Haunted London (8 page)

THE DUKE OF YORK’S THEATRE, ST MARTIN’S LANE

Although the Duke of York’s Theatre in St Martin’s Lane has no resident ghost that I know of, it was the scene of some very odd experiences some years ago when a certain costume jacket became known as the ‘Strangler Jacket’ and actress Thora Hird was among those who were affected by wearing it.

In 1948, Thora Hird was leading lady in
A Queen Came By
, a play set in the days of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, and part of her costume was an old short-backed, bolero-style jacket that had been made some five years earlier. Although there seemed ample room in the jacket and the size was right, Thora Hird found that it produced an unpleasant tightness about the arms and chest. She said nothing at first, but began to detest the coat, which seemed tighter every time she wore it.

One night, Thora Hird was unable to appear and her understudy, Erica Foyle, took over the part, and for the first time wore the jacket. She experienced exactly the same tight and unpleasant sensations, although she knew nothing of Thora Hird’s impressions. That night Erica Foyle saw the apparition of a young woman wearing the tight-fitting jacket.

Erica Foyle told her experiences to the stage manager, Marjorie Page, and when Thora Hird related feeling similar sensations, Marjorie Page tried the jacket on herself and found that it affected her in the same way. Mrs Frederick Pifford, wife of the play’s director, tried on the coat with no ill effect, until she removed it and those present pointed in horror at a series of red weals that had appeared on Mrs Pifford’s throat, marks that might have been expected after an attempt at strangulation! During the course of a séance held at the theatre a medium described a vision in which a young girl provoked insane jealousy and anger in a man who attacked the girl, tearing her clothes, until the girl fell backwards and she was forced into a barrel of water until she drowned. The man then dragged her body up a flight of stairs where he wrapped the body in a blanket and carried it down the stairs again, wet and dripping with water. Here the vision faded. At this point, Marjorie Page, who was watching the proceedings, exclaimed with some excitement that she had seen a very similar vision at the time she had worn the jacket, but it had seemed so fantastic that she had said nothing about it at the time. A little later, a man tried on the coat — and promptly fainted. A younger man took a turn and immediately seemed to have difficulty with his breathing.

The subsequent history of the jacket is interesting. It seems to have become the property of a man named Lloyd who lives in Los Angeles and within minutes of wearing the jacket his wife felt totally exhausted, almost as though she was being strangled or drowned; she complained of a feeling of suffocation of the lungs and an oppressive weight on her legs. A sixteen-year-old girl felt as though fingers were plucking at her throat when she wore the coat, another woman who tried it on said it felt as heavy as armour and it hurt her and a third woman hurriedly removed it after three minutes, saying that it seemed to choke her. The mental condition of those wearing the jacket and knowing something of the story associated with it may be the cause of the impressions received by later wearers of the ‘Strangler Jacket’, but what about the initial reactions of Thora Hird and her understudy? The origin of the jacket is obscure. There is some evidence that it was originally made for an early production of
Charley’s Aunt
and was stored at a theatrical costumier’s for nearly fifty years, but other people maintain that it was picked up from an old clothes stall at a London market. What is indisputable is that the coat is a piece of Victoriana and it was worn by a young woman in a play concerning Queen Victoria; perhaps the combination of these facts and circumstances sparked off some kind of psychic energy.

GOWER STREET, BLOOMSBURY

A teashop that used to stand at the north end of Gower Street (before the modernization of the road junctions there) was said to be haunted by the ghost of a man with a bandaged head, a man who vanished whenever waitresses approached him for his order. The restaurant used to be frequented by medical students from nearby University College Hospital but the immediate and quite inexplicable disappearance of the figure, which always occupied the same table, seems to invalidate the popular explanation that medical students were playing practical jokes. It seems more likely that it was the same ghost that haunted a boarding house in Gower Street a few years earlier.

The trouble began when a young lady lodger was awakened one night by a loud noise and starting up in bed she was terrified to see the head and shoulders of a man, swathed in bandages. The form, which seemed to have a luminosity of its own, appeared in an alcove of the room usually occupied by a bookcase, which had been torn from its fastenings and lay broken on the floor — a probable cause of the noise that had awakened the terrified girl.

A few days later, loud knocks were reported by several people in the house and the following week the figure with bandaged head was seen again. Later, more rappings were heard and thereafter the disturbances seemed to cease. No explanation was ever discovered for either the distinct rappings or the singular apparition.

KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN

An old house in King Street, Covent Garden, has long been regarded as haunted and may be the one in which ‘a handsome woman, but common’ saw her ‘friend’, the son of Lord Mohun, after he had been killed. John Aubrey records that in the seventeenth century the gallant young son and heir of Lord Mohun had a quarrel with a Prince Griffin and it was arranged that a duel should be fought on Chelsea Fields, on horseback, with swords.

On his way to the rendezvous Mohun was stopped by a party of men who picked a quarrel with him and shot him dead. It was commonly believed that the whole thing was organized by Prince Griffin who knew Mohun to be a better horseman than himself.

The murder took place at ten o’clock in the morning and on the same day and at the same time this ‘handsome but common’ lady-friend in King Street saw the figure of young Mohun at her bedside. He drew the curtains aside, looked in on her and then disappeared. She called out to him and then to her maid, who did not see the figure, but the door of the room was locked and the maid had the key in her pocket. Aubrey arranged for a friend to question both the mistress and her servant and was satisfied that the account was a true one.

