Another Roman Ghost

Yesterday, as we were in the vicinity, we paid a visit to the village of Brenchley in Kent, principally to see  All Saints church. The church was open, so we had a good look inside, but the main interest was the churchyard, which was very atmospheric on an overcast and drizzling day; also surprisingly extensive and containing a number of large, elaborate and unusually designed tombs. 

Continuing the theme of the previous post, I had read in Alan Murdie's Fortean Times article (The Romans in Britain Part 2 FT365 April 2018 p.17) that the ghost  of a Roman soldier had been reported in the churchyard. The only reference is to a book by Andrew Green called Haunted Kent Today (1977). To quote from Murdie's article: 'we have no named witnesses for the lone Roman soldier (possibly a Roundhead) at All Saints Churchyard, Brenchley ...' The only result of a Google search for this sighting gave me a reference to the FT article, so this is hardly a well-known and attested haunting, also it seems that the figure could have been a Roundhead (!) soldier from the English Civil War, making it even less reliable. Green's obituary written by fellow ghost hunter Peter Underwood, who mentions that he used 'unreliable sources' here - he lived in Robertsbridge, not far from Hastings - see a video of a local haunting here.

Having asked where the Anglo Saxon ghosts were in my previous post, I happened to read some publicity for the new Netflix series The Dig, a dramatisation of the momentous archaeological  discoveries at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk prior to WW2. Someone commented that it was the ghosts of a group of Anglo Saxon warriors seen on the site that made locals think there was something of value buried in the mounds on the estate of Edith Pretty. See here. Last summer, when the lockdown had been eased, we spent a lovely couple of days in Suffolk, visiting Ipswich and Sutton Hoo - the site and its facilities have been recently refurbished and it was a great place to visit. All the treasures are in the British Museum. 

Addendum: I've just finished reading A Natural History of Ghosts by Roger Clarke and he has an interesting story from his childhood on the Isle of Wight. He was told that the ghost of a centurion haunted a wood near Bembridge, which his family often drove through. 'During the course of my research for the book, I discovered the name of this wood: St Urian's. St Urian was the name of a church and village wiped out by the Black Death. It was not rebuilt and became covered in woodland. St Urian became "centurion". The name made the ghost story.' Much more detail here.

Roman Ghosts

Why are there so few - if any - sightings of ghosts of Ice Age hunters or other prehistoric peoples in the UK? Come to think of it, I'm not aware of a plethora of Anglo-Saxon reports either. The range of what Owen Davies - in his academic study The Haunted (see below) - calls 'heritage hauntings' was supplemented in more recent years by those of Romans: usually military figures and unusually in groups (legions) rather than a single ghost. Another interesting aspect is that there seems to be a disproportionate number of these 'centurions' and 'legionaries' sighted, compared with everyday Roman or Romano-British inhabitants of these isles. The variety of Roman military equipment for identification can be referenced here for example.

While reading a Christmas present, Haunted Places of Sussex, I came across this account from Chichester, known to the Romans as Noviomagus, a walled settlement on Stane Street - the plan of the city still reflects that of the Roman street pattern. Incidentally it also is the home of one of my favourite art galleries Pallant House.  At 38 Wood Street there has been a public house since the 1780s, from 1992 named The Chichester - the building stands very close to the city's ancient walls. According to the book:

'It has long been claimed that the ghost of a Roman centurion still patrols the old walls and that his passage takes him straight through the pub. If the ghost does date from Roman times it seems more likely that he was a legionary, since a centurion was a senior soldier, a commander - but people have always called him a centurion and so it is pointless to quibble. The patrolling spectre has been seen by many people while others have felt him brush past. The whole figure is not in view, only the top half. This could be explained by different ground levels since Roman times.'  Judy Middleton Haunted Places of Sussex (2005) pp.13-14

Probably the most famous sighting of a Roman 'legion' was made by Harry Martindale in the cellar of the Treasurer's House in York in 1953, but not recorded in print until 1974. See here and here. It also includes the detail of the figures being at a lower ground level.

