The ghost of Queen Anne (1702-1714) is said to haunt Queen Anne’s Gate where you can see her statue. It is said she walks the street at midnight every 1 August, the anniversary of her death. Poor unhappy Queen Anne, she conceived nineteen children but none survived her and she was the last Stuart sovereign.

A headless ghost of a young woman haunts Birdcage Walk. It is believed she was the wife of a heartless Guardsman who murdered her, cut off her head so she could not be identified, and threw her body into the St James’s Park Lake.

The Church of St Magnus the Martyr (on the route to and from the Tower of London) is haunted by a monastic figure who wears an old fashioned hooded robe. He has been seen by many people inside the church and a strange aura of sadness emanates from this ghost. People who have worked on their own inside the church have the feeling they are being secretly watched.

The ruined church of Christchurch Greyfriars has two ghosts. One is of Isabella the “She Wolf of France” (the young princess in the film Braveheart) who murdered her husband and was buried here in about 1358. The other ghost is that of Lady Alice Hungerford, said to be the greatest beauty of her age but who poisoned her second husband. She was executed at Tyburn in about 1530 and buried in this church.

Many hundreds of people were burned at the stake in front of the beautiful gatehouse of St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield. Wait quietly and listen for the sounds of crackling wood and screams of the poor victims. Sometimes on a Sunday it is said you can even smell the awful stench of roast human flesh.

Near to the church of St Bartholomew the Great is Cock Lane. Here the ghost of a woman called Fanny came to haunt her husband who it was believed had murdered her by putting a dose of red arsenic in her beer. The ghost attracted attention by scratching on the wall of the room where she was murdered. The ghost became famous across London in the 18th century and was popularly known as “Scratching Fannie”. It later emerged it was a hoax.

The Old Bailey, a famous court house known across the world for its trials of murderers and spies, stands on the site of Newgate Prison one of the most feared prisons in England where public executions took place until the mid 1800s. Many a condemned prisoner reported seeing, on the night before their execution, a ghost with a doglike shape called the Black Dog of Newgate. To this day, a particularly horrific ghostly black shape crawls along the old walls of Amen Court (where the churchmen of St Paul’s Cathedral live) which back on to the site of the old prison.

The Theatre Royal Drury Lane is London’s oldest theatre and has a famous ghost known as the Man in Grey. He appears during a matinee, always of a successful production, wearing a three-cornered hat, powdered wig and grey riding cloak. He proceeds along the back of the upper circle and vanishes through the wall. In the 1800s a cavity was found in the wall, with a skeleton in it. It was discovered that death had been caused by a dagger still embedded in the ribs and fragments of richly braided cloth were also found.

 

The second oldest theatre, the Haymarket, has a regularly seen ghost of John Buckstone who was manager of the theatre in the late 1800s during its most prosperous period. He was a very popular manager and like the Man in Grey, Buckstone is only ever seen during a successful production. However, Buckstone is seen wearing a dark frock coat.

Covent Garden Tube Station is haunted by the ghost of William Terris, a large well built figure dressed in a grey suit and wearing white gloves. Terris was a well known and popular actor at the beginning of the 20th century who was knifed to death in a nearby theatre by a fellow actor in a fit of jealousy.   

Many of the older London pubs have ghosts. The Black Swan in Bow Road was destroyed in 1916 by a bomb dropped by a German airship and four people were killed – the landlord’s mother, his two young daughters (aged 20 and 21) and the baby girl of the oldest daughter. The pub was subsequently rebuilt but the ghosts of the two daughters are often seen in various rooms of the current pub and beer taps have mysteriously turned themselves on and off.

The Connaught Tavern in West Ham is haunted by the ghost of a madwoman who committed suicide there. She was the aunt of the landlord. After she died her bedroom was locked and abandoned. After many years the new owners of the pub decided to open the room and found, staring at them with mad red eyes and twisted mouth, a ghostly shape of an old woman. The pub has had many different landlords since then.

The Tower of London is said to have more ghosts than visitors!! Many dreadful deeds have been carried out within its sinister walls including torture and executions. Anne Boleyn the second wife of King Henry VIII was executed for treason here, and her ghost has been seen in the Chapel Royal in the White Tower – in a stately procession of knights and ladies, in front of whom walks an elegant lady her face averted. The ghost of King Henry VI haunts the room in which he was stabbed to death, at midnight on the anniversary of his death, 21 May 1471.

Those traitors or criminals who were not of the royal blood were executed on Tower Hill just outside the walls of the Tower and their heads were then displayed on a stick on London Bridge. Occasionally a ghostly procession is seen passing through the main gate of the Tower, soldiers and priests preceding a group of attendants carrying a stretcher on which a headless body lies with his head held in the crook of his arm.