The Ghosts of the Tower of London

I have been to the Tower of London and, frustratingly, I did not see a single ghost.

I feel slightly cheated by this because, if there is anywhere in Britain where I should be able to reasonably expect at least one unexplained figure standing at the end of a corridor, surely, it is here. People have lived, worked, celebrated, been imprisoned and died within these walls for nearly a thousand years. The Tower has been a fortress, royal palace, prison, armoury, treasury, mint and, for more than six centuries, home to a collection of wild animals that included lions, an elephant and a polar bear.

We will come back to the bear.

The Tower has also held some of the most famous prisoners in British history and witnessed deaths that are still being discussed centuries later. Anne Boleyn is here, obviously. Lady Jane Grey has acquired an anniversary ghost. Arbella Stuart is said to have remained in the place where she spent the final years of her life, and later traditions have given the lost Princes in the Tower an afterlife inside the fortress too.

The problem is that when a building has this much history, the ghosts become difficult to separate from it. Some Tower stories can be traced to named witnesses and contemporary newspaper reports. Others are much harder to pin down and seem to have grown naturally around people whose real stories were already tragic enough.

Then there is the phantom bear, which is frankly in a category of its own.

ANNE BOLEYN HAD ALREADY BEEN HERE ONCE

Anne Boleyn’s connection with the Tower did not begin with her execution.

In May 1533, she arrived by river to prepare for her coronation. Henry VIII had ordered extensive work on the royal apartments in advance of her stay, including improvements to the Queen’s lodgings and a private garden. Anne spent several days there before travelling through London in a magnificent procession and being crowned at Westminster Abbey on 1 June.

Three years later, she came back as a prisoner.

Anne was arrested on 2 May 1536 and accused of adultery, incest and plotting the King’s death. She denied the charges, but after being taken to the Tower she was housed in the same royal apartments that had been prepared for her before her coronation.

That detail has always bothered me more than any ghost story attached to her.

Three years earlier, she had waited in those rooms to become Queen of England. Now she was waiting there to find out whether her husband intended to kill her.

He did.

On 19 May 1536, Anne was executed by sword inside the Tower and buried in the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula. Catherine Howard would later be buried there after her own execution, as would Lady Jane Grey. During restoration work in 1876, human remains believed to include Anne’s were uncovered in the chancel and reburied beneath the memorial pavement, although Historic Royal Palaces notes that the precise burial places of the queens within the chapel remain uncertain.

The ghosts came later.

ANNE HAS BECOME THE TOWER’S STAR RESIDENT

If Tower folklore is to be believed, Anne Boleyn has been extremely busy since 1536.

Stories place her around Tower Green, near the site of her execution, and around the chapel where she was buried. One of the more elaborate traditions describes a silent procession of figures moving towards St Peter ad Vincula with a woman identified as Anne at its head. Inevitably, there are also versions in which she carries her severed head, because apparently being executed once was not quite enough indignity. Historic Royal Palaces still records the procession as one of the Tower’s best-known legends but presents it exactly as that: Tower tradition rather than documented history.

This is an important distinction for the Archive. We know Anne returned to the Tower as a prisoner. We know where she was held, when she was executed and where she was buried. We do not have equally solid evidence that she subsequently began wandering around it without her head.

Would I still be watching Tower Green very carefully after dark?

Obviously.

LADY JANE GREY HAS AN ANNIVERSARY GHOST

Lady Jane Grey’s real connection to the Tower followed an eerily similar pattern.

Jane arrived there in July 1553 expecting to be crowned. She had been proclaimed queen after the death of Edward VI, but her reign lasted only nine days before support swung decisively behind Mary Tudor. Within a fortnight of entering the Tower as queen, Jane was its prisoner.

She was only seventeen when she was executed on Tower Green on 12 February 1554. Shortly before her own death, Jane watched the body of her husband Guildford Dudley being brought back into the Tower after his execution on Tower Hill. She was later buried beneath the altar of St Peter ad Vincula, close to Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.

