The Chelsea Ghost of 6 Pond Terrace, 1853

In 1853, Pond Terrace was part of College Street, Chelsea. The street is now part of Elystan Street. The houses are gone, cleared for the Sutton Dwellings, finished in 1913. Number 6 was shared by two poor families, the Wards and the Parsloes. Their landlord was Henry Joseph Chappell, an ironmonger who lived above his shop at 51 Leader Street, just around the corner.

Thursday 8 September 1853. Early evening. Only Mrs Parsloe and 17-year-old Emma Ward were at home.

Emma opened the door to her bedroom. A strange man stood there. He had ghastly, deathly features and wore a long white garment that reached the floor. Maybe a shroud. Emma was so terrified that she fainted.

Her brother James, 25, a navvy, said he would deal firmly with the intruder. Moments later he met it. He fell into a fit that reportedly lasted hours. Several men were needed to hold him. Mrs Parsloe bravely opened the door to Emma's room. She too fell into a fit. Then the eldest son, 27, tried to grab the figure. His hands met nothing solid. They simply slid through the phantom's body. He went into a fit as well.

The local beat constable would not go in until three colleagues joined him. Four officers entered the bedroom and came out empty-handed. One told the Globe he would not "stay in the house for untold gold." A second, more thorough search followed. The police announced "there was nothing to explain the sighting of a ghost."

Outside, hundreds of people blocked the street. They reported eerie noises, the slamming of doors and blood-curdling moans. The crowd stayed until the early hours. By the weekend even more arrived, among them a nomadic preacher called in to exorcise the spirit. Reporters from the satirical weekly Diogenes kept a midnight watch. On the last stroke of twelve came a loud knocking at the door. It was the pot boy from the public house round the corner, asking if they wanted anything more to drink.

Acting Sergeant Wright 39B and Constable Rice 248B said there had been no ghostly presence. They blamed noises made by James Ward, who had suffered from fits on and off for four years. The police also dismissed the suspicion that a magic lantern had been used. An anonymous "R.H." called it a "Popish continental trick". Others suspected penny-a-liners, freelance hacks paid by the line.

On Saturday 10 September the Morning Post printed a letter from Robert Owen, the 82-year-old social reformer, recently converted to Spiritualism by the American medium Maria B. Hayden. Through séances, "Shelley" told him the apparition came from the spirit world. It was Mr Ward's dead grandfather, James Ward.

Chappell wrote to the Morning Advertiser that the ghost was "nothing more than a malicious invention." Later PC Robert Clark found him drunk outside the house and arrested him. Before the magistrate Mr Broderip, Chappell said the tenants owed him rent and made up the phantom to keep him away, while charging credulous folk money to view the haunted room. Broderip said "the person responsible for writing such a tissue of lies deserved to be punished" and discharged Henry.

Nothing was ever settled. The landlord's charge was never tested. The Wards and the Parsloes cannot be traced in the 1851 or 1861 censuses. What remains is four people who opened one bedroom door, and what they said stood behind it.