Ghosts of the London Underground The London Underground is not only the longest underground railway in the world by route length it is also the world's oldest. It serves 268 stations by rail and an additional 6 stations. Ever since the first line was opened in 1863, however, one of the major headaches facing the engineers and the army of construction workers commissioned to expand and develop the network has been the presence of huge burial pits dating back to the summer of 1665 when London was ravaged by an outbreak of bubonic plague (a.k.a. the Black Death). Since no-one knew for certain how many of these plague pits were actually dug, nor where they were located with any degree of accuracy, it was inevitable that as the railway network continued to expand more and more of these 17th century plague pits would be disturbed often without any warning. This is exactly what happened when the Victoria Line was being constructed in the 1960s. A huge tunnel boring machine ploughed straight into a long-forgotten plague pit at Green Park traumatising several brawny construction workers on site. Setting aside the awful legacy of the plague pits for a moment, the London Underground has also witnessed its own fair share of human tragedy in the last 145 years. People have been killed building the network. People have been killed maintaining the network. People have died of natural causes on the network. People have been murdered on the network. Others have used the network to "end it all" by throwing themselves in front of a speeding train. There have been train crashes, derailments and major fires on the network that have all claimed lives. In the dark days of the Blitz on London, Adolf Hitler's Luftwaffe scored direct hits on a number of Underground stations causing devastation, disruption and loss of life and the Underground has also been the target of terrorists on more than one occasion. The most recent terrorist attack occurred on 7th July 2005 when suicide bombers claimed the lives of scores of people. Given that the London Underground has carved its way through a veritable charnel house of decaying corpses...many of whom were interred with little or no dignity and without any funerary rights...and that it has also witnessed thousands of sudden and often very violent deaths since it first opened for business in 1863, is it any wonder that the London Underground has acquired a reputation for ghostly goings on? This tube station is located at Aldgate in the City of London. On the Circle Line between Tower Hill and Liverpool Street it is the eastern terminus of the Metropolitan Line and it was opened on November 18, 1876. It was built on the site of a plague pit in which, according to the author Daniel Defoe in his "Journal of a Plague Year", 1,000 bodies were buried in only two weeks during the plague of 1665. The station was badly damaged by German bombing during World War II. Some years ago, an electrician working at the station made what should have been his last mistake. Somehow he managed to send over 20,000 volts of electricity through his own body. By all accounts he should have been killed. Instead, however, he was just knocked unconscious and, apart from bruising his forehead, he was otherwise unharmed. His colleagues had been watching him just before the accident happened. Once he had sufficiently recovered, his colleagues all swore that, just prior to the incident that should have claimed his life, they had seen an almost transparent figure of an old lady standing alongside him gently stroking his hair. I guess the electrician wasn't the only one who had a shock that fateful day... Phantom footsteps, that end abruptly, have also been heard coming from within the tunnel. This is a disused tube station on the Piccadilly Line. Opened in 1907 as Strand Station it was originally intended to be the southern terminus of the Great Northern and Strand Railway. Re-named Aldwych Station in 1917 it ended up as the terminus for a very short branch line to Holborn. This branch line was closed during World War 2 and its tunnels were used as air raid shelters and to store various national treasures from the British Museum including the Elgin Marbles. Re-opened after the War it was finally closed on 30th September 1994 when the cost of refurbishing the lifts at the station was deemed to be uneconomic. Situated at the junction of the Strand and Surrey Street, the L-shaped surface building has been largely restored to its former glory. As it was built on the site of the old Royal Strand Theatre it is perhaps fitting that its resident ghost is that of an actress that once trod its boards. Over the years, numerous people have claimed to have seen her agitated ghost wandering the Station's deserted platforms and eerie tunnels late at night.

• published: 10 Apr 2014
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