Tower folklore claims that Jane appears on the battlements on the anniversary of her death. One much-repeated story concerns two guardsmen who, on 12 February 1957, reportedly saw a white shape forming on the battlements exactly 403 years after her execution. Historic Royal Palaces records the sighting as part of the Tower’s ghost tradition, although that does not give us a detailed contemporary witness statement from the men themselves.

It is a good ghost story. The anniversary is particularly obliging.

I am simply not putting it in the same evidence drawer as the fact that Jane Grey was seventeen when she walked to the scaffold.

ARBELLA STUART’S REAL STORY IS BETTER THAN THE GHOST

Arbella Stuart is another supposed Tower resident whose actual life is far more interesting than the vague haunting attached to her.

She was a great-great-granddaughter of Henry VII and therefore had a genuine claim to the English throne. For much of Elizabeth I’s reign, this meant that her choice of husband was not considered entirely her own business. A marriage could create a rival dynasty, which made Arbella politically useful and personally trapped.

In 1610, during the reign of James I, she secretly married William Seymour, another descendant of the Tudor royal family. They had not obtained the King’s permission, and James separated them. Seymour was imprisoned in the Tower while Arbella was confined elsewhere.

On 3 June 1611, they both attempted to escape.

Arbella disguised herself as a man, complete with wig, hat, boots and rapier, and made for Blackwall, where she was supposed to meet her husband before they sailed to France. Seymour escaped the Tower separately, but they missed each other. Arbella reached the waiting ship and could have continued to safety; instead, she delayed in the hope that William would catch up.

He eventually reached France.

Arbella’s ship was intercepted.

I cannot decide whether that detail is romantic or absolutely maddening.

She was taken to the Tower, where she remained for the rest of her life. Her health deteriorated badly during her imprisonment, and she died there on 25 September 1615, shortly before her fortieth birthday.

The later Tower tradition says that Arbella’s ghost still appears around the Queen’s House. Historic Royal Palaces includes the story among the Tower’s established legends, although the precise origin of the haunting is considerably harder to trace than Arbella’s documented imprisonment.

I would be doing more than haunting if I were her.

Once you know about the disguise, the rapier, the ship waiting in the Channel and the fact that her husband actually made it to France, a vague story about a woman appearing in an old building becomes almost unnecessary.

NOW WE NEED TO DISCUSS THE BEAR

This remains my favourite.

Before getting to the ghost, there is one important thing to establish.

The Tower really did have bears.

The royal menagerie existed for more than six hundred years, and in 1252 Henry III received a white bear, almost certainly a polar bear, from the King of Norway. The animal was kept chained and muzzled, which is horrible, but was also allowed into the Thames on a long rope to swim and catch fish. Three years later, the Tower received an African elephant from the King of France.

Imagine being beside the Thames in medieval London, worrying about plague, taxes and whether your roof is going to fall in, only to discover that somebody has taken the King’s polar bear out fishing.

The menagerie eventually contained dozens of species, and by the early nineteenth century nearly 300 animals were living at the Tower. Conditions were often poor, and in the 1830s the surviving animals were transferred to the Zoological Gardens at Regent’s Park, helping to establish what became London Zoo.

So, when we encounter a story about a spectral bear wandering around the Tower, it is not quite as random as it sounds.

THE SOLDIER WHO TRIED TO STAB IT

One of the best-known versions of the phantom-bear story appeared in print in the nineteenth century.

The story concerns a soldier on guard at the Jewel House who saw something enormous emerge near the doorway. In an account published by William Gregory in 1851, the figure was described as resembling a large bear standing upright, but with a disturbing, almost human face. The soldier thrust his bayonet at it, only for the weapon to pass through the apparition and strike the doorway behind it.

He collapsed in terror and, according to the account, died shortly afterwards.

I would like it noted that if I encounter an enormous ghost bear, attempting to stab it is quite far down my list of responses.

The obvious problem is that the story sounds almost too perfectly Victorian. A spectral beast appears, a brave soldier challenges it, his weapon passes through the apparition, and the encounter frightens him literally to death. It has everything.

Except someone who lived at the Tower later stepped forward and said that something like it really had happened.