The same house has so affected some people that nothing would induce them to spend a night there by themselves. A surveyor, during the course of making some specifications of the building, stumbled down some very worn steps in the basement and found himself in a deep cellar. He knew that a lot of these old houses were built on the site of the old Convent Gardens of Westminster (St Peter’s) Abbey and thought he would see how far the cellar extended, it having been suggested that some of the cellars connect with one another.

King Street, Covent Garden, where the ghost of the son of Lord Mohun appeared at the precise time of his murder in Chelsea.

The surveyor noticed that the cellar was full of coal and, seeing a shovel close by, he set about moving some of the coal so that he could explore further, but as fast as he moved the coal, it slid or rolled back to where it had been previously. After a while, the surveyor gave up and returned upstairs where he talked to the housekeeper about the cellar and the steps and was surprised to learn that the old man seemed to have no knowledge of the stock of coal or of the worn stone steps.

Some time later, the surveyor had occasion to return to the house to check some measurements and, descending to the basement, he was amazed to find neither steps nor coal down there. A burly manservant in the house at the time rarely ventured down into the basement because, he said, he had seen a shadowy appearance of evil down there and he knew others who felt a bad influence in that part of the house. Once he fired a revolver at something he saw in the house, but without any visible effect. I understand that the cellars of this particular house have now been sealed and I could obtain no adequate reason for this action.

THE LYCEUM THEATRE, WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND

The old Lyceum Theatre in Wellington Street, off the Strand, had a ghostly corpse-like figure that stalked backstage during performances, but it seems to have disappeared since the theatre became a dance hall, its elegant Corinthian portico disfigured with massive poster boards. As the venue of many a beauty contest, more attractive figures now walk backstage!

At a meeting of The Ghost Club, W. J. Macqueen Pope related a gruesome experience at the richly decorated Lyceum, as it was about a hundred years ago. During a performance at the theatre, a man, occupying a box with his wife, chanced to look down towards the stalls and there noticed a woman in the fourth row dressed in beautiful coloured silks with what looked like a man’s head on her lap! The man’s wife noticed the direction of his gaze and asked him what on earth the woman had on her lap adding ‘It looks like a man’s head!’ In fact, they both agreed that the pale-faced head with closed eyes had long hair, a moustache and pointed beard and they both thought it looked like the head of a cavalier. During the interval the man and his wife, overcome with curiosity, left their box and walked through the stalls of the theatre to obtain a closer look at the strange object, but they were disappointed to discover that any object on the lady’s lap was now covered by a silk wrap. At the end of the performance they tried to intercept the well-groomed lady who appeared to be unaccompanied, but they lost her in the crowd of theatre-goers leaving the building. Years later, the man, by that time something of an expert in art and
objets d’art
, was invited to visit an ancestral hall in Yorkshire to value some paintings. There he saw a portrait of a cavalier and it was indisputably the man whose head he had seen at the Lyceum. During the course of enquiries he learned that the portrait was that of ancestor who had been beheaded by Cromwell, and he further discovered that the family had once owned the ground on which the Lyceum Theatre was built.

METROPOLITAN MUSIC HALL, EDGWARE ROAD (DEMOLISHED)

The Metropolitan Music Hall in Edgware Road had a ghost that dated from the First World War, a manager who had been killed on active service in France was often seen at early performances dressed in a brown suit and seemingly watching the stage and the attendance with a critical eye. After a while the figure was simply no longer there. It was never seen anywhere in the theatre except seated near the back of the stalls.

RED LION SQUARE, HOLBORN

A London square that is unique in that it used to be haunted by three ghosts walking together. The square, much altered in recent years for the benefit of motor traffic, was built in 1698 on the Red Lion Fields where, it was commonly believed, the remains of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, the Parliamentarian general who married Cromwell’s daughter Bridget, and John Bradshaw who, as president of the court, pronounced the death sentence on Charles I, were brought from Westminster. The bodies of all three men were disinterred from their tombs in Westminster Abbey after the Restoration and publicly hanged at Tyburn, as an expression of public feeling for their part in the Civil War and the harsh rule afterwards.

Although Red Lion Fields was not on the route from Westminster to Tyburn, the tradition is very strong and it seems always to have been believed that the bodies were brought to Holborn. One possible explanation is that since a gallows stood at that time near Red Lion Fields, it is not unlikely that there was a misunderstanding as to the gallows on which the bodies were to be exhibited, which resulted in the remains arriving at Red Lion Fields and soon afterwards being taken to Tyburn to be hanged on the famous gallows there. It is by no means unlikely that further desecration of the bodies took place at Red Lion Fields, the site of Red Lion Square.

Those who have seen these ghosts say they walk three abreast and appear to be in deep conversation with each other. They ignore the present paths, roadways and railings and walk in a straight line diagonally across the old area of the square from south to north.

Historian Sir John Prestwick states that Cromwell’s remains were ‘privately interred in a small paddock near Holborn on the spot where the obelisk in Red Lion Square lately stood’. Other authorities assert that the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw were lodged at the old Red Lion Inn at Holborn, before being dragged on sledges next day to Tyburn.

Red Lion Square, Holborn, has three ghosts that walk arm-in-arm and three haunted houses.