London Urban Legends Read online

  Beneath the green grass of Charterhouse Square lies part of three pits which dealt with many of the dead. The oldest part, used in 1349, covers the area between Great Sutton Street and Clerkenwell Road. It was known as No-Man’s-Land when purchased by the Bishops of London for burying plague victims. The site runs from Clerkenwell Road down to Charterhouse and then into the top of Smithfield. The pits contain an estimated 10,000 bodies. Charterhouse Square has its own plague legend: apparently the schoolboys of Charterhouse School would dare each other to crawl across the square at midnight, when the groans and cries of the dead below could be heard.

  The Devonshire Square development in the City is built on a pit once dug into a green field at the upper end of Hand Alley, according to Defoe, as was Hollywell Mount in Shoreditch, which is now a car park. Liverpool Street station and the Broadgate Estate are built on a pit open from 1569 until 1720, which was used for plague victims and other burials. There are two plague pits in the grounds of St Paul’s Church, Shadwell; a pest-field (where plague victims were buried in large numbers) in the ‘additional ground’ of St John’s Church Wapping, Whitechapel, had three pits, and St Bride’s, off Fleet Street, had a pit which was closed halfway through the 1665 Great Plague. This may be why St Bride’s sits so high above the ground. Marsham Street, Horseferry Road and Vincent Street cover a pit which was once part of Tothill Fields in Westminster, Golden Square and the multi-storey Soho car park on Poland Street. Famously, Bunhill Fields, just on the outskirts of the City, was another pit. The ‘great plague pit in Finsbury’ is under a car park and residential gardens for flats on the corner of Seward Street and Mount Mill. Lille Street Mansions, Normand Park and Fulham Swimming Pool sit on the site of the Lillie Road Pest Field.

  There may not be a plague pit stopping the construction of a tube line to Muswell Hill, but a graveyard did prevent the building of houses there. The Queen’s Wood was previously known as ‘Churchyard Bottom Wood’, being the site of an old church burial ground. In 1893 the Ecclesiastical Commissioners planned to sell off some of the wood for development, but local outrage prevented the building – which was sealed with the Highgate Woods Preservation Act of 1897 – going through parliament, allowing the wood’s preservation through purchase. There must be many stories like this to explain why a tube line travels a certain way. In reality the older tubes followed the road layout so they could avoid building foundations, basements and crypts, not plague pits. Legal considerations can also affect a tube tunnel’s direction. During the construction of the Fleet line, Transport for London set aside millions of pounds for dealing with lease holders who may not have been happy with a train running under their land.

  The Pits

  What of the suburban plague pits of Mortlake, Forest Hill, Camberwell, Muswell Hill and all the other sites? It is fair to say that when telling an urban legend, people never consider resources and logistics. With up to 4,000 people dying a day during the worst month of the Great Plague, Londoners did not have the time or energy to cart the wagons of the dead out into the countryside. Until the Great Plague, most plague victims were either buried in their local churchyards or in the grounds of the pest houses where plague sufferers had been confined. These pits are on the outskirts and edges of London (as it was then) and it would have been a huge waste of time and effort to drag the plague wagons out across the countryside to deposit the thousands of dead in Muswell Hill, Camberwell, Forest Hill, Blackheath and beyond. They had no need; the boundaries of the city at that point were on the edge of the City of London and Westminster, Wapping and Shadwell, which is where the dead were buried. In her book Necropolis: London and Its Dead, Catherine Arnold suggests that these legends sprung up after plague victims escaped London and wandered into the countryside of Camberwell and Forest Hill. The rural Surrey folk were familiar with what to do with infections, from their experience of murrain amongst their cattle, and the bodies of plague victims were dragged into holes by long poles and buried. The place of their burial, Arnold speculates, becomes a site of local lore.

  People have dug up the dead. With London’s long and populous history it would be very strange if digging up the city did not disturb some of the dead. There are still clusters of bones across central London, and often when they are found, the first thought is always that a plague pit has been discovered. This was the belief when bones were dug up in the Main Quad of University College London in 2010. After examination, the 7,394 bone fragments, 6,773 of which were human, were discovered to have a different story. Many of the bones had been cut by saws and scalpels, and many had numbers written on them. The burial was not a fourteenth-century plague pit, but parts of bodies buried there 100 years ago. The date of their burial was traced through a large Bovril jar that was buried with them, and it became clear that they were anatomy specimens that had been disposed of in a pit.

  In April 2011, tunnel digging for the new across-London Crossrail line dug up hundreds, if not thousands, of bodies next to Liverpool Street station. These were not plague victims but inmates of the original St Bethlehem Hospital, the asylum known as Bedlam, who were buried in the churchyard.

  12

  SUBTERRANEAN SECRETS

  * * *

  Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming.

