Hammersmith Ghost
For about two months during the winter of 1803, the inhabitants of Hammersmith were much alarmed by reports of a malevolent ghost ‘stalking up and down the neighbourhood’. The affair led to a violent death, and hence was reported in the press and eventually resulted in a criminal trial. The trouble had reportedly begun after a woman who was pregnant fainted with terror when a very tall white figure arose from among the tombstones, pursued her, and grasped her in its arms; she was carried home in a state of shock, and died a few days later. Others described the phantom as wearing a calf-skin, or draped in white robes and having horns and glass eyes; on one occasion it had ambushed a wagon, causing the horses to bolt, to the great danger of the passengers. It was rumoured to be the ghost of a man who had slit his throat a year before.
There were some people, however, who rejected supernatural explanations; believing that some practical joker was at work, they lay in wait for him on several nights, but there were too many paths and alleys for him to be caught. One of these vigilantes, an excise officer called Francis Smith, went out armed on 3 January 1804 to keep watch in Black Lion Lane, where he saw a white figure coming towards him; as it did not answer his challenge, he shot it. Unfortunately, it was quite human – it was a bricklayer named Thomas Millwood, who was no hoaxer but was simply wearing the white jacket, trousers and shoes which were the normal working dress of his trade. His mother-in-law later testified that it was not the first time he had been mistaken for the ‘ghost’, and that she had advised him to wear a dark greatcoat, for his own safety.
At Smith’s trial on 13 January 1804, the jury at first gave a verdict of manslaughter, but the judge pointed out that however much one must detest the callous trickster who was terrorizing the neighbourhood, this did not justify anyone in shooting a suspect; Smith must either be found guilty of murder, or acquitted entirely. He was therefore condemned to be hanged and dissected. However, the sentence was soon commuted to a year’s imprisonment.
Meanwhile, the real hoaxer had been caught, thanks to information given by a neighbour shocked by Millwood’s death. It turned out to be an old shoemaker called James Graham, who had been going about by night wrapped in a blanket ‘in order to be revenged on the impertinence of his apprentices, who had terrified his children by telling them stories of ghosts’.
There was a sequel twenty years later, as J. A. Brooks describes in his Ghosts of London. In 1824, local papers reported the appearance of a new Hammersmith Ghost, also dubbed the Hammersmith Monster, who, not content with scaring women in unlighted lanes, would jump on them and scratch their faces ‘as if with hooks’; he turned out to be a young farmer and hay-salesman from Harrow. He was ‘sent by the magistrates to the House of Correction to undergo a little wholesome discipline for his pranks’.
Nor was this the end; in 1832, another spectral figure was attacking women in lanes around Hammersmith and Acton. According to one report, he was ‘attired in a large white dress, with long nails or claws, by which he was enabled to scale walls or hedges for the purpose of making himself scarce’. Others said he was dressed in armour, and had wagered that he would strip the clothes from a certain number of women within a specified time, and needed only one more victim to win his bet.
These episodes show the interplay between popular tales of the supernatural and the deliberate pranks of copycat hoaxers. However, there are some who still claim that there is a true ghost which appears in the churchyard of St Paul’s, Hammersmith, once every fifty years at midnight when the moon is full. This was publicized in the West London Observer in July 1955, causing such a crowd to gather that police cordoned off the churchyard. Nothing was seen at midnight (apart from ‘Teddy Boys in white shirts’), but the few people who, mindful of Summer Time, continued their vigil till 1 a.m. were rewarded with the sight of a figure draped in brilliant white gliding among the tombs.
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SOURCE:
Haunted England : The Penguin Book of Ghosts – Written by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson –
Copyright © Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson 2005, 2008