Episode 142: Monsters and Myths of London

Host: Hazel Baker

Hazel is an active Londoner, a keen theatre-goer and qualified  CIGA London tour guide.

She has won awards for tour guiding and is proud to be involved with some great organisations. She is a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Marketors and am an honorary member of The Leaders Council.

Channel 5’s Walking Wartime Britain(Episode 3) and Yesterday Channel’s The Architecture the Railways Built (Series 3, Episode 7). Het Rampjaar 1672, Afl. 2: Vijand Engeland and Arte.fr Invitation au Voyage, À Chelsea, une femme qui trompe énormément.

🎧Other Halloween Episodes listeners may enjoy:

Episode 122: Haunted Underground Stations

Episode 28: The Ghost of Cock Lane Special

Transcript:

Podcast Episode 142: Monsters and Myths of London

Hazel Baker:

Welcome back to the London History Podcast. I am Hazel Baker from londonguidedwalks.co.uk  and if you think you hear an echo, a whisper perhaps, or footsteps behind you well, that is only fitting for tonight’s Halloween special. I am not actually recording in some forgotten crypt beneath London. I am in my studio. But a little atmospheric licence seems in order, don’t you think?

Hazel Baker:

 London has always been a city of stories. Beneath its cobbled lanes, through its fog, and behind its grand facades lurk centuries of urban legends – tales of monsters, demons, spectral hounds, and creatures that refuse to stay buried.

So, today, let us wander together through some of the strangest, most chilling, and enduring legends the capital has ever whispered. From a fire-breathing terror that haunted the Victorians, to a spectral hound of vengeance, from a very modern vampire scandal to serpentine river beasts, and even devils carved into the very stones of the City itself.

Why London? Why here? Perhaps because this is a city that has seen it all: plagues, fires, executions, wars, crime and revolution. Perhaps because the fog from the Thames once wrapped the city in mystery, turning every shadow into a threat. Or perhaps because – just perhaps – some of these stories contain a sliver of truth.

Spring-heeled Jack: The Victorian Nightmare

 

Hazel Baker:

Our first creature seems to leap—quite literally—from the gaslit margins of Victorian London’s newspapers: Spring-heeled Jack.

Imagine London in the late 1830s. It’s a city of contrasts: gas lamps spitting through thick fog, the clatter of carriage wheels on slick cobblestones, and the ever-present mingling of shadow and smoke with the glow of modernity. It’s an era when belief in the uncanny lingers, and fear sometimes outruns fact.

It’s out of this tense, flickering world that Spring-heeled Jack sprang onto the scene.

Eyewitnesses described a spectre, tall and cloaked, eyes burning red “like balls of fire,” hands tipped with claws sometimes cold and metallic. More striking still, he could leap impossibly high—over garden walls, gates, and even entire rooftops—defying every normal explanation.

It wasn’t just rumour. In January 1838, five separate letters reached London’s Lord Mayor, describing a costumed prowler alarming young women across the city’s southern suburbs—places like Clapham and Brixton, Lavender Hill. These weren’t isolated spooky tales. The Mansion House Police Court took the danger seriously, and leading newspapers of the day dubbed the phantom “Spring-heeled Jack.”

The accounts were specific and chilling. Some spoke of clothes torn by clawed hands; others, of attackers who spat blue or white flames, vanishing with a wild “metallic chuckle” echoing in the night.

But Spring-heeled Jack’s legend truly took hold thanks to one real, documented case: the attack on Jane Alsop, detailed in the Patriot and other London papers in February 1838.

Jane Alsop, just eighteen, lived with her family on Bear-bind Lane—a lonely spot between Bow and Old Ford. One February evening, she heard the fierce ringing of the garden gate. A man outside, in the shadow, claimed to be a policeman and cried out, “For God’s sake, bring me a light—we’ve caught Spring-heeled Jack!” Jane obliged, handing him a candle. The next moments were the stuff of nightmares. Her supposed rescuer threw back his cloak, emitting a “most hideous and frightful appearance.” He spat blue and white fire at her, grabbed at her dress and neck, and raked her skin with metallic claws. She managed to break free with her sisters’ help, but not before she was scratched and battered, her gown shredded, her hair yanked out in clumps. The report was detailed and serious enough to convince many sceptics that the terror was, at the very least, real for its victims.

The police investigation that followed found no culprit. Jane and her family were adamant that his claws were metal, and there were hints that the attacker may not have acted alone—he abandoned his cloak and fled across the fields, his accomplice apparently scooping up the evidence.