EDMUND LENTHAL SWIFTE HAD HIS OWN VERSION

Edmund Lenthal Swifte became Keeper of the Crown Jewels in 1814 and lived at the Tower with his family until 1852. When the bear story resurfaced publicly, Swifte wrote to Notes and Queries in 1860 because he believed the published version contained errors.

According to Swifte, the soldier’s experience had happened in January 1816. Swifte had not personally seen the bear, but he said that he saw the soldier afterwards in the guard room and found him almost unrecognisable with terror. The man died within a few days. Historic Royal Palaces has since examined Swifte’s account alongside the earlier printed versions and contemporary newspaper material.

Swifte also claimed that he had witnessed something strange himself while living in the Jewel House.

His apparition was not Anne Boleyn, an executed prisoner or even a bear. While sitting at supper with his family, he and his wife reportedly saw a pale cylindrical shape hovering between the ceiling and the table. Swifte described it as looking rather like a glass tube containing a dense white and pale-blue cloud.

That is somehow worse.

If a recognised historical figure appears, at least I know what department I am dealing with. A floating cloudy tube gives me nothing to work with.

When the apparition moved towards his wife, she cried out and Swifte attacked it with a chair, striking the wooden panelling behind it. He maintained decades later that he had genuinely seen the thing.

This is where the story gets considerably better.

PEOPLE WERE ALREADY TALKING ABOUT THE GHOST

The Martin Tower apparently had a supernatural reputation before Swifte ever moved there.

Recent research by Historic Royal Palaces found a Hereford Journal report from 1789 stating that the Martin Tower had already been “long” associated with noises and frightening apparitions. The same report referred to an earlier incident, around 1782, in which a guard claimed to have been attacked by a spirit resembling a furious beast and was later found injured and unable to speak.

By 1789, the reputation was sufficiently well established that one woman living at the Tower decided to use it for entertainment.

A captain had apparently been boasting that he was not afraid of the Martin Tower ghost. The woman acquired an old laundry mannequin, covered it with a sheet and placed it in a dark passage she knew he would have to use.

The captain encountered it and fled.

This was reportedly a man who had faced genuine danger on battlefields but put him in a dark corridor with some laundry and that was apparently enough. He later admitted that nothing he had experienced in war had prepared him for the fright.

Excellent.

More importantly, the prank tells us that the Martin Tower was already considered haunted decades before Swifte published his own experience.

That cuts both ways.

Perhaps something genuinely strange had been reported there repeatedly.

Or perhaps Swifte arrived at a building already saturated in ghost stories and interpreted something unusual through a story he already knew.

History does this to us constantly.

EVEN SWIFTE SUSPECTED TRICKS

There is another wonderful complication.

Swifte said that, shortly before the 1816 incident, some young women living within the Tower had been suspected of carrying out what he called “phantasmagorical experiments” at their windows. The term could describe optical tricks involving projected images, mirrors and light, and concern became serious enough that the guard around the Jewel House was reportedly doubled.

Now we have possibilities.

There may have been an apparition.

There may have been a prank.

There may have been somebody experimenting with optical effects who accidentally terrified a soldier.

There may have been an old ghost story that influenced several later experiences.

Or there may have been an enormous spectral bear wandering around the Jewel House with absolutely no respect for staffing arrangements.

I am comfortable leaving all of those on the table.

THE SALT TOWER DOES NOT IMPROVE MATTERS

The Salt Tower dates from the thirteenth century and has its own grim history. One of its most famous prisoners was the Jesuit priest John Gerard, who was imprisoned and tortured at the Tower in 1597 before later escaping. He subsequently wrote about his treatment there.

Centuries afterwards, people were still reporting strange things around the building.

In 1957, two guardsmen said they saw a shapeless white form high on the roof. In 1973, a Yeoman Warder reported seeing an unexplained glow coming from one of the prison chambers before feeling something touch the back of his neck. Historic Royal Palaces also records a continuing story among some Yeoman Warders that dogs are reluctant to enter the Salt Tower.

A medieval prison chamber glowing inexplicably would already be more than enough for me. If something then touched the back of my neck, I would consider my employment terminated by mutual agreement.

The important point is that these are reported experiences, not proof of what caused them. We know people said they saw the white shape and the glow. We do not know that the explanation was supernatural.

