Ghosts of the Tower of London Read Free Page A

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!

HAUNTINGS IN THE TOWER

by
Yeoman Warder G. Abbott (retd)
    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