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Going bump in the night

May 24 2002

By Local Historian Brian Mcconnell, South London Press

SO YOU don't believe in ghosts. But it was not always like that in south London.

In 1820 a famous story of a purposeful ghost was published as a pamphlet. It read: "The history of the mysterious house and alarming appearances at the corner of Stamford Street, Blackfriars Road, well known to have been occupied for many years and called The Skeleton's Corner, also the particulars of the female spectre which appeared at the window; and an account of who are the victims of seduction and murder, the wonder and excitement caused by the appearance of the house and also by the curious and extraordinary disappearance of the inmates. Alarming noises and strange shadows; the curiosity excited on passing the house and an account of what has reported to have been seen of the skeleton and apparitions.

The report of the butcher, baker and the pieman and other interesting particulars. Spectre visit of that strange female in black and the fate of the young lady supposed to be a tenant many years ago...''

And so the pamphlet went on. Christina Hole, the folklorist, devoted a whole chapter on the subject in her book, Haunted England (1940).

But belief in ghosts was very common and the telling of ghost stories was very popular before and after that date.

William Blake (1757-1827) painter, engraver, poet and mystic, who lived in Hercules Road, Kennington, said that he was often visited by the ghost of his dead brother.The ghost first came to him, he said, clapping its hands with joy, almost immediately after his brother's death.

Poet Lord Byron (1788-1824) who went to Dr Glennies private school on the site of The Plough, where the South Circular meets Lordship Lane in East Dulwich, was deeply interested in the supernatural and claimed to have seen the phantom monk, also known as the goblin friar. He said it always appeared just before any calamity happened to his family and that he saw it just before his ill-fated marriage to heiress Anne Millbanke in 1815.

Byron described it in verse: "A monk arrived in cowl and beads, and dusky garb appeared. "Now in the moonlight, and now lapsed in shade, "With steps that trod as heavy, yet unheard." Charles Dickens (1812-1870), of Lant Street, Southwark, who embodied the age in which he lived, particularly in south London, wrote the most famous ghost story of all in A Christmas Carol, in which the ghosts of Christmas past, present and yet to come show Scrooge how to mend his ways.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), who set his early Sherlock Holmes adventures in Brixton, Camberwell and Streatham, and himself retired to Tennyson Road, Norwood, claimed leadership of the spiritualist movement, attended numerous seances, claimed to have been in touch with the ghost of his dead mother, and heard the voice of his son, killed in the First World War.

In this Royal Jubilee year, it should be remembered that The Queen's House at Greenwich, at the Royal Maritime Museum, built for Anne of Denmark, wife of James I, is still said to be haunted by two figures dressed in the cowls and cloaks of monks.

The Rev R W Hardy, a Canadian, photographed the spiral tulip-decorated staircase in 1966 only to find the shadowy figures of the monks climbing the stairs on the prints.

Others, unconnected with the clergyman, claim to have heard ghostly footsteps on the stairs, mutterings and other inexplicable noises.

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