Another celebrated ghost of a Roman 'centurion' is said to patrol the Strood (pronounced Strode) a causeway that links Mersea Island with mainland Essex to the south of Colchester. The Rev Sabine Baring Gould was the first - in 1904 - to record the local belief that the ghost could be seen at certain times of the year, especially on the night of the autumn equinox, around 23 September. He also notes that the 'ring of swords and the clang of armour' could sometimes be heard at the spot. (Westwood and Simpson Lore of the Land 269-272).

James Wentworth Day - mentioned here in previous posts - wrote that he was told about the centurion by Mrs Jane Pullen, landlady of the ancient Peldon Rose inn. She told him that she was accompanied on a walk from Barrow Hill on the island: 'The steady tramp of a man's feet, like it was a soldier marching, and he caught up with me and walked all the way down to the Strood. I could see no one, yet the feet were close beside me, as near as I could have touched him. I walked down the hill till I came on a man I knew. He was all a-tremble. He shook like a leaf. "I can hear him," he said, "but where is he? I can't see anyone." "Keep all along of me," I said to the man, "and no harm will come to you. 'Tis only one of those old Romans come out of the barrow to take his walk." (J Wentworth Day Ghosts & Witches 44-47).

In 1962 a man was digging in one of the burial mounds at Barrow Hills, when the ground gave way and he fell into a hollowed-out chamber. Archaeologists later discovered some Roman artefacts and an urn containing human ashes - the fabled centurion? At some unspecified date after this two naval officers driving over the causeway at night saw in the headlights a figure wearing a helmet and metal plates. When they stopped the car and got out there was nobody to be seen. (Westwood & Simpson ibid)

There is evidence of pre-Roman and Roman occupation of the island.

It seems that stories of Roman ghosts do not pre-date the 20th century. According to Owen Davies:

'The most recent addition to the corpus of heritage hauntings is also the most venerable - the roman [sic] legionnaire [sic]. A search on the internet reveals numerous sightings in diverse places such as London, Derby, the Isle of Wight and an old Roman road near Weymouth. Some readers will be familiar with a well-known case of a troop of soldiers seen by a plumber working in a York cellar in 1953. However, such sightings are a modern phenomenon, with almost all of them dating to the last fifty years. The earliest reports I have found concern a Roman centurion seen patrolling the Strood, Mersea Island, which was first recorded in 1904 and a ghostly Roman army that marched on certain nights along Bindon Hill, Dorset, to their camp on Ring's Hill during the 1930s. Distinguishing between the ghost of a Bronze Age warrior and an Iron Age one would be the task of an archaeologist, but thanks to "Swords and Sandals" film epics and the inclusion of the Roman invasion in the curricula, the dress of the Roman soldier has become as recognisable as that of a monk or cavalier. Clothes truly make the ghost.' (Owen Davies The Haunted p.42)

Apropos this observation is a passage from a short story by Grant Allen called Pallinghurst Barrow - information and text can be found here and here

'It's a very odd fact', Dr Porter the materialist interposed musingly, 'that the only ghosts people ever see are the ghosts of a generation very, very close to them. One hears of lots of ghosts in eighteenth-century costumes because everybody has a clear idea of wigs and small-clothes from pictures and fancy dresses. One hears of far fewer in Elizabethan dress, because the class most given to beholding ghosts are seldom acquainted with ruffs and farthingales; and one meets with none at all in Anglo-Saxon or Ancient British or Roman costumes, because those are only known to a comparatively small class of learned people, and ghosts, as a rule, avoid the learned ... as they would avoid prussic acid. Millions of ghosts of remote antiquity must swarm about the world, though, after a hundred years or thereabouts, they retire into obscurity and cease to annoy people with their nasty cold shivers. But the queer thing about these long-barrow ghosts is that they must be the spirits of men and women who died thousands and thousands of years ago, which is exceptional longevity for a spiritual being don't you think so ..?'