These events were not unique, and versions quickly multiplied. Some said Jack took other monstrous forms—a white bull in Barnes or a bear in East Sheen; a figure in shining brass or steel in Richmond and Twickenham; a “baboon” near Hammersmith and Kensington Palace. Newspapers, pamphlets, and penny dreadfuls spun new sightings and ever more dramatic escapes: the man leaping fences in Uxbridge, dashing across rooftops in Hanwell, or even posing as a mischievous lamplighter in Paddington before vanishing in a cabriolet.

The legend swelled as anxiety gripped London: letters poured in to police courts, committees were formed, and even the Duke of Wellington was rumoured to have patrolled the streets, pistol in hand, hoping to face down this “devil in brass armour.”

Some explanations pointed to local pranksters or proposed elaborate spring-heeled boots and clever mechanics. Others glimpsed something darker in these tales—a reflection of the city’s anxieties about crime, rapid change, or the supernatural still lurking at the city’s edge.

As the year went on, the stories grew more surreal—Jack appearing in animal form or as an acrobat, putting out town gas and terrifying entire neighbourhoods. Most researchers today agree that many later tales were exaggerations, misunderstandings, or outright theatre. 

Following the sensational newspaper accounts and panicked police reports, Jack swiftly became a favourite in London’s cheap theatres. In 1840, just two years after the first major sightings, the melodrama “Spring-heeled Jack, The Terror of London” took to the stage, thrilling audiences with a heady mix of supernatural scares and social commentary. The character didn’t stay in one theatre for long—he was popular everywhere booth and penny-theatres popped up, from city slums to provincial playhouses. In fact, so dramatic and strange were the real-life legends that the line between news and stage spectacle grew increasingly thin. The show was still being produced in 1903 where the Music Hall and Theatre Review displayed a half page advert for a £1,000 reward for Spring-heeled Jack – without mentioning it was a theatrical production. I assume the marketing department were rather pleased with themselves for such an attention-grabbing advert.

Jack’s adventures were soon adapted into “penny dreadfuls”—cheap, serialised stories aimed at young and working-class readers. Here, he transformed from urban menace to pulpy anti-hero, sometimes cast as a misunderstood vigilante, sometimes as a true villain. One of the best-known was “Spring-heel’d Jack: The Terror of London,” a serialised story that ran for years in the late 19th century. His legacy as a sensational literary character even helped lay the foundations for modern superheroes—Spring-heeled Jack’s masked, leaping persona is sometimes cited as a precursor to characters like Batman.

The legend didn’t stop at stage and story papers. He became part of everyday entertainment—his name invoked in Punch and Judy puppet shows in Victorian parks, his image gracing children’s picture cards, and even his mysterious laugh echoed in playground songs and rhymes. Jack’s notoriety made him a fixture in the period’s popular imagination; as the decades rolled on, he featured in music halls, parodies, and variety acts.

And his story has endured far beyond the nineteenth century. Spring-heeled Jack features in modern novels, steampunk fiction, comics, and radio plays. Authors like Philip Pullman and Mark Hodder have written new tales, recasting Jack as everything from dark avenger to time-traveling villain. In Edwardian times and beyond, songs and ballads referenced his name, keeping his legacy alive in street culture and music hall performance, even if the details changed with every retelling.

Yet the legend endured. By the time Spring-heeled Jack leaped from newspaper columns into plays, penny dreadfuls, and Victorian popular culture, he had become a symbol—of fright, fascination, and London’s uneasy dance with modernity.

Officially, he was never caught. Theories and suspects abounded, from local aristocrats to gangs of pranksters, but no one was ever brought to justice. In that sense, Spring-heeled Jack belongs to the shadowy boundary between fact and fiction—a creature born of real fears, shaped by rumour, and immortalised by the press.

And even now, sometimes in the fog and gaslight of London’s history, it’s as if he’s still out there—waiting for his next leap.

The Black Dog of Newgate: Vengeance from the Shadows

 

We now step into the very heart of medieval London’s darkness—to Newgate Prison, a place so wretched that it earned its reputation as “a prototype of hell” from the eighteenth-century writer Henry Fielding. But our story reaches back far further than Fielding’s day, to a time when famine and desperation turned human beings into monsters—and perhaps summoned something monstrous in return.

