Ghosts of the Tower of London (3 page)

Be it summer or winter, daily the public pour in their thousands to Her Majesty’s Tower of London. Jostling across the causeways over the moat they surge through the archways, their bright clothes contrasting with the grey walls, their incessant chatter penetrating the remotest cells of the prison towers. They bring their own holiday atmosphere with them as they swarm across Tower Green. Here a crowd listens enthralled to a yeoman warder, their ‘Beefeater’ guide, or stands impressed by the impassive sentry. Yonder the babel of many tongues echoes from the Jewel House approaches as the queue ebbs and flows. Coach parties noisily follow their hurrying leaders, children dash in vain to catch the perambulating pigeon – the scene is alive, a whirlpool of colour, of chatter and happy activity.

Yet when the last tourist is shepherded out beneath the By ward archway and the shadows start to lengthen across Tower Green, it almost seems as if the grey stone buildings shake off the traces of the day’s artificiality.For night is the time for memories, and the Tower of London has indeed a surfeit of those. Happy ones, yes, of banquets and coronations, processions and merrymaking. But when the clouds scud across the moon and the wind sighs through the arrow slits, the fortress wraps its cloak of brooding isolation around itself, like an old enshawled woman staring into the embers. It is then that the evil memories of the past jostle to emerge.

Many have experienced the horror of those memories. A ghostly figure flits across the Green; footsteps ascend stairs untrodden by human feet; a luminescent cylinder hovers above a table; huge shadows of terrifying shapes appear on battlemented walls. Memories conjuring up the countless wretches who suffered the agony of thumbscrew and rack, who perished beneath the axe. Could they not return, to reproach and bewail?

This book gathers together some of the reports of apparitions seen, inexplicable noises heard. That there have been more, I do not doubt. Not everyone is brave enough to admit fear, the bloodchilling terror which turns one’s feet to stone, when one’s twentieth-century brain refuses to accept the sight, the sound, the sensation of … who knows?

I do not seek to explain them, nor even to comment on the truth of their ever happening. You may laugh when the sun is high over the turrets, giggle with your friends as you ascend the spiral stairs in the Bloody Tower – sneer if you must as you crowd round the scaffold site.

But when the midnight mists wreathe low to shroud the battlements – when the dark cavities of turret windows watch sardonically like half-closed eyes – when the wind, leaning gently on the oaken doors, causes pendant chains to swing and clank … scoff not, but speed your stride and look not back!

It was a dark still night in October 1978 - so dark that had the patrolling sentry peered into the ravens’ cages he would scarcely have been able to make out the feathered occupants. Not that the birds were asleep; they stirred restlessly, as if they had some fore-knowledge of the eerie events soon to take place. The time was just after ten o’clock. The great oak doors of the Tower of London had been slammed shut and locked firm, the ponderous hasps securing the castle and its unique treasures against possible intruders. The Queen’s Keys, in accordance with the ancient ceremony enacted nightly for seven hundred years, had been challenged, then saluted and held secure in the Byward Tower at the castle’s entrance. The bugle’s brassy voice had echoed round the shadowed battlements and the little group of awed spectators to the Ceremony ushered out through the guarded postern gate. And the Norman fortress settled down for the night, leaving only the ever alert yeoman warders and sentries on duty.

One such sentry moved silently along his beat, a route which took him along the Outer Ward. This was the roadway between the inner and outer walls of the castle. The inner wall, thirty feet high and battlemented, connected some smaller towers, and was pierced at intervals by archways. These gave access to the area surrounding the central White Tower, the nine-century-old Norman Keep at the very heart of the fortress.

The sentry paused by one archway adjacent to the Wakefield Tower. Within its cold depths, on 21 May 1471, King Henry VI had been brutally stabbed to death whilst at prayer. The adjoining prison, the Bloody Tower, had also witnessed anguish and sudden death. There Sir Walter Raleigh had been caged for many a long year; there the two young Princes were savagely exterminated. The evil Judge Jeffries chose death by an excess of brandy rather than by the axe, and also within its walls Sir Thomas Overbury succumbed to the corrosive poisons administered to him by his enemy the Countess of Essex.

The sentry know nothing of this. He and his colleagues would be on duty here for forty-eight hours and would then return to their barracks in the City, to be replaced by yet another regiment.

Beyond this archway stretched the grassy slope, a thin layer of autumn leaves covering it. All was quiet. There was no known reason why this particular area should have a sinister reputation, any more than anywhere else in the Tower, yet it was but five years or so earlier that a sentry of the Scots Guards had been on duty at that very spot. He had been aware of something moving, something that had the shape of a cloaked figure. The shape had emerged from the shadows, to be promptly challenged by the sentry. Receiving no reply, again the challenge came - a challenge that was stopped mid-breath, as the figure was seen to have no head! That particular episode ended with the soldier receiving first-aid for his distraught condition. Despite an exhaustive search, no trace was ever found of the headless intruder.

Such reports of course were not passed on through the regiments over the years and so there was nothing to alarm the sentry on duty on the night in question. Like a wraith himself, he moved along the roadway between the two high walls eyes probing the darkened arrow slits the pools of shadows between the old cannons which bordered the path. Suddenly, with a sharp ‘click’, a small stone struck his boot. Thinking that he had kicked it, he continued his patrol. Two, three paces further on, another stone hit his foot, followed by yet another. Then one hit him on the leg! He froze into immobility. The small missiles seemed to come from the wall on his left, the high battlements linking the Wakefield Tower with the Lanthorn Tower. He knew that all his colleagues were either resting or on duty - and in the Tower of London no-one played jokes on armed sentries!

