The Hammersmith Haunted-House Crowd and Mrs M'Carthy

Victorian London had a habit. A rumour of a ghost would spread along a street, and the crowds would follow. Newspapers of the period record these gatherings again and again. Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog, which collected many of them, gives the pattern a name. The ghost riot.

Hammersmith. April 1874. A house in the district had gained a reputation. People said it harboured a ghost. Its occupier insisted the reputation was unjust. It made no difference. Every night, crowds gathered around "the favoured spot". They came at the hour the ghost was expected to appear. They waited. When nothing appeared, "the impatient spectators proceed to shout and break the windows."

Among them was Mrs M'Carthy, an Irish washerwoman. She went up to the house and knocked at the door. She wanted a look at the ghost. She had also been drinking, and that brought her within reach of the law.

"'What am [I] to do about the ghost?' was the plaintive inquiry of a gentleman at the Hammersmith Police Court on Tuesday." So begins the report. That Tuesday was most likely 28 April 1874. The gentleman was the occupier. He was not asking for protection from a spirit, but from the people who came to see it.

The magistrate's answer was plain. The crowds could not be dispersed unless someone committed "an overt act". Simply gathering broke no law. The report closes on a note of resignation. "Still there the crowds are [to] be found every night, and nothing can be done [to] turn them away."

Nobody in the surviving report claims to have seen anything. No figure. No light. No sound. According to the newspaper, the belief apparently grew out of a burglary said to have happened a few doors away. A story of a night intruder, it seems, became a ghost story as it spread. Nobody was accused of a hoax. In a comparable case at Golden Lane in 1880, police suggested that thieves started such rumours to cover robberies.

The story survives only as a short excerpt, quoted by Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog in 2015 from a paper cited as "Ed Ev Ne", 1 May 1874. That is probably the Edinburgh Evening News. The original London police court report has not been found, and the street, the occupier's name and the magistrate's name are all missing. John Bridge sat as a police magistrate at Hammersmith from 1872, but no source places him on the bench that day. What became of Mrs M'Carthy is not recorded.

This is not the famous Hammersmith Ghost of 1803 and 1804, which ended with the shooting of bricklayer Thomas Millwood. The two cases share a district. Nothing found links them further.

The Chelsea Ghost in 1853, Woburn Square in 1867, Cromwell Terrace in 1868, Golden Lane in 1880. Hammersmith in 1874 belongs to this line of London nights, when people went looking for a ghost and found only each other. The ghost never appeared. The crowd did, every night.