Picture, if you will, the reign of King Henry III, somewhere between 1216 and 1272. This was an era scarred by multiple famines that swept across England. The 1250s, in particular, brought devastating food shortages—one chronicler recorded death tolls of 15,000 to 20,000 in London alone during this period. Mass burials of famine victims found in the 1990s in central London bear witness to this catastrophe. Contemporary sources tell us that by 1316, death rates in Newgate reached exceptional levels—deaths caused not by the prison’s brutal conditions, but by the widespread famine that gripped the entire land.​

Into this world of hunger and horror enters our tale. The earliest written account dates to 1596, recorded by Luke Hutton, a prisoner in Newgate who penned a work with the extraordinary title: “The Discovery of a London Monster, called The Blacke Dogg of Newgate: Profitable for all Readers to Take Heed by”.

According to Hutton’s account, during one of these terrible famines in Henry III’s reign, desperation had driven Newgate’s inmates to the ultimate sin: cannibalism. Among the prisoners languished a scholar—”whispered to be a sorcerer, a manipulator of the dark arts, and diabolical witchcraft”—who had been imprisoned for practicing sorcery and accused of having “Done much hurt to the Kings subjects with his Charms and Devilish Witchcraft”. This unfortunate man, unable to defend himself physically, quickly fell victim to his starving cellmates. They killed him, dismembered him, and consumed his flesh, noting only that he was “good meat”.

But this grotesque crime unleashed something far worse than human cruelty. Soon after the scholar’s death, prisoners began seeing the spectre of a monstrous black dog prowling the prison corridors—”eyes burning like coals, fur black as midnight.” The inmates, gripped by terror, became convinced this canine phantom was the sorcerer’s spirit, returned to exact vengeance on those who had devoured him.

The beast began its work methodically. One by one, it hunted down and killed those responsible for the scholar’s murder. The remaining prisoners who had participated in the cannibalism were so terrified that they plotted a desperate escape. They murdered several guards and broke free from Newgate, fleeing into the night. But freedom offered no sanctuary. The Black Dog pursued them relentlessly, seeking out each escapee wherever they tried to hide, killing them one by one.

This legend proved so powerful that it quickly leaped from prison folklore into popular culture. By 1602—just six years after Hutton’s account—the story had already been adapted for the stage. The dramatist John Day, working with Richard Hathway, Wentworth Smith, and an anonymous fourth playwright, produced “The Black Dog of Newgate” for Worcester’s Men. A second part followed in 1603, testament to the play’s popularity.

The cultural reach extended even further. Tavern tokens bearing the Black Dog’s image circulated as local currency as early as 1598, showing how deeply the myth had embedded itself in London’s popular imagination. These tokens became so recognizable that the Black Dog served as both warning and entertainment—a symbol that crossed the boundary between folklore and commerce.

The Black Dog’s legend refused to die with the medieval period. For centuries afterward, people claimed to see the creature near the site of the old prison, prowling the Old Bailey, appearing as an omen before executions. Even today, in Amen Court—formerly known as “Deadman’s Walk,” the narrow alley where condemned criminals were led to their execution—residents and visitors report sightings of a massive black dog with glowing eyes.

The story resonated so strongly because it reflected deeper truths about medieval justice and suffering. As one modern scholar notes, “the Black Dog became more than a legend—it was a warning, a theatrical spectacle, and a deeply ingrained piece of London’s haunted imagination”. From Luke Hutton’s 1596 prison memoir to John Day’s theatrical adaptations, from tavern tokens to modern ghost stories, the Black Dog of Newgate represents something fundamental about London’s relationship with its own dark past—the belief that some wrongs are so terrible, they summon their own supernatural justice.

In the end, the Black Dog of Newgate serves as a mirror to its age: born from real famine and genuine desperation, shaped by the brutal realities of medieval imprisonment, and transformed through centuries of telling into something larger than history—a creature of pure vengeance, stalking the shadows of London’s collective memory.

The Highgate Vampire: A Modern Gothic

 

Hazel Baker:

But monsters are not confined to the distant past. In the late 1960s, London gave birth to a new legend—the Highgate Vampire. And this time, the terror unfolded not in gaslit Victorian streets, but in the age of colour television and moon landings.

Highgate Cemetery, once the grand resting place of Victorian elites, had by the mid-twentieth century collapsed into Gothic ruin. Established in 1839 as one of London’s “Magnificent Seven” cemeteries, it was designed to be a park-like oasis for the dead. But by the 1960s, World War I and II had decimated its staff, funding had dried up, and the gates were closed. Overgrown ivy choked monuments, tombs gaped open, and the once-pristine landscape became, as one contemporary observer described it, “a chilling scene of utter ruin and decay where vaults yawn in the shadows and gravestones crumble beneath one’s feet”. It was a stage set for a horror film—and soon, life would imitate art.

