Photo: jonfeinstein
Here at East London Lines, we love a good scare. In fact, there’s not a day goes by without someone jumping out of a filing cabinet, covered in a white sheet and wielding the big stapler.
It’s getting a bit tedious, if we’re honest.
So for the past few weeks we’ve gone in search of scarier fare; ghost hunting across East London. And we’ve found a lot more than you might expect.
For example, did you know that in the Tower of London, it was this month back in 1483, that the fate of the infamous murdered princes was sealed? Or that Edgar Allan Poe, that master of horror, went to school in Stoke Newington?
We’ve gathered all the best ghost stories from along the line, to bring you a borough-by-borough guide to all that’s ghoulish and otherworldly in your neighbourhood.
There’ll be stories, videos and even interactive maps so you can check out whether there are any known hauntings on your very own street.
Check back each day, as we post entries for Tower Hamlets, Lewisham, Croydon and Hackney. If you know of a story we’ve missed, tell us about it in the comments.
To get you started, here’s the spooky low-down on Croydon!
I saw a ghosts when I was a small child
1975 laying asleep on my side with my back to the bedroom window I woke up from a sleep and was annoyed even angry I turned myself over and saws A sckelton in a long black cloak looking down at me at first I shouted ‘you woke me up”! And then I turn back on my side and realised I saw something that scared me I look across the room to see this tall figure float across the room and walk through a wall. Since then I’ve had to sleep with my back against the wall. The haunting was in a basement flat in greenwood road hackney
1972
I lived in a ground floor flat [in] Hackney and the front room was my bedroom with big heavy Victorian double doors that used to open on to the lounge and kitchen at the back. The doors use to be hard to open as they stuck on the carpet. I closed them each night, but during the night they used to be flung open, and loud bangs in the room as though a weight had been dropped from a height, so the room would shake. Snoring on the settee but no one there. I piled telephone directories behind the doors but every morning they were wide open. My cat wouldn’t stay in the place and eventually left home for good as I did in the end,