  G.K. Chesterton

  * * *

  BETWEEN THE TUNNELS used by amorous and criminal historical figures, and the legends set within the London Underground, are other tales of underground London. The city is so honeycombed with basements, nuclear bunkers and tunnels that it must often ring hollow beneath the feet of its inhabitants. The unseen world is one full of allure, and a natural habitat for secrets.

  The Secret of the Elephant and Castle

  Waiting for a bus at the Elephant and Castle on a cold and rainy night must be one of the unspoken rites of passage of contemporary London, like seeing a cast member of EastEnders in the West End or realising that something being ‘pop-up’ doesn’t automatically make it exciting. The asymmetrical jumble of the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, all dirty glass and faded pink plastic, is a strange, sometimes fascinating place. Was it really thought that putting it there would improve the area and the lives of those that inhabit it? ‘No’, according to writer Nigel Pennick, who believes that the shopping centre was constructed in the 1960s as a cover. In the 1940s an extension of the Jubilee line down to Camberwell Green was planned, before losing out in 1961 to the Victoria line running to Brixton. A mile or so of tunnel was dug and then abandoned, but not without an anarchist group noticing and describing it in their pamphlet London – The Other Underground as a ‘government tunnel’ linked via other secret passages to the City and Victoria. Pennick decided that during the 1950s, with the chill of the Cold War and fear of nuclear war in the air, these tunnels were converted into nuclear shelters, suggesting that many 1960s redevelopments were a cover for the construction of secret government bunkers. How does one cover up a secret underground government bunker near to Westminster but beneath a disreputable part of south London? You build a giant shopping centre as a cover and hope anarchists and authors do not notice. And that, some say, is why the Elephant and Castle shopping centre is there.

  There are people that think that the government still has the power to have secret tunnels and sites across London, and there are endless rumours of a secret tube line for ferrying the Royal Family out of Buckingham Palace in the event of an attack or disaster. These are not new rumours; in 1914 a discussion on the drainage tunnels that run under Greenwich Park gave them the more heroic role of being a possible escape tunnel for Henry VIII, their kinks and bends there to perturb arrows that may be chasing the king as he squeezed down them. Another royal escape route is through the trees in St James’s Park. They were arranged during the Second World War, somehow, to ensure that a light aircraft could land in the park to whisk the Royal Family out
of Buckingham Palace should Germany successfully invade. This is what I was told by a friend in the Hermit’s Cave in Camberwell anyway, but the friend who told me is a bit of a trickster – we were there to discuss his role in the Brentford Griffin hoax.

  The MI6 building, Vauxhall Cross, on the south bank of the Thames, has a tunnel running from its basement to Vauxhall station, but in greater dangers it is rumoured that the building has a more drastic self-defence mechanism. Folklorist Martin Goodson found himself on the No. 36 bus going from Peckham to Camberwell and overheard three Camberwell art students talking:

  You know that in case of emergency I’ve heard that it (MI5 building) [actually MI6], can sink down and go under the river.’

  General hilarity broke out from the other students.

  ‘No, it’s true, it can. I’ve also heard it can turn black so that it cannot be attacked at night.

  The level of hilarity increased, but the student persevered in her conviction that this building is now equipped with some spectacular special effect qualities to protect itself in case of attack.

  13

  THE CORPSE ON THE TUBE

  * * *

  I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening;

  I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

  Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies

  * * *

  Dead Line

  The best and most popular place to share an urban legend is some point during an idle chat. During a quiet moment, a work colleague mentioned a story her friend had told her about the London Underground. Someone, a friend of a friend or someone a bit further removed, had been travelling on the Underground late at night – she didn’t know which line – in an empty carriage when three people got on and sat opposite her. Two men sat either side of a pale, limp woman. The half-remembered story, as it came across the desks at work, had the traveller being warned away from the two men and their pale companion and for good reason: the woman was dead.

  Other versions of the same story can be found on the internet. Web forums are like chatting in the pub or during a tea break at work, but one can converse with like-minded people across the internet. The Unexplained Mysteries forum created a thread in 2007 called ‘The Girl on the London Underground’, which began with a friend of a friend (an art student) travelling back to her campus from central London late one night. She was alone, except for one other person in the carriage, a man who looked to be in his thirties. Then, three new people board: two men and a woman. The art student decided that the trio looked like drug addicts and avoided making eye-contact with them. Then, the thirty-something man started acting strangely. He walked over to the student and behaved as if he knew her, asking, ‘Hi, how are you? I’ve not spoken to you in a long time,’ before leaning into her and whispering, ‘Get off at the next stop.’

  The student was wary of this, but did not wish to be left alone on the train with what she thought were three drug addicts, so she followed the man off the train and onto the platform. Once they were off the train, the man revealed to the student that the girl in the trio was dead; he had seen the two men drag her onto the train with a pair of scissors embedded in the back of her skull.

