Free Ghosts of the Tower of London by Geoff Abbott Page A

Chamber in the Queen’s House
    Still in the last century, a yeoman warder swore under oath to seeing a bluish form hovering, a shape which then seemed to move towards the Queen’s House, whilst in 1933 a guardsman reported seeing a headless woman floating towards him near the Bloody Tower.
    Within the Queen’s House, long a prison for royal and important personalities as well as being the Lieutenant’s residence, many an eerie experience has been reported. Across the ancient timbered floors walks the ‘Grey Lady’. Only a woman will ever discover her secret – for she has never been seen by a man. In the 1970s the figure of a man in mediaeval dress was seen drifting along an upper corridor, whilst in the same decade firm footsteps were frequently heard ascending a rear stairway. So convincing were these sounds that eventually two residents investigated. On hearing the measured tread, one resident went instantly to the foot of the stairs, his companion going to the top. Slowly they moved along the stairs – to meet no one but the other!
    Late in 1978 an American guest in the house heard religious chanting. It was midnight, and the faint music and voices continued for some minutes. Assuming it to be from a radio or similar equipment, she mentioned it casually the next day – only to be told that no music had been played as late as that. The same slow religious chant had been heard on a previous occasion by a resident passing by the house.

    The Gunpowder Plot conspirators
    A room adjoining that in which Anne Boleyn passed her last few days has a particularly unearthly atmosphere, being noticeably colder than other rooms in the house. A peculiar perfumed smell lingers in the air, and such is the brooding menace of the room that no unaccompanied girl or young child is ever permitted to sleep in it, for in the past those who were have woken to feel that they were being slowly suffocated!
    Across Tower Green is the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula, and an instance some years ago of lights burning therein led the Officer of the Guard to investigate. Peering in through the window, he stared unbelieving at the spectacle confronting him. Along the aisle, between the tombs, moved a procession of spectral figures, knights and their ladies. They were led by a female who, he averred, resembled Anne Boleyn, and they moved towards the altar beneath which her pitiful remains had been buried centuries before. Even as he stared the vision faded and the chapel darkened, leaving the officer alone in the deepening shadows of Tower Green.
    Of the women who perished so violently on the private scaffold, surely none suffered more terribly – nor more undeservedly – than Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury. Over seventy years of age, innocent of all crime, the countess was slain as an act of vengeance by King Henry VIII. The countess’ son, Cardinal Pole, from the safe haven of France, reviled Henry’s religious beliefs. Retribution – and the axe – descended on his mother. On the scaffold the countess proclaimed her innocence. She refused to kneel over the block and she challenged the axeman to ‘remove her head as best he could’. Pursuing her around the block, the axeman is said to have literally hacked her to death in a welter of blood.

    Chapel Royal, St Peter ad Vincula
    Over the centuries it seems as if her proud Plantagenet spirit still shrieks defiance to the sombre skies. On the anniversaries of her brutal execution, her ghost is reported to run round the scaffold site pursued by the spectral axeman, the bloodstained axe brandished aloft.
    One night in 1975 personnel in the Waterloo Block overlooking the Green were roused in the early hours by the sound of piercing screams. This was confirmed by men on duty in the Byward Tower, and a few nights later the guardsman patrolling the rear of the Waterloo Block also reported that just before dawn he too heard high-pitched screaming from the direction of the Green. Nothing was