The first whispers came in 1967, when two teenage girls walking home along Swain’s Lane near the cemetery’s north gate claimed to have witnessed “the dead rising from their graves”. They ran, terrified, and their story seemed destined to remain a local curiosity—until more reports began to surface.

By late 1969 and early 1970, the British Psychic and Occult Society was receiving multiple accounts of a “tall dark figure” with “hypnotic red eyes” haunting the cemetery. Dead animals—foxes, in particular—were discovered near the grounds, some claiming they had been drained of blood. Graves were desecrated, flowers arranged in mysterious circular patterns, and one coffin was found with a heavy iron spike driven through its lid and into the corpse inside.

Then, on February 6, 1970, a local man named David Farrant wrote to the Hampstead and Highgate Express with a simple request for information. His letter read: “Some nights I walk home past the gates of Highgate Cemetery. On three occasions I have seen what appeared to be a ghost-like figure inside the gates… I have no knowledge in this field and I would be interested if any other readers have seen anything of this nature”.

The response was immediate. Four readers wrote in the following week, describing similar encounters. One woman reported: “My fiancée and I spotted a most unusual form about a year ago. It just seemed to glide across the path. Although we waited a little while, it did not reappear again. I am glad someone else has spotted it”.

But the story took a dramatic turn on February 27, 1970, when the Hampstead and Highgate Express ran a front-page article with the headline: “Does a Wampyre Walk in Highgate?”. The piece featured an interview with Sean Manchester, who described himself as “president of the British Occult Society.” Manchester claimed that what Farrant had seen was no mere ghost, but “a King Vampire of the undead”—a medieval nobleman and practitioner of black magic from Wallachia (the homeland of Dracula) who had been brought to England in a coffin by his followers in the early eighteenth century. According to Manchester, this vampire had lain dormant in the cemetery until recent Satanic rituals performed by occultists had reawakened him.

Manchester arrived at the newspaper’s offices dramatically attired in “a black cloak lined with scarlet silk and carrying a cane,” dressed for the opera—complete with top hat and tails. His theatrical presentation matched his sensational claims, and the media seized upon the story with relish.

Within days, Manchester and Farrant—whose initial letter had made no mention of vampires—found themselves locked in a public rivalry over who could and would destroy the spectre. Each gave interviews. Each claimed authority. The tension escalated rapidly.

Word of the supposed vampire reached Thames Television, and with Friday the 13th of March approaching, producers decided to broadcast a special programme on the phenomenon. On the evening of Friday, March 13, 1970, Thames TV’s Today programme, introduced by Eamonn Andrews, aired interviews with Manchester, Farrant, and several witnesses filmed at Highgate Cemetery. One witness said on camera: “Yes, I did feel it was evil because the last time I actually saw its face and it looked like it had been dead for a long time.” Another commented: “It seemed to float along the ground”.

The programme was transmitted at 6:00 PM. Within two hours, Highgate Cemetery became the scene of what one historian called “the largest vampire hunt of the twentieth century”. Hundreds of Londoners—some estimates say as many as three hundred or more—swarmed Swain’s Lane and stormed the cemetery, despite police efforts to control them. Many carried homemade wooden stakes and crucifixes. Police leave was cancelled. The mob climbed walls and forced open gates in a frenzy that bordered on hysteria.

The fallout was swift and grim. On August 1, 1970, the charred and headless remains of a woman’s body were discovered near the cemetery’s catacombs. Police suspected it had been used in a black magic ritual. Just weeks later, on the night of August 17, 1970, David Farrant was arrested in the churchyard beside the cemetery, carrying a crucifix and a wooden stake. When questioned, he told the Daily Express: “My intention was to search out the supernatural being and destroy it by plunging the stake in its heart”. The case was eventually dismissed in court.

Manchester, meanwhile, claimed to have returned to the cemetery and forced open the doors of a family vault, lifting the lid of a coffin he believed contained the vampire. He was, he said, about to drive a stake through the body when a companion persuaded him to stop. Instead, he left garlic and incense in the vault. In 1973, Manchester publicly declared he had tracked the vampire to a house in nearby Crouch End—dubbed the “House of Dracula”—and driven a stake through its heart, ending the terror once and for all.