Fortean Times Ghostwatch writer Alan Murdie wrote a couple of very useful articles called The Romans in Britain on this topic and noted that:

'From the early 20th century, images of Romans became familiar from depictions in cinema, the years 1951-54 (before and immediately after Martindale's experience) being vintage ones for Hollywood treatments of Ancient Rome. Films included Quo Vadis (1951), Androcles and the Lion (1952), Julius Caesar (1953), The Robe (1953), Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) and Sign of the Pagan (1954), with such imagery re-enforced by film posters and advertising. So could Martindale's experience have been inspired or influenced by exposure to this?' Murdie suggests a psychosocial hypothesis for such sightings, although as he admits 'Psychosocial theories remain nebulous, their appeal owing much to convenience rather than actual evidence.' Murdie also observes that there are very few first-hand accounts with named witnesses of Roman ghosts, citing the Mersea Island spectre as one of the few examples. [Alan Murdie The Romans in Britain Fortean Times 364&365 March and April 2018].

Bricked Up Borley

Browsing through the Reader's Digest guide to British folklore I found the following story regarding  Chilbolton (near Stockbridge) Rectory in Hampshire:

'Chilbolton is said to be haunted by a nun. The window where her apparition most often appeared was bricked up to discourage her but, a few years ago, her ghost was again seen by two guests at the rectory. One said that he had seen a beautiful nurse gazing out of a window; the other awoke in the night and saw a nurse standing by his bed. The rector confirmed that there was no such person in the house on either occasion. In 1393 a nun named Katherine Faukener ran away from the nearby Benedictine Abbey of St Cross at Wherwell. On her return seven years later, she is believed to have been walled up alive on the site of the rectory which was then a nunnery.'
Reader's Digest Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain (1973) p.174. See also Wendy Boase The Folklore of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight (1976) p.78.

This story once more brought to mind Borley Rectory, with it's bricked up ground floor window and peeping nun. The window can be seen in the photograph at the top of this post. Here is Harry Price's rather repetitive description from The Most Haunted House in England (1940 pp.17-18):

'speaking of windows, the first thing a visitor notices when he enters the carriage drive from the road is a large bricked-up window to the left of the entrance porch ... The disfigurement quite spoils the appearance of this side of the house and one immediately wonders why it should have been done ... I began to make enquiries and from three different sources learned that the window was bricked up because the spectral 'nun' ... habitually peered into the room from the drive thus annoying the Rev Henry Bull, who had the window removed and the aperture bricked in.

Pursuing my enquiries I then heard that the window was not blocked up because of the too inquisitive 'nun', but because people passing along the road could see the Bull family having their meals. Candidly, I do not believe that this was the reason at all, because (a) very few people use the road past the rectory, and fewer must have used it at the time when the window was removed; (b) the carriage drive is so wide ... that it must have been a sheer impossibility to see through the window from the road, as I have proved to myself by trying to peer through the other windows on the side of the house; (c) the hedge and belt of trees separating the drive from the road form an impenetrable screen that would discourage anyone trying to peer in at the window, even if the drive were not so wide. In any case a light curtain or blind would have prevented any person from seeing what was going on in the room. That is, any normal person. But it might have been thought that such a screen would not prevent an entity such as the 'nun' from peering into the room. Whatever the reason, a drastic remedy was decided upon, and the window was strongly and permanently bricked up, as it remains today, completely spoiling this side of the house. The illumination of the room by day is obtained only from the bay window overlooking the lawn.'

The Haunting of Borley Rectory, A Critical Survey of the Evidence by Dingwall, Goldney & Hall (1956) pp.25-26 is characteristically more critical:

'In The Most Haunted House in England Price discusses the mystery of the bricked-up dining room window at the rectory which, it is suggested, was blocked by the Rev. Henry Bull (and therefore prior to 1892) to prevent the nun peering through the window from the drive. No testimony is available other than the mute evidence of the window itself, or if it is, none is offered by Price. The rectory was built rather close to the road and was separated from it by the narrow drive only and there would probably have been some lack of privacy if this window had not been bricked up.

The room was adequately lighted by another large window facing the lawn and had indeed the same amount of natural light from this one window as the drawing room, which was identically illuminated. The other principal rooms on the ground floor, the drawing room and the library, had complete privacy from passers-by (facing on to the lawn as they did) and the bricking-up of the small dining-room window merely made this room uniform with the other two in this respect.

