The Hackney Ghost Hunt, St John-at-Hackney Churchyard (1895)

The parish church of St John-at-Hackney was built in 1797. Its churchyard was declared full in 1859. In 1893 and 1894 it became a public garden, with graves grassed over and headstones moved to the edges. It reopened as St John's Gardens in 1894. Within a year or so, something else was said to walk there.

"For some time, people passing through the churchyard late at night have been startled by the appearance of 'a ghost'," one newspaper reported. Women fainted with fright. The local papers published accounts of the strange affair. No one recorded what the figure looked like. No witness was named.

The report placed the ghost at a grave at the back of the church. Its stone represented three boys playing at cards on a table. According to the legend, three boys played cards for money, and one who was losing heavily exclaimed, 'May God strike me dead if I do not win this game.' When he rose to leave the table, he dropped down dead. His ghost was said to haunt the spot.

Tuesday night, 20 August 1895. Between ten and eleven o'clock a mixed crowd began to gather at the rear of the church. Usually scarcely anyone passed that way after eleven. This time fully 1000 men and women turned out from the neighbourhood.

They waited until midnight without seeing a ghost. The crowd went in search of it. Armed with lanterns and candles, carrying sticks and stones, they climbed the railings and took possession of the burial ground. Graves and tombstones were clambered over. Recently restored mounds were trampled down.

Part of the crowd treated it all as a joke. Every few minutes someone cried "there it goes!" and the whole crowd rushed that way. Others made the night hideous with imitations of unearthly cries. Pockets were picked. The police were called to clear the ground, but the last stragglers left only at the verge of daylight.

On Wednesday night about forty constables were on the scene. They had much difficulty controlling the mob, which indulged freely in horseplay. The damage to the graves was described as very great. Efforts would be made, the report said, to prevent any further demonstration.

The story travelled. The Dundee Evening Telegraph carried it on 22 August. Findmypast attributes the detailed account to the Illustrated Police News. On 25 August a newspaper printed an engraving by S. Higham, "The Hunt for the Hackney Ghost: Midnight Scene in St. John's Churchyard". It now belongs to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The cited 1895 report did not identify a ghost. It called the figure a 'supposed ghost.' Similar cases of the era sometimes ended in plain flesh. At Plumstead in 1897 the ghost was traced to a man living in the neighbourhood. At Woodside Cemetery in Paisley, the same year as Hackney, police caught a boy swinging a lamp behind a white sheet.

Hackney sits in a long run of Victorian ghost riots, from Woburn Square in 1867 to De Beauvoir Road, Kingsland, in 1898, where 700 to 800 people gathered very near Hackney. It echoes older scenes too, from the armed hunters of the Hammersmith Ghost in 1804 to the crowds of about a thousand a night at the Miamisburg cemetery ghost in 1884. The card players' tomb has not been traced in modern records. Whether it survives is unknown.