Yet the legend refused to die. The feud between Farrant and Manchester continued for decades, playing out in books, interviews, and even court cases. Manchester published The Highgate Vampire: The Infernal World of the Undead Unearthed at London’s Famous Cemetery and Environs in 1985, which became a cult classic. Farrant countered with his own account, Beyond the Highgate Vampire, in 1997. Each man accused the other of fabrication, self-promotion, and worse.

Farrant consistently maintained that he never believed in a literal vampire, stating: “At first I suspected it might just be an animal or someone dressed up or messing about because all these stories about vampires were in the news”. Yet television footage from October 1970 showed him reconstructing his arrest, stalking among tombstones with cross and stake in hand, never once denying the vampire theory on camera.

The Highgate Vampire case became a cultural phenomenon. It reflected the anxieties of its era—a time when Britain was rediscovering a fascination with the occult, influenced by popular Hammer Horror films starring Christopher Lee as Dracula. The cemetery itself had been used as a filming location for movies like Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) and Tales from the Crypt (1972), blurring the line between fiction and reality.

Whether vampire, ghost, or mass panic fuelled by media sensationalism, the Highgate legend demonstrates that even in an age of space exploration and modern technology, London could still fall under the spell of the undead. The energy of old legends persists, the boundaries between history, horror, and the supernatural forever blurred in the city’s restless imagination.

And perhaps that’s the true lesson of the Highgate Vampire: in London, the past is never quite buried—it’s always waiting, just beneath the surface, ready to rise again.

The Cornhill Devils: Mischief in Stone

 

Hazel Baker:

Not all London’s monsters walk or glide. Some are carved in terracotta, staring down from the facades of Cornhill. Three grotesque devils, sneering at passers-by.

Hazel Baker:

Walk down Cornhill today, in the heart of the City of London, and you might pass them without noticing. We Londoners, you see, are often in such a hurry—racing from meeting to meeting, eyes fixed on our phones—that we simply don’t look up. What a pity that is. Because many of London’s secret treasures are located way above the streets, on the upper levels or even the rooftops of the City’s buildings.

But lift your eyes—look up at number 54 and number 55—and there they are: red terracotta demons, horned and grinning, frozen mid-sneer for over a century. Pevsner’s Architectural Guide to the City of London describes them matter-of-factly: “No’s 54-55 by Runtz, 1893, red Doulton terracotta”. But the locals call them the Cornhill Devils, and they have a far more colourful story to tell.

Legend says they were placed there by a mischievous architect, Ernest Augustus Runtz, to spite a vicar who opposed his building plans. Born in 1859, the sixth son of John J. Runtz of Stoke Newington, Ernest Augustus trained under Samuel Walker from 1875 to 1880 before establishing himself as one of London’s prominent late Victorian architects. His portfolio included theatres across the country—the Theatre Royal in Birmingham, the Empire in Middlesbrough, the Marina in Lowestoft, and the New Theatre in Cardiff—but it would be three little devils on Cornhill that ensured his lasting notoriety.​

The story goes that St. Peter’s Church, Cornhill—one of London’s oldest parish churches, rebuilt by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666—sat directly beside Runtz’s new commission at 54-55 Cornhill. During construction in 1893, the vicar of St. Peter’s discovered that Runtz’s design encroached fractionally—perhaps only by a few inches—onto church property. The vicar, protective of his sacred ground, objected fiercely. A lengthy dispute followed, forcing Runtz to return to his drawing board, redraw the plans, and absorb the additional costs and delays.

Relations between the two men became, as you might imagine, decidedly strained. And when the building was completed later that year, Runtz decided to have one last parting shot—a permanent, immortal act of revenge carved in Doulton terracotta.

He commissioned three demonic figures from William James Neatby, one of the period’s most versatile artists. Born in Barnsley in 1860, Neatby had trained as an architect before becoming head of the architectural ceramics department at Doulton and Co. of Lambeth in 1890. For eleven years, Neatby designed mural ceramics and architectural sculpture in terracotta for a range of prestigious projects—including the Meat Hall at Harrods, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, and the Royal Arcade in Norwich. Runtz himself said of Neatby: “He was a true artist, and a man of fine character, and he pursued his art with a direct and single purpose”.

But for the Cornhill commission, Neatby’s brief was delightfully different: create devils as grotesque and malevolent as possible, positioned so they would glare down eternally at St. Peter’s Church and its parishioners. According to legend, the smallest devil—the one with its mouth wide open, howling down toward the church entrance—was modelled on the facial features of the vicar himself. One contemporary observer described these figures as having “faces contorted in fury,” with one “spitting” and another “sticking its fingers up in rage”.