That distinction lets the story stay creepy without us having to pretend we know more than we do.

WHAT ABOUT THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER?

We could hardly come here without mentioning them.

Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, were taken into the Tower in 1483 during the political crisis that followed the death of their father, Edward IV. Edward was twelve and Richard was nine. Their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, became Richard III, and the boys gradually disappeared from public view.

A contemporary observer, Dominic Mancini, wrote that the children were seen less and less frequently behind the windows until eventually they stopped appearing altogether. Their fate remains one of the most famous unresolved questions in British history.

In 1674, workmen demolishing part of the old royal palace found a wooden chest containing the skeletons of two children beneath a staircase in the White Tower. Charles II later had the bones reburied in Westminster Abbey as Edward and Richard. They were examined again in 1933 and judged to belong to two children of approximately the right ages, but they have never been conclusively identified as the princes.

Ghost stories eventually appeared in which two small boys are seen together inside the Tower, often wearing pale clothing or nightshirts.

The difficulty is tracing those supernatural stories back nearly as far as we can trace the historical mystery.

The boys genuinely disappeared.

Two children’s skeletons were genuinely found.

The image of two murdered brothers wandering together through the fortress is so perfectly suited to the story that I almost wonder how it could not have become part of Tower folklore eventually.

Sometimes the hardest question is not whether somebody saw a ghost.

It is whether the history created the ghost before anybody saw anything at all.

THERE ARE ALMOST TOO MANY

Once you start collecting Tower ghosts, the place becomes extremely crowded.

Anne Boleyn supposedly walks Tower Green and appears near the chapel. Arbella Stuart is said to remain near the Queen’s House. Lady Jane Grey has her anniversary appearance. The Princes have been turned into two small wandering figures, while other Tower traditions attach supernatural sightings to Henry VI, Walter Raleigh and numerous unidentified prisoners.

Even soldiers themselves have become part of the folklore. Historic Royal Palaces records an 1864 story in which a rifleman was found collapsed while on duty near the King’s House. Facing a court martial for neglecting his post, he claimed that a white figure had approached him. After challenging it several times, he charged with his bayonet and supposedly passed straight through it. Two people watching from a nearby window were said to have supported his account, and he was acquitted.

I would like to know considerably more about that court martial.

Imagine having to explain to your commanding officer that you abandoned your position because the person you attempted to stab turned out not to be sufficiently solid.

PERHAPS THE TOWER ITSELF IS THE GHOST STORY

This is what makes the Tower different from Tedworth or Cock Lane.

There is no single haunting to investigate. The Tower itself has gradually become the haunted thing.

For centuries, people have entered the buildings already knowing something about what happened there. Guards have walked at night past the places where famous prisoners were confined. Families have lived inside the walls. Yeoman Warders still live there today, and the gates are still formally locked each night during the Ceremony of the Keys, a ritual whose documented form goes back to the Tudor period.

The history is constantly present.

Anne Boleyn really did arrive in triumph and return three years later as a prisoner. Lady Jane Grey really did enter expecting to be crowned and leave only for the scaffold. Arbella Stuart really did wait for her husband and lose her chance of escape. Two young princes really did disappear somewhere inside the political machinery of the Tower.

Soldiers really have spent long nights standing guard there, often already knowing the stories associated with the places around them.

And yes, there really was a polar bear.

None of that proves that anybody stayed behind.

It does explain why almost every generation seems to have added something of its own.

A noise becomes more interesting when you hear it in the Tower. A movement at the end of a passage becomes harder to dismiss when somebody was executed nearby. A pale figure on a battlement has an obvious identity waiting to be given to it, while an unexpected shape near the old menagerie can apparently become a bear.

Perhaps that is how haunted places are made.

Not necessarily by one enormous supernatural event, but by history accumulating until every unexplained thing has a story ready for it.

I have already visited the Tower in daylight and saw nothing remotely supernatural. If I ever get the opportunity to walk through it after the gates have closed and the visitors have gone home, I would still take it.

I would just like somebody else to go first.

Preferably with a dog, although even the dogs have started refusing the Salt Tower.