Indeed Price admitted in MHH (p.18) that when pursuing his enquiries in Borley he was told that the window was bricked up "because people passing along the road could see the Bull family having their meals"; but adds that he does "not believe that this was the reason at all." It is curious that he does not disclose that this explanation was made by Mr Walter Bull who, as a son of Henry Bull, was presumably entitled to speak with some authority.'

So, was the window bricked up because a ghostly nun persisted in peering through it, or because it was close to a road where curious passers-by might spy the inhabitants eating and relaxing?

As with many ghost stories, no dates are provided for the Chilbolton haunting, but the resemblance to  Borley is noteworthy - does it predate Borley or does it originate from the popularity and influence of Price's book? Are there a number of similar tales of ghostly bricked-up windows around Britain that post-date the Window Tax (1696-1851)?

Another coincidental aspect of bricking-up concerns the unfortunate nun. Legend at Borley tells of a novice from the nunnery at Bures - 7 miles south of Borley on the River Stour (there is no evidence for the nunnery) - attempting to elope with a lay brother from the monastery on the site of the Rectory (no archaeological or written evidence has ever been discovered for this claim). Their escape in an anachronistic coach was thwarted and she was captured and returned to her nunnery to be bricked up alive as her cruel punishment - the monk was hanged. It may be her ghost that haunted Borley and was seen on the 'Nun's Walk' - see The Borley Rectory Companion (2009) 'The Phantom Nun' pp.230-233.

Bricking up of nuns was a motif (often anti-Catholic) in popular literature such as Sir Walter Scott's poem Marmion (1808) and one also recalls Poe's tale The Cask of Amontillado (1846) in which the Italian nobleman Fortunato is immured in the wine cellar of the narrator Montresor for some unspecified insult (for more see here).

A well-researched online essay by Rene Collar that deals with immurement, especially in the work of H Rider Haggard (author of King Solomon's Mines and She - who incidentally lived in St Leonards; the house - North Lodge - is still there, with a plaque) 'They Walled Up Nuns, Didn't They?' can be found here. It references a book called Walled Up Nuns & Nuns Walled In by W Lancelot Holland, see here.

This would appear to be another example of Harry Price's entertaining but speculative use of local legend and folklore to bolster his arguments for the haunting of Borley Rectory.

Ghostland

Just finished reading Ghostland, In Search of a Haunted Country by Edward Parnell (William Collins, 2019) a psychogeographic journey around the country seeking out the places where various classic ghost stories were set, or places associated with the authors' lives.

All the usual suspects are present and correct: James (M R), Blackwood, Machen, Aickman, E F Benson, Walter De La Mare etc. The book also covers the recently fashionable 'folk horror' genre and the classics - many of them mentioned in posts on this blog - Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan's Claw, The Wicker Man, The Owl Service and Penda's Fen. While I had read or seen most of them, there are a number of ghostly novels and short stories I wasn't familiar with, some of which I shall now seek out. For example I'm now reading Nine Ghosts by RH Malden who is considered one of the better MR James imitators. See here.

The book's most obvious debt is to W G Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (which supplies the book's main epigraph - the layout of text and pictures is very similar). Obviously, that's a hard act to follow and it's interesting that Parnell tests out some of Sebald's text by revisiting locations and finds much of it more fictionalised than he (and I) had imagined. He also gets down to Cornwall and visits the area around Zennor associated with Crowley and the 'mysterious' death of Katherine Arnold-Foster that I wrote about in recent blog posts. Ghostland is also a meditation on illness, loss, grieving and memory - the journeys were undertaken as a form of nostalgia for the author's boyhood and places visited on family holidays.

I really enjoyed reading it and you might do too. A review from the TLS here.


It's also worth mentioning a recently-uploaded large archive of 'occult' recordings freely available here that also includes recordings of Aleister Crowley and the perennially disturbing Enfield Poltergeist.

British Museum Station Spectre? Part 3

One morning last week I spent a couple of hours at the Camden Local Studies & Archives Centre looking through the Holborn & City Guardian newspaper for 1933 and 1935. Fortunately, the newspaper came in bound volumes, rather than on microfilm, so it was easier to scan whole pages quite quickly. I was looking for any mention of British Museum station and, in particular, any references to ghost stories - later accounts say that 'shortly' before it closed there were rumours of its being haunted by the ghost of an ancient Egyptian (see posts below). The newspaper included weekly columns devoted to 'unusual' stories and local oddities, but I found only a couple of surprisingly brief pieces that mentioned the station and both were to do with its closure when the expanded Holborn station reopened in September 1933.