The three devils are all different. The largest squats on the gable at the top of the building, almost human in form, with claws, horns, a beard—and, curiously, breasts. The second has short, hyena-like legs and a tail whipping around its foreleg; it too has breasts, “not the battery of teats you would expect of a dog but just two, as a woman would,” noted one blogger with some alarm. The third and smallest is easiest to miss, positioned just below the larger one, but upon closer inspection reveals itself as equally malignant.

Whether the story is entirely true—and architectural historians remain delightfully skeptical—the devils themselves are undeniably real. Runtz completed his building in 1893, during the height of Victorian eccentricity, when London’s architecture was as much about character and wit as function. These weren’t religious gargoyles meant to ward off evil. They were personal, satirical, designed to provoke and amuse—and, perhaps, to exact a very public, very permanent form of petty revenge.

And they did their job. The Cornhill Devils became one of the City’s best-loved curiosities—proof that even in the buttoned-up world of Victorian finance and commerce, where bankers and stockbrokers hurried past each day, there was room for a little devilry.​

True or not, the devils remain, watching from their perch high above Cornhill—the highest point in the ancient City of London. They are a reminder that in London, even the stones may harbour malice. Architecture here isn’t just backdrop—it’s memory, argument, and storytelling carved into brick and terracotta. The city’s buildings hold grudges, immortalise feuds, and whisper their secrets to anyone willing to look up.

So next time you pass through Cornhill, pause. Tilt your head back. Meet the gaze of those grinning demons, perched menacingly above the entrance to one of London’s oldest sites of Christian worship. And ask yourself: who are they really mocking? The vicar? The architect? Or perhaps all of us, hurrying past, too busy to notice the monsters watching from above?

Hazel Baker:

In London, monsters don’t always lurk in shadows. Sometimes, they sit in plain sight—waiting, grinning, eternal. The Cornhill Devils have been doing just that since 1893, and they show no signs of stopping.

Closing Reflections

 

Hazel Baker:

So, what do these legends tell us about London?

Perhaps they reveal that this city has always been more than bricks and mortar, more than commerce and crown. London is a living archive of human fear and fascination—a place where every era leaves behind not just buildings and records, but stories that refuse to die.

Spring-heeled Jack embodied Victorian anxieties about crime, technology, and the unknown lurking just beyond the gaslights. The Black Dog of Newgate gave voice to medieval fears of sin, starvation, and supernatural retribution—proof that in desperate times, even the walls of a prison could not contain guilt. The Highgate Vampire showed us that even in the space age, with television cameras and modern media, we still hunger for the Gothic, the inexplicable, the thrill of the uncanny. And the Cornhill Devils? They remind us that London’s architecture itself can be weaponised—that stone and terracotta hold grudges longer than any living person ever could.

Monsters, in the end, are mirrors. They reflect our age, our worries, our deepest fascinations. But in London, they also become woven into the city itself—embedded in its alleys, prisons, rivers, cemeteries, and rooftops. They don’t just haunt us. They become part of the urban fabric, waiting patiently through the centuries for someone—perhaps you—to stop, look up, and remember.

Hazel Baker:

So, the next time you walk through the city at night and feel a sudden chill—a prickle at the back of your neck, a sense that something is watching from the shadows or the rooftops—don’t dismiss it too quickly. Ask yourself: is it just the wind? Or is it one of London’s monsters, stirring once more, waiting for the next chapter in their endless story?

Perhaps the real question is not whether these creatures existed, but whether they ever truly left.

Hazel Baker:

I’m Hazel Baker, and this has been the London History Podcast Halloween Special, brought to you by London Guided Walks at londonguidedwalks.co.uk.

If you’ve enjoyed this journey into London’s darker tales, you might also love some of our other spooky season episodes.

Explore Episode 122: Haunted Underground Stations, where we descend into the eerie depths of the Tube and uncover the ghosts that never left their platforms.

Or step back into Georgian London with Episode 28: The Ghost of Cock Lane, one of the most infamous haunting scandals of the eighteenth century—complete with rapping spirits, public hysteria, and a cast of characters that includes Dr. Samuel Johnson himself.

You’ll find all of these episodes, and many more, waiting for you at londonguidedwalks.co.uk/podcast.

Until next time, keep your eyes open, your wits sharp, and remember: in London, the past is never quite as buried as you think.

Happy Halloween and watch your step in the shadows.