Welcome to Limehouse

When I dwelt in the central London suburb of Clerkenwell, I would often go on a Sunday stroll to the Thameside communities of Wapping and Limehouse, now gentrified and quite ‘posh’ (actor Sir Ian McKellen owns the venerable The Grapes pub there, and can occasionally be seen holding court with his thespian pals). But they were once dens of many kinds of vice – as well as eerie chills.

The Grapes appears, barely-disguised, in the opening chapter of Charles Dickens’ novel Our Mutual Friend:

A tavern of dropsical appearance … long settled down into a state of hale infirmity. It had outlasted many a sprucer public house, indeed the whole house impended over the water but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver, who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all.

Limehouse History

Limehouse is named for the limekilns that operated there from the mid-14th century, converting chalk into quicklime for the capital’s nascent building industry. From the late 16th century, many ships were built at Limehouse and traders supplied provisions for sea voyages. Well-heeled merchants established fine houses on Narrow Street, especially in the early 18th century and in 1730, Nicholas Hawksmoor built St Anne’s church just south of Commercial Road.

Little Limehouse China

As the docks grew, Limehouse acquired an immigrant population and became London’s very first ‘Chinatown’. The oriental community gained a reputation for gambling, skulduggery and opium-smoking, and Limehouse provided the backdrop for some of Sax Rohmer-based Fu Manchu films. Rohmer (1883-1959) claimed that the character was based on a Chinese gentleman of a peculiar appearance whom he had espied on the Limehouse Causeway one murky evening back in 1911.

The area has been immortalized in literature, TV, and film, including the following:

“During the final years of the last century, there still stood a mansion in Limehouse, to the east of London, known as The House on the River. Here men with bizarre tastes would meet once a month in order to terrify each other by means of true stories of horror and the supernatural. Those story-tellers who failed to impress the assembly were – it is said – never seen again. Those who succeeded were permitted to join: THE CLUB OF THE DAMNED".

As said, the area was once home to a sizeable Chinese community, and was notorious for seedy opium dens, immortalised in the work of Conan Doyle, Sax Rohmer and others; today a dragon marks the entrance to Limehouse’s Old China Town (the newer one, of course is in Soho).

The area’s association with the Far East also led to a noted Dr Who episode, 1977’s The Talons of Weng-Chiang and also a cheeky spoof by comedian/actor Steve Coogan in Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible (2001).

For further information check out: Lilied Tongues and Yellow Claws: The Invention of Limehouse, London's Chinatown, 1915-1945, by Shannon Case (University of Virginia).

Witches, ghosts…and murder

There be sorcery nearby

The Witch of Wapping anonymous pamphlet (1652), tells of one Joan Peterson who lived on Spruce Island, near Shadwell, and was hanged at Tyburn in April 1652. Peterson was not one of the local poor: she had work, and kept a respectable home with at least one servant. Some claimed Peterson had cured them and their animals.

According to the leaflet, ‘There was one of her neighbours, who had a young child, which was very strangely tormented, having such strange fits that the like was never known and had continued certain days in that condition to the great grief of the Parents, and the admiration of all those that beheld it…. whereupon two women that were neighbours, desired that they might watch with it, which was very thankfully accepted of; about midnight they espied (to their thinking) a great black cat come to the cradle’s side, and rock the cradle, whereupon one of the women took up the fire-fork to strike at it, and it immediately vanished, about an hour after the cat came again to the cradle side, whereupon the other woman kicked at it, but it presently vanished, and that leg that she kicked with, began to swell and be very sore, whereupon they were both afraid.’

Peterson was believed to have a conference with Satan, through a familiar spirit. These spirits, or ‘imps’, usually took the forms of animals, such as cats and dogs and mice. Her treacherous maid said her mistress entertained one in the shape of a jovial squirrel, which talked with Peterson all through the night, presumably in English. Another lower class ‘oik’ was terrified to see a black dog come to her and put its head under her arm.

Lydia Rogers’ pact with Satan

The wife of John Rogers, a carpenter, lived in Pump Alley, at Green Bank in Wapping, E1W. Pump Alley no longer exists, but may well be the modern Meeting House Alley, which, like Pump Alley, can be found on Green Bank’s north side. The family (which included two kids) belonged to the radical religious sect, the Anabaptists. Orthodox Protestants believed that these followers had been becharmed by the devil, which may explain why this case was interpreted in the way it was.

Lydia was accused of making the usual blood pact with Satan, Old Nick cutting a vein in her right hand to obtain the blood for inking the contract. Rogers’ motive was supposedly greed for ready cash. The minister of Wapping, Mr Johnson, spent time with her when she lay in a sickly condition and, eventually owned up to her devilish pact. Rogers went so far as to display where the devil had drawn her blood. The prelate then attempted to calm her but she suffered an intense fit of raving (is there any other kind?), as the devil in her was irked, so much so, that witnesses in the room had to hold her down. The source for the story was the 1658 pamphlet The Snare of the Devil (1658).