  A similar story was collected via an anonymous email in 2003 by the Urban Legend Reference Pages, better known as ‘Snopes’. This tale came from a work colleague of the sender, whose boyfriend knew or had heard about a girl who got on the tube and, not wanting to sit on her own, sat opposite the three other people in the carriage. Again, this was a woman flanked by two men. The girl started to read, but whenever she looked up the woman was staring directly at her. The girl ignored the stares and at the next station a man boarded the train, looked about the carriage and sat down next to her. This new man then whispered to the girl, ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get off at the next station with me.’ Despite feeling threatened by this, the girl presumed there would be other people at the next station and got off. At this point the man revealed himself to be a doctor, who could tell that the staring woman was dead and the two men either side of her were propping her up.

  A Mystery on the Underground

  Another version of the previous tale takes place on an intercity train. Two women travellers are stared at intensely by a girl who they find out later had been murdered by her two female companions. Could this be the same story, warped by whispered repetition, as the story Rodney Dale records in his book It’s True … It Happened to a Friend (1984)? This version has a girl getting onto a quiet subway carriage and doing her crossword. A man gets on, whom she ignores, and then at the next stop two more men board and sit either side of the first man. As the train stops again, the two men get off, leaving the first man in his seat, although not for long. As the train jolts out of the station the man falls out of his seat with a knife in his back. This time the corpse on the tube becomes one right in front of our unfortunate commuter. The story takes place on the subway rather than the tube, so where could it have happened? I asked Rodney Dale if he could remember his source or the location for this version but sadly, it is a very small section in the book and he could not.

  One possible origin for the corpse on the tube legend is a fictional story serial called ‘A Mystery on the Underground’ by John Oxenham, which appeared in To-Day magazine in 1897. Presented as fake newspaper clippings rather than a conventional narrative, the story begins with men turning up dead while travelling on the District line. Early on in the story, finding the body is like finding the corpse in one version of the urban legend in this book: a lone woman on the tube discovers a man is dead when his body falls off the seat as the train wobbles.

  A story about this stroy claims the tube companies were concerned that people would mistake each episode for actual news clippings. There was a mocked-up cartoon, supposedly from Punch, showing shocked people on a crowded stagecoach when they hear a man is still taking the tube. The tube contacted the editor of To-Day, the famed writer Jerome K. Jerome, to complain. Jerome considered pulling the story but, having one more episode to go, which took place on a ship rather than the London Underground, Jerome let it run. There is no mention of any 1897 tube panics in The Times index for that year, and in his autobiography, Jerome does not discuss To-Day any further than his regrets when he had to sell it.

  After the initial similarity to the corpse on the tube legend early on in the story, there is no further resemblance to it in ‘A Mystery on the Underground’. The murders always take place on a Tuesday and the victims are shot dead in the carriage by an anonymous killer and not led on to the train by shifty characters. If a cause of death is mentioned in the urban legend, it is a stabbing.

  Death on the Tracks

  The story of the corpse on the tube is clearly an urban legend, but was it ever more than just a horror story about travelling with strangers in confined spaces? People do die on London’s public transport; the TUBEprune, the Tube Professionals’ Rumour Network, is a website full of gossip and stories, purportedly from London Underground staff. One section describes two instances when bodies have been found on the tube, though they do both have the air of a story rather than the retelling of an event. The first was when a train arrived at East Finchley station at the end of the morning peak time. The crew inspected the train and found a man slumped in a seat, who they tried to wake. They discovered that the man was dead, and had been for so long that rigor mortis had set in and he was rigid in his seat. The body had to be removed by being laid sideways on a stretcher to prevent it rolling off.

  While rigor mortis begins three to four hours after death – so is possible after the morning peak – maximum stiffness does not set in until around twelve hours. It is possible the body was left overnight on the tube, but hopefully not.

  Another find was on the eastbound Piccadilly Line at Northfields. A passenger raised the alarm when a man on the packed train seemed ‘a bit poorly’. The guard did not wish to delay the train so he persuaded a couple of
passengers to help him drag the corpse off the train and left it sitting upright on a bench. The police were called and complained about the disrespectful treatment of a body. The guard then responded with, ‘What else could I do, I couldn’t delay the train, could I?’

  Whether this is a true story or not, or a joke about the far edges of job-worthiness told by Tf L staff, or even a blending of the two, I shall leave up to you to decide. A problem that occurs when one spends a lot of time researching, writing and thinking about urban legends is that you end up doubting every story you hear unless the teller can show you photographs, official documents or the scars. And even then you still doubt.

  One person who was almost certainly found dead on the tube was German naval lieutenant-commander and suspected Nazi spy, Franz Rintelen von Kleist. The former Isle of Man internee was found dead on a train at South Kensington tube station in May 1949.