Closed Railway Stations

  6Defunct Underground Stations

  7‘Ghost’ Steam Trains

  8The Haunted Underground in Film, Television and Books

  INTRODUCTION

  Anyone who has stood on a platform on the London Underground late at night will appreciate what an eerie place it can be. It has all the right conditions for a creepy, ghostly setting with its labyrinth of subterranean tunnels and passages and whatever might lurk down there. In addition there are the disused stations that were abandoned and now sport a haunting look. As a train speeds along passengers may catch a glimpse of one of the fabled ‘ghost stations’. These have added to the fascination of the Underground with tales of what secrets may hide behind the sealed-off platforms, dusty tiles and crumbling staircases.

  The Underground, which saw the Metropolitan Line open for business on 10 January 1863 with 30,000 passengers on the first day, is an engineering marvel. With over 270 stations and 253 miles of track carrying millions of people every year, the system is predictably crowded, claustrophobic and at times uncomfortable. Nonetheless it is a defining part of London’s identity with its distinctive logo, map and architecture. In addition to serving the transport needs of the capital, it also served London during two wars when many Londoners sought refuge from enemy bombs. Not surprisingly it has inspired many stories, films as well as urban legends.

  As it approaches its 150 years of history, the Underground has had its share of tragedies and deaths. Many burial grounds and plague pits have been disrupted as a consequence of extensions and developments. Staff working on the Underground at night have often reported strange incidents such as unexplained noises and sightings, feelings of unease and even encountering people who had reputedly died years earlier. This book will include a variety of stories including a faceless women, a 7ft figure, the ghosts of two actors, a woman in black, a thirteen-year-old girl who was murdered in the eighteenth century, reflections in carriage windows, screams of women and children who were crushed to death, semi-transparent apparitions, tales of troglodytes and even a screaming Egyptian mummy as well as other stories. Where possible we have attempted to explore the historical details behind some of these accounts. We believe there are many more stories to be told but is understandable that there is a reluctance by people to admit to having such experiences for fear of not being taken seriously or, worse, being ridiculed. What is particularly interesting is that many who have told of their experiences are or were sceptics when it came to believing in ghosts.

  London has provided a rich seam for ghost stories and haunted places such as pubs, houses, lanes and various buildings. However, whilst accounts concerning the haunted Underground have found their way into ghost walks, Internet sites and general books about hauntings, there has been no specific book on the subject. We have also included a brief section on how the haunted Underground has been reflected in film and literature. Here then is a collection of spooky stories related to the London Underground with occasionally an item thrown in about other railway places with ghostly connections, even if they not part of the Underground system. Some of these stories are familiar; others have never appeared in print before. None belong entirely in the world of the fictional. Wherever possible the authors have included some historical material about the locations which they hope will help to put the events in their context and add to what the reader can gain from the book.

  Particular thanks are expressed to the people who were kind enough to tell us of their personal experiences on the Underground. Acknowledgements also go to staff at the Guildhall Library, Oscar Butler for some of the photographs and Rod Corston for his unstinting help with organising the images.

  1

  LONDON AND ITS UNDERGROUND RAILWAYS

  London owes its very existence to possessing a geographical position largely favourable to transport. Given its size, it is not surprising that it has a very complex un-derground-railway system. Despite its infrastructure, fabric and rolling stock creaking at the seams from time to time and the fact that it has become a political football, it has for long played and continues to have an essential part in the social, economic and cultural life of London. ‘Underground’ is something of a misnomer. Only about 42 per cent of the system actually runs below the surface.

  It could be argued that it isn’t really a system at all in the strict sense of the word. In spite of the iconic nature of its logo, the station totem, the architectural merit of some of its buildings and the masterpiece of graphical design which is the Underground map, all giving a strong sense of system, the network grew up, at least until the early 1930s, in a largely piecemeal fashion. Many proposals for additional lines or extensions to existing ones have been mooted and then abandoned, never to see the light of day despite the likelihood that they were logical and would have made very useful contributions to the network. There are substantial parts of London that have never been well-served by the Underground network. Even with these reservations, the Underground is still a marvellous system. It is too easy to take it for granted; it is an essential part of the capital’s infrastructure – life in London would be very different without it, and worse.

  It is impossible to appreciate the history of modern London without some understanding of how and why the underground railway network developed. What follows is a brief chronological account of the growth of what, for convenience, we will call the ‘system’. Some description and evaluation of the contribution that the system has made to London provides a useful background to the mysterious and often eerie events described in the main body of the book.

