The Golden Lane Ghost Riot

Golden Lane had a reputation. In the 1860s a police sergeant called it a "bad, ruffianly, thievish place". In 1874 James Greenwood called it the "slummiest of slums". A clearance scheme was authorised in 1877. It foundered in a property speculation scandal at the Metropolitan Board of Works.

By September 1880 the Board had pulled down houses on a site abutting on Whitecross Street and Golden Lane, next to the City of London Baths. Part of the cleared ground was Black'n Boy Court. Its ruins lay open beneath the windows of Hartshorn Court, in the parish of St Luke's.

Mrs Taylor lived in Hartshorn Court. Her rooms overlooked the site. One night she looked out over the ruins and saw a female form rise from them. The figure was "clothed in white, with long black hair down the back." Mrs Taylor became hysterical.

The next night, police and neighbours kept watch together. Several persons, a policeman among them, said they saw the apparition. One watcher added a detail that would stick. The woman in white had "a bright red mark on the temple."

The neighbourhood already had a story waiting. About forty years earlier, a woman had disappeared from Black'n Boy Court in suspicious circumstances. Local lore said she had been murdered. When the court came down, workers allegedly found a woman's body with "a fracture of the temple caused by an axe." To the crowds, the red mark and the broken skull told one story.

Word spread. For a week, vast crowds gathered every night. Extra members of the G division of police were needed. When officers tried to clear the site they met resistance, with groups backing each other up and presenting "a formidable obstacle". On the Saturday night the scene became one of "riot and ruffianism." The story reached print in a newspaper report dated 22 September 1880.

The police had their own theory. They suspected local thieves had started the ghost rumour so they could rob and plunder the crowds. The report offers no proof. Nothing confirms the body either. No inquest record, no coroner's report and no named victim have been traced, and the skull reached the paper as hearsay. Nor is it known whether the red mark was reported before or after people heard about the axe.

The pattern is familiar. The Cock Lane ghost drew crowds to a reputed murder victim's haunting in 1762. The Hammersmith ghost panic of 1803 and 1804 ended with Thomas Millwood shot by mistake. In 1899 the Islington churchyard ghost drew a riotous crowd of hundreds, with pickpockets said to be working among them.

The case survives through Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog, which retold it in January 2015 and placed it in a run of British ghost riots reported between 1867 and 1921. A reader added the Miamisburg, Ohio crowds of 1884, gathered round a graveyard for their own woman in white. The original 1880 wording has yet to be found. So has the policeman's name.