Curious rather than apprehensive, he retraced his steps until, at the end of his beat, he met his companion pacing the adjoining beat. A few half-whispered words - and the two men changed places. The new sentry stepped out, half-doubting, yet wary. A practical man, he was more concerned about the possible damage flying stones might inflict on his highly-polished boots! Half a dozen paces - a few more - and then a stone struck his ankle, to clatter away across the well-worn cobbles! The Orders for the Guard were clear and well-defined; anything unusual must be reported immediately. The sentry made a quick decision; the sergeant’s sceptical disbelief would have to be risked - this WAS unusual!

The senior NCO was not sceptical. Together with other NCOs and soldiers, they searched the area. There was no trace of any living person. The wall in question was over a hundred yards long and thirty feet high. Even more significant, it was eight feet thick, thus effectively ruling out the possibility of anyone on the other side of the wall lobbing stones over the top. The size of the stones, coupled with the trajectory required, eliminated the chance of hitting the feet of a moving target with any degree of accuracy. That anyone could have been on top of the wall was also out of the question. The only access was through the Wakefield Tower, but its two ground level doors were locked and its upper door, at battlement level, had an additional iron barred gate secured across it.

The sergeant, puzzled yet satisfied with the thoroughness of his search, ordered resumption of the normal patrols. He resolved however to carry out random checks throughout the night, a resolve which was to lead HIM into a perplexing and eerie situation. But that was not until two more sentries had had their nerves tested!

Midnight was striking as these two approached the archway beneath the Bloody Tower. This archway, for long the only entrance to the Inner Ward, the precincts of the royal families, was also the dreaded route trodden by the doomed prisoners. These tragic figures, queens and princesses, archbishops and aristocrats, entered via Traitors’ Gate and thence through the Bloody Tower archway to their prison towers, many later to suffer death ‘neath the descending axe. Now the archway stood dimly lit in the cold still night. A pigeon stirred in a wall crevice nearby as the two sentries passed beneath the raised portcullis. Suddenly both men shivered, the hair on the back of their necks bristling. For a long moment they halted, experiencing a sensation of indescribable terror - then, unheralded, an icy gust of air blew through the archway with violence sufficient to whip their short capes up over their heads!

As quickly as the men reacted, the wind dropped and all was still again. Bewildered they stared around. There was nothing sinister to be seen, other than the stone gargoyles looking down enigmatically at them from the inner alcoves of the archway, stone faces which had watched the splendour and panoply, the misery and despair of the historic figures who had passed beneath them over six hundred centuries.

One man shrugged his shoulders. How could you report a cool breeze and a spooky feeling? How indeed?! Although it must be said that they weren’t as badly frightened as a certain Guards Officer in the 1930s. He was stationed at the Tower of London and was returning to the Officers’ Mess there late one night. Passing under the Bloody Tower he felt a most peculiar and utterly distasteful sensation which filled him with an intense desire to escape from that spot. His mind went completely blank. Next moment, or so it seemed to him, he found himself three hundred yards away on the steps of the Mess, gasping for breath, his heart pounding wildly.

So over the centuries, little has changed - or had the visitations from the other world no knowledge of earthly time? The Sergeant of the Guard certainly had, when, on this night in October 1978, he escorted the Officer of the Guard on his rounds of inspection. It was two a.m. All sentries had been checked and found alert and watchful. The lights burned bright in the barracks in the Waterloo Block where solders were preparing for their next tour of duty; otherwise the great fortress slept. The mournful noise of a ship’s hooter sounded distantly, echoing from the gaunt empty warehouses which lined the river’s banks.

The officer and his sergeant passed through the Bloody Tower archway without incident. To their right stood part of a thirteenth century rampart, crumbling and derelict. Its once sharply defined arrow slits had deteriorated into gaping cavities through which the verdant lawn gleamed as the moon slipped out from behind a cloud. Beyond it the White Tower soared high and majestic, and as the two men paused to look up at that building, the sergeant suddenly gripped his rifle tightly as, only yards away, a huge shadow moved along the face of the ancient wall! They watched wide-eyed as it seemed to writhe sinuously, its shape changing as the broken, jagged surface of stone altered its blurred outline!

The men swung round to scan behind them. But nothing moved, nothing that could have created such an apparition. As if drawn by magnetism their gaze returned to the wall, where the gigantic shadow continued to traverse its length, finally merging with the darkness at the base of the Wakefield Tower. Both men, pulses racing, searched again for its possible cause - but the Tower of London guards its secrets jealously and their search proved abortive.

A grey dawn brought daylight edging over the battlements, glancing off the flint-clad walls, the diamond-paned windows of the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula, wherein lie the bones of three executed Queens of England and many other victims. The sentry yawned and thought of breakfast. It had been a long night. Round the corner, from his quarters in the Tower’s casemates, came a yeoman warder, one of the historic body of men who for over nine centuries have been custodians of the royal fortress. It was six thirty am, time for him to unlock and swing open the great oak doors and thereafter control entry of those authorised to do so. The sentry, silent for long enough, related the night’s adventure to his new companion. “The stones actually hit my feet” he exclaimed ‘And because I could hardly believe it, I collected some of them - and here they are!”

I was the yeoman warder on duty that morning; I have those very stones in front of me as I pen this account! And as I look at them, I wonder; who - or what - held them before the sentry picked them up ……………?!!!!!