That evening I did a “Haunted London” ghost tour with London Walks. I learned a lot of things about ghosts.
The first story was about Myles Coverdale, the producer of the first English language printed Bible, who was originally buried in St. Bartholomew’s by the Exchange. However when that church was demolished, his remains were moved to another church, St Magnus the Martyr. Except that when they tried to move his remains, they only found half of the skeleton. The left half. (I am unclear whether this meant that the skull was also split in half.) And now the church is haunted by half a ghost. Clearly this means that ghosts are very attached to their bodies and tend to follow them around.
Next we went to the Tower Bridge, which was a popular spot for suicides before they put up guard rails. Sometimes at night you can see lineups of ghosts jumping off, one at a time. This confused me because their bodies are presumably nowhere near the bridge. So while Miles Coverdales ghost had to be split in half when his body was moved, these ghosts hang out miles from their bodies, reliving their deaths. Or maybe they just really like bungee jumping.
The next story took place in Leadenhall Market (where Diagon Alley was filmed in Harry Potter). A contractor named Harley was taking a lunch break from renovating the market when he suddenly heard someone shout “Harley” and felt a pain in his left hand. He looked at his hand and noticed a weird cross shape was marked on it. Later that day he was taking another break and it happened again. He lifted the stone he had set his hand on, and underneath they found Roman ruins, including a sandal with the same cross shape on it. They concluded that the ghost was a Roman soldier marching through, and he wasn’t saying “Harley”, he was saying some Latin word that sounds like Harley but means “look out!” This ghost must have not cared about his body or his death at all, he’s just really attached to his sandals. I’m also unclear why it was impossible that the ghost actually knew the contractor’s name and was using it to get his attention, rather than speaking a language he wouldn’t understand.
Next we passed through St. Peter’s Gate:
The next story was about Nicholas Hawksmoor, an architect that designed several London churches. He placed his churches in the shape of a pentagram:
Do you see it? Fine, I’ll draw it out for you. First you ignore the 6th church he designed on the southeast side, for unknown reasons. That leaves 5 points. And as long as none of those points are colinear (which the bottom 3 almost are, but ignore that), if you connect 5 points you get a pentagram. Presuming you don’t mind your pentagrams being rather squished:
Short of actual supernatural interference, I’m not sure how he supposedly had enough power to determine the precise locations of his churches. Presumably the government knew where they wanted to put the churches before they hired him to design them. And with many of his designs uncompleted, it sure was lucky that the ones that were finished were the ones that he needed.
Anyway, the architect, who was obviously a Satanist because he built 5 churches (if you don’t count the 6th), had to sacrifice innocent blood to Satan at a location conveniently close to our walking tour.
But the best story of all was the finale. A week after Princess Diana’s death she had been scheduled to go to a charity event in this building:
The event was cancelled, but some caretakers were in the building that night doing some work. One caretaker noticed a woman an a dress by the door. He followed her out and ran into his coworker. He asked the coworker who the lady was, but he said he hadn’t seen a lady. They didn’t want to lock her in, so they searched the building but couldn’t find her. The next week he saw a picture of Princess Diana on the news and recognized her as the woman he had seen.
The tour guide concluded with something about Princess Diana being so committed to charity that she hung around for charity events even after her death. Personally, I have a different theory. Clearly Princess Diana was so upset about being chased by the Paparazzi that the first thing she did after her death was chase down the only person in London who would not recognize her.