The Laughing Ghost of Limehouse

A report from a local newspaper in 1827, about a couple in Limehouse visited by a ghost with a strange sense of humour.

The neighbourhood of Limehouse, like the Highlands, in the good old days of the bogles, has, it seems, been haunted for some months back, by a most refractory and incorrigible phantom. The facts of this afflicting visitation are simply these:—A Mr. and Mrs. Dickenson took a small house, in October last, at the upper end of Church-street ; but scarcely had they passed the first half of the first night in it, when a sort of a loud chuckling laugh (the very sound which, if you could fancy a grasshopper intoxicated, he would no doubt make,) was heard, proceeding as it seemed from the bedroom closet. Now, it so happened, that the bedroom of this worthy couple had no closet, whereupon being puzzled to account for the phenomenon they very naturally explored the whole house from top to bottom. Still no explanation was afforded.

The next night, at the same hour, the same fat chuckling laugh was heard, and as it appeared close to Mr. Dickenson’s ear, that much injured individual jumped up, and throwing his inexpressibles indignantly, but with a due regard to decorum, around him, he rushed again into the adjoining, room, where, however, nothing was found that could at all throw light upon the mystery. Meantime, the confounded cachinnations continued, first three short, broken winded laughs, then a halt, then a long asthmatic ululation, the whole wound up by a solemn midnight stillness.

The affair now became truly distressing. To think that an attached couple, when absorbed in those chaste connubial endearments on which all married folks set so high a value— to think, we repeat, that an amiable pair thus engaged should be interrupted by the villainous laughter of a ghost; ‘the bare idea is revolting, and fully justified Mr. Dickenson- in his application to the parochial authorities. ‘This he did ‘on the third night, but alas! what can a beadle, or even a parish clerk avail against the evil one?

Every night, albeit a brace of undaunted constables kept watch in Mr. Dickenson’s apartment, the cacophonious interruption continued till the whole set were fairly laughed to scorn. This was some weeks back, but the noises, we should observe, are heard up to the present time, though, as they have appeared more asthmatic of late, it is to be hoped that their fiendship owner may one night break his wind and die. Meanwhile, the house, like Ossian’s dwelling of Moina (only infinitely more touching), is desolate, for Mr: and Mrs. Dickenson have evaporated, and no one has since been found at all desirous of being laughed into fits every night, by an ungentlemanly good-for-nothing goblin. Here the affair rests at present.

In the 1970s, a magazine printed the story of a famous ghost that haunted the Wapping and Limehouse riverfront known as the Phantom Vicar of Radcliffe Wharf. He was supposed to have run a seaman’s mission in the 1770s, although respected by the local community for his good deeds , he did however possess the habit of killing his guests for their money and chucking their bodies into the Thames.

Frank Smyth’s article for the Man, Myth and Magic magazine included quotes from people who claimed to have seen the ghost of the nasty cleric along the riverfront. According to Smyth, local people who worked on the river apparently never went down to the wharf after dark. Later magazines and books often made reference to Phantom Vicar who haunted the riverfront, It was even featured in a 1977 TV special, here below:

However in 1975, Smyth confessed in an interview with The Sunday Times that he had concocted the entire story. His motive was that he was so brassed off with stories about modern ghosts that he decided to invent an old-fashioned one, the derelict wharves seeming a perfect location for his naughty old homicidal parson.

The Blackwall Tunnel Ghost

In 1972, a motorcyclist picks up a hitchhiker on the Northern Approach to the tunnel at Greenwich and they have a friendly conversation about where the hitchhiker lives. When the motorcycle  comes out of the tunnel in Blackwall, the motorcyclist finds that his passenger has disappeared. Fearing that his passenger has fallen off in the tunnel, the motorcyclist rides back through the tunnel but finds no trace of the mystery hitchhiker.

The following day, the motorcyclist decides to visit the address given to him by the hitchhiker. When he arrives and talks to a woman who lives in the house, he is shocked to find out that the young man had died in a motorcycle accident near the tunnel many years before. This story has been told so many times that it’s now a ‘true’ Urban Legend.

And lastly:

Ratcliff Highway slayings of 1811 – a true story

In the space of 12 days, two families were done away with in their homes in such a foul way, that for weeks afterwards, locals barricaded their doors and eyed every stranger with suspicion. The main suspect in the killings, John Williams, killed himself before he could be put on trial.

In 1886, a gas company excavated a trench in the area where Williams had been buried. They accidentally unearthed a skeleton, reportedly buried upside down and with the remains of the wooden stake through its torso. The landlord of The Crown and Dolphin, a pub at the corner of Cannon Street Road, was said to have retained the skull as a keepsake. The whereabouts of said skull are currently unknown.

Stephen Arnell’s novel THE GREAT ONE is available now on Amazon Kindle

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