In a suggestive book written by Edward Lovett, Magic in Modern London, published in 1925, it is reported that sharks’ teeth taken from the London clay were said to cure cramp. In Camberwell it was customary to cover a horseshoe with red cloth in order to ward off nightmares, while Mile End was known as the place where children could be “charmed” and healed. When market business was bad in the East End the trader would exclaim: “Ah! I expect I forgot to bow to the new moon!” It is appropriate, in a city of commerce, that it was customary to call out “money” at the sight of a falling star. Strangely shaped stones were placed on London mantelpieces as a “votive offering,” in the same manner that silver representations of limbs were hung in medieval city churches. A woman in Whitechapel told an investigator that, when moving house, it was customary to swing the cat around one room in order to induce it to stay. There are also interesting records of “cat sacrifice” in the walls of certain houses. Cauls in which children had been born were on sale for eighteen pence each as a safeguard against drowning but, at the time of the First World War, when the danger of death was very close, the price rose to £2. In London markets it was possible, until recent times, to buy neolithic stone axes or flint arrowheads as another precaution against thunderbolts.
London resembles a prison, and it is perhaps not surprising to discover that keys have always been an object of taboo. They were associated with magic and the presence of demons; thus “The art of lock-picking was known as the ‘Black Art,’” according to Peter Linebaugh in The London Hanged, and “the most common lock-picking tool was called a ‘charm.’” Keys were used to investigate suspected persons; the name was placed in the stem of a key and guilt was established if the key then moved or shook. The lodgings of prostitutes were often symbolised by “the drawing of a large key,” and many ladies of the night wore keys around their neck as a symbol of their trade.
There is a suggestive eighteenth-century passage, connected with the storming of Newgate Prison. One rioter came back to his lodging house and announced: “I have got the keys of Newgate.” At his subsequent trial, a fellow lodger was questioned by the magistrate about these keys. “You would not touch them for fear that they would contaminate you?” “I would not come near them.”
Patients at Bedlam who refused to swallow their drugs had their mouths opened by a specially designed metal key.
At the time of the plague, spectres were seen in the thoroughfares of the city; indeed London has always been troubled by ghosts. A fine brick house on the south side of the churchyard in Clerkenwell was “seldom tenanted” because of its reputation. Number 7 Parker Street, off Drury Lane, had a name for “ill luck” and was eventually torn down. Another house in the same street, No. 23, was haunted by “fearful noises” in a corner where death had occurred. There was a haunted house in Berkeley Square which was “empty for a long time,” and another in Queen’s Gate.
P.J. Grosley, visiting the city in the eighteenth century, remarked upon “the great practical fear” of ghosts there, even while Londoners “make a jest of them in theory.” Another stranger in the same period visited the theatres and noticed that the ghosts of Shakespearean drama provoked “surprise, fear, even horror … to such a degree, as if the scenes which they saw were real.” It has often been remarked that, in a city of spectacle, Londoners find it difficult to distinguish theatre from reality but, more significantly, such reports suggest a surprising credulity. In the middle of the sixteenth century a young girl was found to have counterfeited a supernatural voice in a house near Aldersgate, “through which the people of the whole city were wonderfully molested.” We must imagine flying rumour, and reports, and fear.
The London writer “Aleph” has another story. In the early months of 1762 it was firmly believed that, within a house in Cock Lane, that once “dingy, narrow, half-lighted street,” there dwelled a ghost known as “Scratching Fanny” responsible for certain knockings and bangings. A young girl was believed to be possessed by this spirit, and “was constantly attended by mysterious noises, though bound and muffled hand and foot.” Thousands of Londoners visited Cock Lane and the more genteel were permitted to visit the girl’s bedroom, fifty at a time, “almost suffocating her from the stench.” A committee of eminent Londoners was set up to investigate the claims-one of their number was the superstitious Samuel Johnson-and concluded that the girl “had some art of counterfeiting noises.” Her father was put in the pillory at the end of Cock Lane, where “the populace treated him with compassion.” And so the affair ended, after London had once again been “wonderfully molested.” It is almost as if it were itself a spectral city, so filled with intimations of its past that it haunts its own inhabitants.
The “Islington Ghost” visited a patch of ground beside Trinity Church in Cloudesley Square causing “a wondrous commotion in various parts, the earth swelling and turning up every side”; Michael Faraday is supposed to haunt a telephone exchange in Bride Street which was once the chapel of his Sandemanian congregation. Lord Holland and Dan Leno, Dick Turpin and Annie Chapman, have variously been seen. Old hospitals and the city churches have proved fruitful ground for phantoms, and the stretch of Swains Lane in Highgate beside the cemetery has been the home of many “sightings.” There is apparently a ghost in the Oriental Department of the British Museum, and a phantom blackbird haunted a house in Dean Street for many generations. The daughter of the Earl of Holland, walking in Kensington Gardens, “met with her own apparition, habit and everything, as in a looking glass”; she died a month later. The rector of St. Bartholomew’s, Smithfield, saw in his pulpit the ghost of a divine “in the black gown of Geneva … exhorting the unseen audience with the greatest fervour, gesticulating vehemently, bending first to the right and then to the left over the pulpit, thumping the cushions in front of him, and all the while his lips moving as though speech was pouring from him.”
The Tower of London has of course been the natural haven of many spirits. Familiar figures have glided by, among them Walter Raleigh and Anne Boleyn. The latter was “seen” by three witnesses as a “white figure,” and a soldier on duty at the door of the Lieutenant’s Lodgings “fell in a dead faint.” He was court-martialled but later acquitted. The ghost of a bear “issued from beneath the door” of the Jewel House, and the sentry who saw it died two days later. It might be recalled that there was indeed a menagerie, or a zoo, within the Tower itself. One of the most ambiguous apparitions was that vouchsafed to the Keeper and his wife; they were at table in the sitting room of the notorious Jewel House when “a glass tube, something about the thickness of my arm” hovered in the air. It contained some “dense fluid, white and pale azure … incessantly rolling and mingling within the cylinder.” It approached the Keeper’s wife who exclaimed “Oh Christ! it has seized me!” before it crossed the room and disappeared.
Other places have remained objects of London fear. It is believed the cries of drowned Jews, murdered in the great expulsion of 1290, can still be heard at low tide near Gravesend. The “Field of Forty Footsteps,” which now lies beneath Gordon Square, was considered to be “charmed” or “blasted,” according to taste. Here were once picked plantain leaves which were supposed to influence dreams but, more importantly, on the same spot two brothers killed each other in a duel. The imprint of their fatal footsteps was thought to have lingered, while the area of the killings could produce no grass. Southey did indeed decipher the outlines of seventy-six footsteps “the size of a large human foot about three inches deep” and in the summer of 1800, just before the area was built upon, Moser “counted more than forty.”