Haunted London Tours. Ghosts of the West End.

This walk goes through an area with a decidedly royal feel. It includes a refreshing stroll through the delightful St James’s Park, where you can admire the abundant and varied species of waterfowl, descendants of those introduced by Charles II. You may also encounter the headless woman who has been known to disturb the peaceful tranquillity of the park from time to time. Then, after passing two Royal Palaces (both haunted), you enter the timeless village of St James’s, where several old houses are still visited by residents who have long since shuffled off this mortal coil. The walk ends in the elegant streets of Mayfair. Here is the most haunted house in London, where you might just glimpse the thing that has caused several people to throw themselves to painful deaths from upper windows. The last section, although lacking in ghosts, takes you into the narrow alleyways and courtyards of Shepherd’s Market, where you should explore the old-fashioned labyrinth of streets.

A headless woman is sometimes seen in this vicinity. She rises slowly from the dark rippling waters and drifts slowly across the surface of the lake. Reaching dry land, she breaks into a frenzied run, her arms flailing wildly about her. Petrified onlookers stand rooted to the spot as the headless figure rushes towards the bushes and vanishes. In life, she is thought to have been the wife of a sergeant in the guard who murdered her in the 1780s. Having hacked off her head, he buried it in a secret location before flinging her body into the lake, which was then little more than an expanse of marshy ground. Since that fateful day her headless spectre searches in vain for its missing head.

In her book Haunted Royal Homes Joan Forman tells of a clerk, Sonia Marsh, who was working alone in the vast building one Saturday afternoon when she got the uneasy feeling that something was watching her. Looking into the darkness, she saw a greyish, smoky, triangular mass coming towards her in a bobbing motion.†Petrified, she leapt to her feet, grabbed her coat and raced from the building into the chill of a gloomy October afternoon.†When on Monday morning she told a colleague of her experience, the woman commented, ‘It was probably the Old Duke of Connaught.’†Arthur, Duke of Connaught, the third son of Queen Victoria, lived at Clarence House from 1900 until his death in 1942.†It would appear, however, that his ghost was roaming the corridors and rooms of his London home for several years afterwards.

Long before, a priory stood on the site on what was then an inhospitable site surrounded by marshland. Some say that it is the ghost of a monk who died in the monastery’s punishment cell that haunts Buckingham Palace. He always appears on Christmas Day, on the terrace overlooking the gardens to the rear of the building. Bound in heavy chains and dressed in brown, he clanks and moans his way backwards and forwards for a few minutes before fading into nothingness, not to be seen again until the next Christmas.

The palace has a second and more contemporary ghost, dating from the reign of Edward VII. Major John Gwynne, the King’s private secretary, was involved in a scandalous divorce that meant he was shunned by polite society. In shame, he retired one night to his first-floor office with a revolver and blew out his brains. Since that day, staff working in the vicinity have occasionally heard a gun firing in the room where the suicide occurred.