The spookiest London Underground station and why ghosts haunt it

The London Underground is the home of a remarkable number of ghost stories.

For a city as old as London, rumours of ghosts and ghouls gliding across the city was always going to be inevitable.

There is good reason why ghost hunters across the world find themselves making the journey to London; from the Tudors to the Victorians, we’ve always loved a good ghost story of drama and intrigue, and 21st century Londoners aren’t any different from our urban dwelling forefathers.

And its one series of locations that find themselves particularly steeped in haunting tales.

The London Underground, first built by the Victorians – perhaps the most ghost obsessed society this island has ever seen – is the home of a remarkable number of ghost stories.

It doesn’t help, either, that the city’s underground hosts a number of abandoned Tube stops, left completely untouched from the day it closed to the day of this article being written.

“There’s something exceptionally eerie about an abandoned location,” journalist Emma Jones wrote for The Mirror, recounting her experience on travelling down to perhaps the most haunted of all closed stations; Aldwych, in central London.

One of the ghosts that reportedly still haunts this unused station is Francis Maria Kelly, whom Transport for London workers and commuters alike claim to have had seen floating around in traditional theatre garments.

Francis was the star of a one-woman show in the late 19th century at the Royal Strand Theatre, which was located just around the corner from Aldwych station. She is said to haunt the station in sorrow and despair, the actress reportedly devastated over her career terminating alongside the closing of the theatre; pretty fitting, then, that she would find an after-life of solace in a closed down station.

Then there’s also the real life stories that don’t need the element of the supernatural to horrify.

Such as a man in the 1830s, who charged Londoners considerable money to organise the burial of their loved ones at a local church, but instead dump the corpses in a 6ft-deep, 60ft-wide pit that was just mere metres above one of the platforms of Aldwych station.

Troubled thespian Francis Maria Kelly isn’t the only ghost spotted haunting the platforms of Aldwych. There have been a plethora of other sightings across the centuries, both when the station was open, and in its current state of being closed.

These include a man in uniform, who firsthand witnesses claim, could be a staff member that tragically died on the tracks. There’s also been insistence on the sound of human singing, the scent of cigarette smoke and perfume, and even human chatter.

Sounds like quite the party at Aldwych Station.

Source: MyLondon