I also checked from July, the month in which the film Bulldog Jack was released, up to the end of October 1935 to see if there were any news stories about mysterious disappearances of women in the borough, especially at Holborn station. I found nothing. As noted in the previous post I had already checked digital files of major newspapers and the British Library online newspaper archive, to no avail. One source claims that a newspaper had offered a reward to anyone who would spend the night in the closed station - although it is highly unlikely that the London Passenger Transport Board would have agreed to this arrangement.

However, in my searches I did find a few interesting snippets gleaned from the British Library's online newspaper archive. There were two incidents of suicide at British Museum station, in February 1930 and May 1933 (curiously, not mentioned in the Holborn & City Guardian), both males, a traditional explanation for some hauntings, but not in this instance. After the closure of the station, a young traveller had a disconcerting experience, as reported in the Lancashire Evening Post 22 Sept 1934 p.4:

'Marooned Underground in London: Burnley Student's Ordeal' by 'North Westerner'

'A Burnley young man, while a student in London, had a quite remarkable experience recently through being marooned in a disused station on the underground railway.

The incident occurred soon after the closing of the British Museum station, whereby by some mischance a tube train stopped and swing-gates at the carriage entrance opened. At that moment the Burnley student who had been ready to alight at the next stopping place stepped from the train onto a station pitched almost in inky darkness. Then he had the more horrifying feeling when he heard the gates of the carriage close and the tube train restart. By the light of matches he felt his way towards the station exit to find that it was boarded up.

Minutes that seemed hours passed and the traveller marooned in the tube had, so he said later on, the sickly feeling creeping over him when first one and then other trains swept along. Ultimately, a train stopped and the guard, having received a message about the stranded passenger, alighted to hail the young man and take him aboard.'

In what seems to have been some pre-publicity for Bulldog Jack, a number of newspapers carried reports of the filming at Gaumont-British Lime Grove Studios in Shepherds Bush. According to the Birmingham Daily Gazette 19 Dec 1934: 'They have had to construct in the Gaumont-British studio a replica of a tube station, a tube tunnel, and a tube train. And the station which has been made is one that is no longer in existence. It is the British Museum station, which has been merged with Holborn. The Hastings & St Leonards Observer 29 December 1934 also noted 'The Gaumont-British studio at Shepherd's Bush now has its own 'tube' station - dubbed 'Gaumont Station' another set represents the British Museum', while the Daily Herald 21 December 1934 added 'Shepherd's Bush studio replica of the former British Museum station has been built together with live rail and train', which must have been rather hazardous.

Addendum 07/08/18 Today my nine-year-old son showed me his copy of Horrible Histories: Loathsome London (Scholastic Children's Books, 2005) p.121 which has a cartoon of a terrified man fleeing a male in ancient Egyptian garb who says 'I haunted the British Museum station. Because your trains disturb my mummy. I'm a pharaoh way from home.'

British Museum Station Spectre? Part 2

Hopefully, it can now be (at least partially) understood why this widely disseminated and much-elaborated narrative about a reputedly malevolent object displayed in a world-famous museum, has mutated into a ghost story attached to the nearby abandoned underground station. However, while the majority of accounts agree that the ghost is that of an ancient Egyptian, on studying published and online accounts it becomes difficult to determine the exact identity, or gender, of this spirit. The variety of candidates I have discovered so far are listed below, as they have been described:

• an ancient Egyptian in 'traditional' headdress and loincloth
• the Egyptian god Amun/Amen-Ra
• the mummy of Amun/Amen-Ra (presuming a god can be mummified?)
• the priestess of the cult of Amun/Amen-Ra said to be depicted on the mummy-board in the British Museum
• the mummy of the priestess of the cult of Amun/Amen-Ra at the BM
• the priestess Amen-Ra
• the Princess of Amen-Ra, the Princess Amen-Ra (from the same page of a book on ghosts on the underground)
• an Egyptian looking for a mummy

