Tower of London

The story

The Tower of London, formally "His Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London", stands on the north bank of the Thames at the eastern edge of the old City, separated from it by the open ground of Tower Hill. It is one of the most visited monuments in Britain and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1988.

Its story begins with the Norman Conquest. After his victory at Hastings on 14 October 1066, William the Conqueror circled around London rather than storming it, and by December the city's leaders gave in without a fight. William's advance party built fortifications to keep the large and restless population in check, using the south-east corner of the old Roman walls as ready-made defenses, with the river guarding the south side. That first castle was an enclosure of ditch and timber.

Stone came soon after. Work on the White Tower, the great keep that gave the whole fortress its name, is usually dated to 1078, under the direction of Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester. It was probably complete by 1100. That year it received its first recorded prisoner, Bishop Ranulf Flambard, a hated tax collector who also became the first to escape: in February 1101 he held a banquet for his captors and then climbed down a rope that had been smuggled in inside a cask of wine. Later kings, above all Richard I, Henry III and Edward I between the late 1100s and around 1300, wrapped the keep in two rings of walls and a moat.

Over the centuries the Tower served as royal palace, armory, treasury, mint, record office, home of the Crown Jewels, and even a zoo: the royal menagerie's animals included a polar bear in the 13th century and, in the early 19th century, a grizzly bear known as Old Martin. In 1483 the two young sons of Edward IV, the Princes in the Tower, vanished inside its walls and are presumed to have been murdered.

The Tower's most famous role is as a prison for people who had fallen from favor, from the future Elizabeth I to Sir Walter Raleigh; hence the phrase "sent to the Tower". Yet its image as a place of constant torture and execution owes much to Tudor-era religious propaganda and Victorian authors. Before the 20th century, just seven people lost their heads inside the walls, on Tower Green: Lord Hastings in 1483, Anne Boleyn in 1536, Margaret Pole in 1541, Catherine Howard and Jane Boleyn in 1542, Lady Jane Grey in 1554 and the Earl of Essex in 1601. Three soldiers of the Black Watch were also shot there in 1743. Most executions linked to the Tower actually took place outside, on Tower Hill, where 112 people died over some 400 years. During the two world wars the Tower again held prisoners, and twelve men were executed there for spying.

The legend

With such a history it is no surprise that the Tower has a long list of ghosts. Most of them are the famous dead, and most entered print through folklore collections, notably Christina Hole's Haunted England (1951), Daniel Farson's Ghosts in Fact and Fiction (1978) and Steve Roud's London Lore (2008).

The best known is Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, beheaded with a sword on Tower Green on 19 May 1536. Her body lies in the Tower's own chapel, St Peter ad Vincula, and that is one of the places her ghost is said to appear; the other is the area around the White Tower, where she is supposed to stroll with her severed head tucked under one arm. By 1934 the image was familiar enough to inspire a comic song, "With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm", made famous by Stanley Holloway.

Hole's list adds several other victims. Henry VI met his end inside the fortress during the night of 21 May 1471, most likely murdered; tradition places his death in the Wakefield Tower, though there is no evidence for that exact spot. Lady Jane Grey, the "nine days' queen", was beheaded on Tower Green on 12 February 1554. Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, was executed in 1541 in a notoriously botched beheading: the imperial ambassador Chapuys wrote that a blundering youth "hacked her head and shoulders to pieces," and other accounts speak of around eleven blows; popular retellings claim a phantom re-enacts the scene, but that version could not be verified. The Princes in the Tower, Edward V and his brother Richard, are also named. The Bloody Tower owes its name to their supposed murder, and two child skeletons found under a White Tower staircase in 1674 were reburied in Westminster Abbey as theirs, although that identification has never been proven.

The two oldest dated accounts are stranger and less royal. The oldest report we found ran in the Richmond Enquirer on March 16, 1816, with a January heading, "GHOST IN THE TOWER." It declared "The whole place is in an uproar": the ghost had come "in tangible shape," a sentinel had fainted on the spot, the guards had been doubled and residents suspected a trick. The Virginia Argus carried the same item on March 13. Neither names a bear.

In October 1817 the man in charge of the Crown Jewels, Edmund Lenthal Swifte, described a glowing, tube-shaped form that appeared during a meal in his lodgings and hovered over his wife's shoulder, and she screamed that it had grabbed her. The bear appears in his own account, reprinted in the New Orleans Daily Crescent on December 3, 1860. There the sentry comes after the apparition: "Following hard at heel the visitation" of his household, a night sentry at the Jewel Office was alarmed by a "huge bear issuing from underneath the door," lunged with his bayonet, collapsed and died in "two or three days." A feature in the Evening Star of Washington on September 24, 1900, told it differently, with a bear-shaped figure on a dark January night, a sentry dead "in a few hours" and an "official inquiry" that blamed "phantasmagoria." Whether these are one scare or two, the papers do not settle. Given the menagerie then still kept in the Tower, the shape is intriguing. Roud also notes more recent, shapeless frights reported by night staff, without names or dates.

Ghost-tour websites add many more names, including Catherine Howard, Thomas Becket, Guy Fawkes, Walter Raleigh and a "White Lady". None of these could be traced to a reliable source, and they are best treated as embellishments.

A dose of skepticism helps. The memorial on Tower Green may not even mark the real scaffold site: Wikipedia relates that a Yeoman Warder may have pointed Queen Victoria to the wrong spot. Much of the lore attaches to people whose deaths are famous rather than to specific, documented experiences, and no television ghost investigation of the Tower was confirmed in our research.

What remains today

The White Tower still dominates the site, surrounded by its two rings of walls, towers and the moat. Inside the walls are Tower Green with its execution memorial, the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula where Anne Boleyn, Jane Grey and others are buried, the Bloody Tower, the Wakefield Tower and the Jewel House, which still holds the Crown Jewels. Visitors have been able to walk through the restored medieval palace rooms since 2006. In the late 19th century, after the Royal Mint and other offices moved out, the architects Anthony Salvin and John Taylor restored many buildings to what was then imagined as their medieval appearance, so not everything that looks medieval is.

Since 1990 the Tower has been cared for by Historic Royal Palaces, an independent charity that receives no money from the government or the Crown.

Visiting

The Tower of London is a museum open to the public, with paid admission managed by Historic Royal Palaces; check the official website for current hours and tickets, and book ahead in busy seasons.

The Yeoman Warder tours are the best way to hear about the executions and prisoners behind the ghost stories. No official ghost tour was confirmed in our research, but several private London ghost walks pass by the Tower. Tower Hill, the real site of most executions, is outside the walls and free to walk around.

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Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.