London
10 legends
Ghostwatch on the BBC
BBC Elstree Studios and the suburban district of Northolt in Greater London, UK, are the defining locations of one of the most controversial media hoaxes in broadcast history. On Halloween night in 1992, the BBC aired "Ghostwatch," a mock live investigative special into a haunted council home that triggered nationwide public hysteria, regulatory sanctions, and real-world tragedy.
The Unlucky Mummy and the Titanic
The painted coffin lid of a priestess of Amun-Ra, acquired by the British Museum in 1889 as EA22542. By the early twentieth century a story had grown around it: everyone who owned it was ruined or died, the photographer who took its picture shot himself, and in April 1912 the museum was said to have shipped it secretly to America aboard the Titanic. None of it happened. The lid is a flat board, not a mummy, and no body was ever attached to it; it has not left London except for wartime and 1990s storage, as the accession registers show. The story was got up privately by the journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson and the editor W. T. Stead, who liked to tell it at dinner; Stead himself died on the Titanic.
The British Museum Crystal Skull
A life-size rock crystal skull, bought by the British Museum from Tiffany & Co. in 1897 and displayed for half a century as Aztec work. In the nineties the museum's researchers traced it to the Paris dealer Eugène Boban, who sold Mexican antiquities in the second half of the nineteenth century and had connections to the German lapidary workshops of Idar-Oberstein. In 2005 a joint study by the British Museum and the Smithsonian found the regular marks of a rotary wheel under the microscope, and the inclusions showed the quartz to be Brazilian — unavailable to pre-Columbian Mexico. The label in the gallery was rewritten.
Florence Cook and the Spirit Katie King
The London medium Florence Cook would go behind a curtain and Katie King would come out — a full materialisation, photographed and vouched for by the physicist William Crookes. Everyone remarked on the resemblance between the medium and the spirit. In December 1873 William Volckman seized Katie round the waist and held on until confederates pulled her away; when the curtain was opened, Cook lay there with her clothing disarranged. In January 1880, at a sitting in Hackney, Sir George Sitwell caught the spirit Marie and did not let go: it was Cook in her underclothes, and her corset and dress were found in the cabinet. Her career ended there.
The Hammersmith Ghost and the Smith Case
Through the winter of 1803–04 a figure in white went about Hammersmith throwing itself at passers-by; it was said to be a suicide from the churchyard. The parish organised night patrols, and in the early hours of 3 January 1804 the excise officer Francis Smith fired at a white shape in Black Lion Lane and killed Thomas Millwood, a bricklayer walking home in the white linen of his trade. Smith was sentenced to death for murder, commuted to a year's hard labour, and the case served English law for two centuries as the standard problem of whether an honest mistake can excuse force. The ghost itself was accounted for soon afterwards by a shoemaker, John Graham, who admitted wrapping himself in a sheet to frighten his apprentice.
The Stockwell Ghost
On 6 January 1772, in Mrs Golding's house at Stockwell, china began to come off the shelves, clocks fell from the walls and a ham stepped off its hook. She fled to the neighbours and it all happened again there. The two houses had one thing in common: her twenty-year-old maid Ann Robinson went with her. The maid was dismissed and the destruction stopped at once. Years later Robinson told the clergyman Samuel Horsley how it was done — horsehair tied to the crockery, wire, fixings filed through in advance, and a careful sense of when to leave the room. She had wanted the house empty so that her young man could visit.
The Cock Lane Ghost
In the winter of 1762 a house on Cock Lane near Newgate was knocked on by the ghost of Fanny Lynes, a young woman who had died and who now accused her own lover, in raps, of poisoning her. London lost its head: carriages blocked the street, money was taken at the bedroom door, the affair was discussed in Parliament. A commission that included Samuel Johnson spent a night in the vault of St John's and summoned the ghost to the coffin, where nothing happened. Eleven-year-old Elizabeth Parsons was then put in a hammock with her hands tied and the knocking stopped; watched closely, she was found with a small board hidden on her. Her father Richard Parsons was sentenced to two years and stood three times in the pillory.
London and the Alien Autopsy Film
On 17 August 1995 television in twenty countries ran a black-and-white film of figures in protective suits dissecting a humanoid body, said to have been shot at Roswell in 1947. It was sold by the London music producer Ray Santilli. Kodak said the edge codes belonged to stock made in 1927, 1947 or 1967 — but only a blank offcut was ever handed over for testing. In 2006 Santilli admitted on Sky that the original had degraded and that what the world saw was filmed in a Camden flat, the dummy stuffed with sheep brains, chicken entrails and raspberry jam.
Highgate Cemetery
An overgrown Victorian cemetery in north London with gothic vaults and an Egyptian Avenue. In the early 1970s a newspaper frenzy about a "Highgate Vampire" drew crowds of hunters to its gates.
Tower of London
A medieval fortress on the Thames with nearly a thousand years of executions and imprisonments. Legend holds that the ghosts of Anne Boleyn and other prisoners still walk its grounds.