A further facet of the underground ghost story is the secret tunnel that supposedly connects the British Museum with the abandoned station of the same name and is traversed by the ghost. The most likely source for this added element is a British film released in 1935 (two years after the station closed) called Bulldog Jack (Dir. Walter Forde, released as Alias Bulldog Drummond in the USA). Older readers will probably remember Captain Hugh "Bulldog' Drummond, often described as a 'gentleman adventurer' perpetually getting into scrapes with foreign spies and damsels in distress, whose roots lay in such popular fictional figures as Sexton Blake and Richard Hannay. In this film Drummond is injured in a sabotaged car and has to be impersonated by the hapless Jack Pennington (Jack Hulbert), who becomes involved in a plot to replace a valuable necklace in the British Museum with a forgery.

A gang led by a villain called Morelle (Ralph Richardson) kidnap the jeweller grandfather of Ann Manders (Fay Wray), who they need to manufacture the worthless copy. Significantly the thieves' hideout is an abandoned underground station named 'Bloomsbury', obviously based on British Museum. To get into the museum at night they make use of a secret tunnel from the station, emerging through a tomb-chest, the lid of which rises up on jacks. This film is mentioned in some of the literature on abandoned stations, but one book mistakenly states that the museum entrance to the tunnel in the film is through the lid of an Egyptian sarcophagus, which swings open, thus evoking once more the Egyptian mummy theme.

To add to the mysterious underground shenanigans, online sources now note: 'It is often said that on the night that this movie opened, two women went missing from Holborn station and never-described marks [?] were found in the British Museum station during the investigation.' I have so far been unable to find any national newspaper article from the mid-1930s referring to 'missing' women at Holborn station or, it has to be added, any mention from the early 1930s papers of the ghost of an 'ancient Egyptian' at British Museum station. There were, however, a number of articles in the national press about the 'Unlucky Mummy' in the museum. I have yet to go through the local newspapers for Camden and Holborn, (which have not been digitised) for this period and these may yield more information.

Another film should also be mentioned with reference to this piece of folklore: Death Line (dir. Gary Sherman, premiered in London in December 1972 -later released in the USA in October 1973 as Raw Meat - to be issued on Blu-ray in August this year) concerned the grisly antics of a cannibal living in abandoned tube tunnels, the last descendent of a group of Victorian railway workers who survived a cave-in when they were tunnelling the tube. He subsists by snatching passengers and railway workers late at night, taking them back to his subterranean lair and devouring them. The only words he can utter are 'Mind the doors'. Much of the underground action takes place in Russell Square and Holborn stations. The plot has possibly influenced an urban legend, reported in Issue 105 of Fortean Times (December 1997) of a race of subterraneans living on a diet of discarded takeaways and careless vagrants.

Plots involving monsters or mutants living in the London underground and preying on commuters also feature in a number of films, including An American Werewolf in London (dir. John Landis, 1981) and Creep (dir.Christopher Smith, 2005). From their spaceship, unearthed during a tube extension at Hobb's Lane underground station, Martians although long dead, are still capable of wreaking havoc in Quatermass and the Pit (dir. Roy Ward Baker, 1967) and in the Patrick Troughton-era Doctor Who episodes The Web of Fear (thought lost, but now mostly recovered and issued on dvd) robot yeti stalk the tube tunnels of central London.

In recent years attention has focussed on Holborn station, presumably as very few people have heard of the abandoned and inaccessible stop nearby. To quote the Daily Mail online once more: 'It has long been rumoured that there is a secret tunnel stretching from Holborn station to the British Museum's famous 'Egyptian Room' - perhaps Amun-Ra has been letting himself loose on the Underground during the small hours.'

Holborn is one of the busiest stations on the tube network, with 63 million passengers using it every year. According to Transport for London: 'The station is too small for current demand, creating crowding and queuing.' Plans are currently underway to substantially increase capacity at Holborn (including a second entrance, eight new escalators and an additional 700 metres of tunnel). Work is intended to begin in 2021, if permission is granted, and also, one imagines if the peripatetic spirit of Amun-Ra will allow it to proceed.