  It may seem ironic to us in the twenty-first century that the London underground-railway network largely owes its origins to chronic road-traffic gridlock in the nineteenth century. It also results from the squalid living conditions endured by huge numbers of London’s working people and the laudable desire to create a means of transport which would enable them to live in healthier districts just outside the central part of the Metropolis.
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  The first underground line to be built ran the four miles from Bishops Road at Paddington to Farringdon and was opened in 1863. It had the effect of relieving the traffic congestion on the New Road, London’s first bypass. This is the permanent pandemonium of today’s Marylebone, Euston and Pentonville Roads. Back in the nineteenth century, this road funnelled large amounts of traffic from the north and west of London heading particularly to the City and the Docks. The line formed the nucleus of the Metropolitan Railway and was built just below street level on what became known as the ‘cut-and-cover’ method. Wherever possible, the line was built in a cutting along and under existing roads and was then bricked over except for portions left open to the elements. This method may have caused temporary chaos for traffic but it reduced the potential costs involved in the compulsory purchase of many of the buildings that lay around the path of the projected route.

  The trains were hauled by steam locomotives. The fact that the line was in a relatively shallow trench open to the air for much of the route enabled some of the smoke and steam to dissipate. However, the poisonous and almost impenetrable fug in stations such as Baker Street which were entirely subterranean, caused travellers to cough, splutter, expectorate and complain querulously while also providing a helpful environment for members of the light-fingered criminal fraternity. Early underground train travel was not for the faint-hearted.

  An attempt was made to operate a locomotive that would tackle the pollution problem by being ‘smokeless’. The idea was that a white-hot firebrick would heat the water in the locomotive’s boiler and as a result produce steam for propulsion but no smoke. Robert Stephenson (1803-59) designed and built the experimental locomotive in 1861. This machine produced very little smoke but also very little steam and it was all it could do to haul itself around, let alone pull a train. It was regarded as a failure and quickly disappeared from public view. It gained the derisive nickname ‘Fowler’s Ghost’ because no one was sure whether it actually existed or not.

  In spite of apocalyptic predictions that the building of underground railways would disturb the Devil, who would then wreak his revenge in the ways that only he knew how, and equally dire warnings to the effect that tunnels and cuttings would collapse, the line from Paddington to Farringdon was an almost total success. So much so that there was soon talk of similar sub-surface cut-and-cover lines. One, a roughly circular route joining places of major importance, eventually became the Circle Line. Extensions were made to the Metropolitan Railway to reach Hammersmith in the west and the City in the east. Another line was the Metropolitan District which eventually reached out, far beyond the continuously built-up districts, to Wimbledon and Richmond in the south-west and Upminster in the east. The Metropolitan Railway had pretensions to being more than just a line serving London and its routes eventually extended deep into what were then almost entirely rural parts of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire before it effectively petered out in a field at the rustic spot of Brill, fifty or so miles from Baker Street. The East London line joined the inner part of the East End at Shoreditch with what became a mixed residential and industrial district around New Cross and New Cross Gate. It took over and used the tunnel under the Thames built by Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. There had been many deaths during the building of this, the first significant underwater tunnel in the world.

  In the central parts of the Metropolis, land values were too high to permit more cut-and-cover routes so attention turned to the building of deeper-level lines. There was already an extremely complex spaghetti of pipes, sewers and other services beneath the streets and it made sense to build below these. Crude technology was available in the form of the tunnelling shield invented by Marc Brunel for the Thames Tunnel. This was adapted to a circular form and used to build the first railway inside a tube. Opened in 1870, this line ran from Tower Hill to Bermondsey under the Thames and was cable operated. It was not very successful but Peter William Barlow modified the shield to build a line in a deep tube tunnel, also under the Thames. This was the City & South London Railway and it opened in 1890. Trains were powered by electricity. Later to become part of the Northern Line, the City & South London was hugely successful and it acted as the model for many other deep-level tube lines built over the next century. Improvements were made to Barlow’s tunnelling shield by James Greathead (1844-1896) and modern tunnelling shields could be described as updates of Greathead’s machine.

