Tower of London

If any building should be haunted, it is the Tower. Nearly a thousand years of executions, imprisonment, and murder have left it with more documented ghosts than any other structure in England. The accounts come from military personnel and government officials, men whose professional reputations depended on accuracy.

Anne Boleyn

Beheaded on Tower Green on May 19, 1536, after conviction for treason, adultery, and incest. Her ghost reportedly leads a silent procession from the execution site to the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, where she is buried beneath the altar floor.

In 1864, a rifleman from the 60th Rifles was on guard outside the King’s House. A white figure approached. He challenged it three times. No response. He charged with his bayonet. The blade passed through the figure. He collapsed. Two witnesses watched from a window in the Bloody Tower. The rifleman was court-martialed for deserting his post. He was acquitted on their testimony.

The Princes

Edward V and his brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, disappeared around 1483. They were twelve and nine. In 1674, workmen found a box containing two small skeletons beneath a staircase in the White Tower. Charles II ordered them reburied in Westminster Abbey. Since then, guards have reported shadowy figures of two small boys holding hands, drifting through the White Tower.

The Keeper of the Crown Jewels

Edmund Lenthal Swifte held one of the most trusted positions in the realm. In January 1816, a sentry guarding the Martin Tower saw a bear emerging from the Jewel Room. He stabbed at it with his bayonet. The blade passed through and stuck in the door. The sentry died days later. Swifte confirmed the account.

In October 1817, Swifte was dining with his family in the Martin Tower when his wife saw something across the room. Swifte described “a cylindrical figure like a glass tube, seemingly about the thickness of his arm, hovering between the ceiling and the table; its contents appeared to be dense fluid, white and pale azure.” He threw a chair at it. The chair passed through. The cylinder retreated and vanished.

He published the account in Notes and Queries in 1860. He was a government official writing for a scholarly journal, reporting what he had seen.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Edmund Lenthal Swifte, Notes and Queries (August 1860)
• Historic Royal Palaces archives
• Peter Underwood, A Gazetteer of British Ghosts (1971)