British Museum Station Spectre? Part 1

I'm aware that I haven't been posting very much recently. I've been kept busy trying to be a publisher having to sell books rather than write them. However, I offer here a much-expanded version of part of the talk I gave at the recent Haunted City conference on one of London's stranger pieces of ghost lore.


The numerous abandoned and disused stations on the London underground network are often known as 'ghost stations' and it is hardly surprising to learn that some of the them are claimed to be haunted, as is also the case with many of the stations still functioning. Perhaps the most well-known of the latter is Covent Garden (on the Piccadilly line), where a number of witnesses have testified to seeing, in various parts of he station, the ghost of the popular actor William Terriss, murdered by a jealous fellow thespian at the stage door of the nearby Adelphi Theatre. The last recorded sighting appears to have been in 1972.

One of the most famous 'ghost stations' was named British Museum, with an entrance building at No.133 High Holborn. It opened on 30 July 1900 on the Central London Railway (today's Central line). In 1907 a new station opened nearby, at the junction of High Holborn and Kingsway, on the Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton Railway (today's Piccadilly line) called Holborn. As the two stations were so closely situated it was proposed to tunnel a subway between them to facilitate an easy underground interchange, but this was rejected, leaving passengers to walk a couple of hundred yards through the busy streets to change lines. Finally, in 1930 work began on enlarging Holborn to create a combined Central and Piccadilly line station, which opened on 25 September 1933.

Now deemed superfluous, British Musem station closed the same day. The platforms were later dismantled, and the station was abandoned, until finding use as one of the many tube air-raid shelters during the Second World War. By 1989, the street-level former entrance building had been replaced with a post-modern block and the lit and staircase shaft filled with concrete; the only access to the station is now along the tube tunnels. See here.

Of what interest is this to folklorists? Before closure in 1933 there were said to be reports that the station was haunted - these reports have persisted - internet sites claim that it is still haunted - but by what?

According to an article from The Daily Mail online from Halloween 2015: 'Legend has it that the disused station is haunted by the ghost of Amun-ra, an Ancient Egyptian God, dressed in traditional Egyptian loincloth and headdress - and a couple of years after the station's closure, two women vanished from nearby Holborn station, with witnesses claiming they heard ghostly moaning around the time of their disappearance.'

When attempting to unravel this mystery it becomes clear very quickly that the 'haunting' rumour attached to the abandoned station has become inextricably entangled with the more widely disseminated story of the so-called 'Unlucky Mummy' in the collections of the British Museum.

In 1889, Ms Warwick Hunt, on behalf of her brother Arthur F Wheeler, gave the museum a mummy- board, a wooden cover placed over the mummified body, carved and painted to represent the deceased as if they were still alive. Classified as exhibit No.22542 it was believed to date from the 21st dynasty (c.950) and was probably from Thebes. The female depicted on the mummy-board was identified, by Keeper of the Egyptian Rooms Ernest Wallis Budge, as priestess of the cult of Amen-Ra or Amun-Ra, a patron deity of Thebes, fused with the sun god Ra; with Osiris, he is the most widely recorded of the Egyptian gods.

In addition to the standard catalogue information about it on the museum's website, the entry for exhibit 22542 also includes the following:

This object perhaps best known for the strange folkloric history attached to it ... has acquired the popular nickname of the 'Unlucky Mummy', with a reputation for bringing misfortune. None of these stories has any basis in fact, but from time to time the strength of the rumours has led to a flood of enquiries.

The mummy-board is said to have been bought by one of four young English travellers in Egypt during the 1860s or 1870s. Two died or were seriously injured in shooting incidents, and the other two died in poverty within a short time. The mummy-board was passed to the sister of one of the travellers, but as soon as it had entered her house the occupants suffered a series of misfortunes. The celebrated clairvoyant Madame Helena Blavatsky is alleged to have detected an evil influence, ultimately traced to the mummy-board. She urged the owner to dispose of it and in consequence it was presented to the British Museum. The most remarkable story is that the mummy-board was on board the SS Titanic on its maiden voyage in 1912, and that its presence caused the ship to collide with an iceberg and sink!'