  In spite of the fact that the early tube lines, such as the City & South London and the Central London Railway, provided an economic and efficient means of urban transport, it was left to a thrusting American entrepreneur, Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837-1905), to start creating a modern network in the 1900s. A number of lines had been built without any coordinated plan. Yerkes created the Underground Electric Railway Co., bringing these companies together, building short lines to join up the routes of some of the constituents, improving interchange facilities and creating an immediately recognisable brand: ‘UndergrounD’.

  In 1933 control of a unified underground system passed into the hands of the London Passenger Transport Board which set about a programme of extensions to the tube system and modernisation of rolling stock, stations and other facilities. It also created an immediately recognisable house style for the system, with close detail being paid to design issues as disparate as station architecture and the moquette used for seating. The deep-level tubes played a heroic role in the Second World War, sheltering vast numbers of Londoners during the Blitz with unused tubes acting as bomb-proof factories for war supplies and stores for valuable works of art. They also housed top-secret control centres having a major influence on the Allied war effort.

  Since the war, new lines have been few and slow in coming but the Victoria Line, opened throughout in 1972 and the Jubilee Line Extension in 1999 have set new standards for automation. Controversially, maintenance of the infrastructure and rolling stock has passed into private hands. A common perception is that parts of the London Underground system are now creaking at the seams, run down and overcrowded for much of the time and comparing badly with similar systems in other major European cities. It is difficult not to see London’s public transport system as a long-term pawn in party-political gamesmanship. It is perhaps a miracle that it works as well as it does.

  Without question the London Underground has had an enormous social, economic and cultural impact on the Metropolis. Whatever its limitations, it has provided a ready means for people to get around quickly and easily, particularly in the central parts of London. It has acted to ‘pull together’ the remarkably disparate collection of ‘villages’ which constitutes London. It has stimulated and sometimes directly caused the growth of vast tracts of London’s inner and more distant suburbia including, of course, the ‘Metroland’ affectionately mocked by Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984). It has assisted the regeneration of areas of inner-city decay as has been seen, for example, in the Bermondsey district of south-east London with the building of the Jubilee Line. It has given the world the immortal diagrammatic map of the system, originated by Harry Beck in 1932, a concept copied across the world. It has expressed itself in stations of the highest architectural merit such as Park Royal and East Finchley and the monumental headquarters block of No. 55 Broadway with its sculptures by Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein. More modestly it has given us the distinctive glazed terracotta station fronts, the colour of oxblood and the Art and Crafts faience work of the architect Leslie W. Green. These date from the 1900s and many of them can still be seen on the Bakerloo and the Piccadilly Lines, for example. London Transport and particularly the Underground have created a constant demand for advertising and poster art of the very highest quality.

  Lest we get carried away with paeans of praise, it must be noted that there has been a price to pay for having the Underground. The building of the sub-surface lines was extraordinarily disruptive and often meant that people lost their homes, most frequently those who could not afford expensive legal counsel to c
ontest compulsory purchase orders. Many burial sites had to be disturbed and human remains laid to rest elsewhere. Understandably this raised concerns among relatives and others that it should be done respectfully and reverentially. Perhaps it was inevitable that such episodes would lead to stories of ghosts, angry at this cavalier disruption of their repose, haunting the tunnels and stations built where the burial grounds had previously been. The underground railways have seen their share of murders and suicides and these have given rise to tales of consequent hauntings. Serious accidents have thankfully been few but again, probably inevitably, stories have developed that these events provoked a response from unexplained, possibly supernatural phenomena.

  There are a sizeable number of closed underground stations. Can anyone with a soul honestly say that they do not experience at least some slight frisson of pleasurable terror at the idea of those cold, darkened tunnels and platforms and the thought of what might be lurking down there? It is difficult to think of many locations more suitable for hauntings and paranormal phenomena than underground stations, even working ones, especially at times when they are not open for public use. There are a few locations underground where it is possible to descry some fixtures such as the once shiny tiles on closed or relocated underground stations. It does not take much imagination to think that such stations come alive with their own residents during the hours when living travellers are at home and snug in their beds.

  Many, especially of the deep-level tube stations, contain doors sealed off to access by the general public. What mysteries or possibly malevolent entities lurk behind these doors? Even many of the stations still in regular use are spooky first thing in the morning and last thing at night when few passengers are about and trains less frequent. Are the authors alone in being fascinated when travelling on the Underground on a Sunday as the train slows to pass through the platform of a station not open on that day of the week? The platform lights are dimmed and there seem to be minatory shadows a-plenty. What happens on the platforms and in the passages when no living entities are there?