The St Peter's, De Beauvoir Town Ghost Crowd

De Beauvoir Town lies in Kingsland, Hackney. Here stands St Peter's Church on De Beauvoir Road. William C. Lochner built it between 1840 and 1841, in a plain Gothic style of stock brick with a west tower. H. R. Gough added the chancel in 1884. Brick walls and railings enclose the churchyard, entered through three pairs of wrought-iron gates. The vicarage stood next door.

London knew this kind of night. From the 1860s onward, ghost rumours drew crowds of hundreds, sometimes thousands, into its streets. In 1895, about 1.8 km away, fully a thousand people took possession of the churchyard of St John-at-Hackney with lanterns, candles, sticks and stones. They were hunting a ghost in a sheet.

Thursday night. Almost certainly 15 September 1898.

A rumour had started that the churchyard of St Peter's was haunted. According to the police, 700 or 800 persons assembled about the church. Their evidence in court summed up the scene in one plain sentence. They were looking for a ghost. The surviving text never says that anyone saw anything. No figure. No light. No sound. Only the crowd, and the churchyard behind its railings.

Within days, five lads were in the dock of North London Police Court. They were charged with disorderly conduct and causing a crowd to assemble at De Beauvoir-road, Kingsland. Their ages were alleged to be 16 or 17. The police said they had been amongst the crowd on Thursday night.

The account appeared on Sunday 18 September 1898 in Reynolds's Newspaper. It is the only contemporary report anyone has traced. The surviving transcription does not name the youths, the officers or the magistrate, and it gives no verdict. The lads were charged for their part in the crowd. No source says they faked the ghost.

A few hundred metres away, on De Beauvoir Square, the Paranormal Database records a second story dated circa 1898. One woman claimed to have seen a greyish white figure with its face covered by a cowl in a private house. Nothing connects her sighting to the crowd at St Peter's. It may have started the rumour. No source says so.

One suggested explanation was that the "ghost" was the vicar's daughter, who would wear white and enjoyed cycling through the bushes. The record does not say who suggested it, or when, and the daughter is never named. Still, the vicarage stood beside the churchyard, and the safety bicycle was hugely popular in the late 1890s.

The wider pattern offers another answer. Rumour and a crowd could make a ghost out of very little. At St John-at-Hackney three years earlier, the cry of "There it goes!" was raised as a joke every few minutes, and the whole crowd rushed in the direction indicated. Some decided the ghost had disappeared into the earth.

St Peter's belongs to a long series of London ghost riots, from Woburn Square in 1867 to a last listed case in 1921. At Edith Villas in 1900, some fifteen hundred people gathered and windows were broken. The De Beauvoir crowd survives today through Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog, which transcribed the report in 2015, and through the Paranormal Database. The church still stands, Grade II listed. The ghost itself was never described.