The Titanic-related element of the story derives from the fact that the campaigning investigative journalist W T Stead was onboard and did not survive the disaster: he had earlier written about the 'Unlucky Mummy' and often mentioned it at dinner engagements. This loose connection somehow led to the belief that the mummy-board itself was being carried on the fateful vessel - the British Museum, in a bid to rid itself of the curse, had decided to sell it to a museum or wealthy collector in the USA. In fact the exhibit only left the museum for the first time to be shown abroad in 1990, and can still be seen in London.

Roger Luckhurst's scholarly investigation The Mummy's Curse: the True History of a Dark Fantasy reveals that the British Museum's 'Unlucky Mummy', which caused death and misfortune to those who came into contact with it, predated the much-publicised curse of King Tutankhamun, said to have been unleashed on the opening of the chamber by Howard Carter in 1922 (although no curse was found inscribed in the tomb). The tales attached to the 'Unlucky Mummy' were first publicised in the summer of 1904 via an article in the Daily Express by a rising young reporter Bertrand Fletcher Robinson - the fact that he died of enteric fever three years later at the age of 37 was said to be attributable to the malign influence of exhibit 22542. Luckhurst offers a detailed history of the mummy's alleged owners and the wide variety of personal disasters that befell them, as well as demonstrating the way in which the tale subsequently grew in the telling and retelling. Books on London ghosts always include a few pages on this chilling story.

Event after the mummy-board entered the collections of the British Museum, tragedy was said to have followed in its wake and the 'curse' also seems to have applied to anyone who photographed or sketched the object. A photographer contracted from the firm of Mansell to photograph the mummy-board met with misfortune that same day. According to Peter Underwood in Haunted London: 'Upon the way home in the train he injured by some unaccountable accident his thumb, and hurt it so badly that he was unable to use the right hand for a long time. When he reached home he found that one of his children had fallen through a glass frame and was suffering from severe shock.' It was claimed (and later refuted by the Museum authorities) that employees who moved or handled the object suffered accidents or died unexpectedly.

Part 2 to follow shortly.

The Many Hauntings of Burton Agnes Hall

A recent read has been Calvariae Disjecta: The Many Hauntings of Burton Agnes Hall (Information as Material, 2017) edited by Robert Williams and Hilmar Schaefer.  I've complained in this blog before about the sloppy nature of the vast majority of 'non-fiction' ghost books that repeat earlier versions of the same story without doing any basic research and sometimes weave new details into the embroidery.  The idea of this book is to take all the extant narratives of one ghost story and put them in chronological order so that the reader can see the way in the which the basic text is transformed and enlarged in the retelling, with tropes from other pieces of ghostly folklore interpolated as the legend evolves.  In this instance it is the story of the so-called 'Screaming Skull' of Burton Agnes Hall in East Yorkshire.  The earliest account traced thus far was printed in The Folklore Journal of November 1880 and the narrative is followed all the way up to paranormal sites on the internet.  It makes fascinating reading.  Review by Phil Baker in the TLS here.

At its simplest, the narrative concerns a daughter of the hall's owners who was fatally attacked by robbers - before she died she requested that her head be kept in the house; her family instead buried her whole body in the local church (or churchyard) and subsequently all kinds of ghostly goings on occurred until the grave was opened and her (by that time desiccated) skull taken into the house.  If it was ever removed for any reason the supernatural outbreaks recurred.   I found it amusing to see how details were added or mangled so that, for example, in one much later account the name of the family involved changes from Griffith to Griffin and clanking chains are introduced for the first time.  The funniest must be the accounts of the skull rolling out of the house and bowling itself at skittles.

In many versions a maid unwittingly throws the skull from a window where it lands in a passing manure cart (later a cabbage cart) pulled by horses (or donkeys) that refuse to move until the skull is removed.  By coincidence, this week I was reading Supernatural Peak District by David Clarke which has a chapter on skulls and stone heads - lo and behold there is exactly the same story attached to Flagg Hall in Derbyshire.

Apparently the Burton Agnes skull was walled up somewhere in the house at some point in the early twentieth century.  The book is not so much a folklore study as an art project and also contains a dialogue between the editors and a section of various photographs of the skull motif.  The photos of the skull-encrusted tomb in the local church certainly make one wonder whether the origins of the story might lie there.