The Jewel House apparition: the glass-tube ghost of Martin Tower, Tower of London

From 1669 to 1841 the regalia were kept in Martin Tower, at the north-east corner of the inner curtain wall of the Tower of London. This was the Jewel House. The jewels lay in the basement behind a grille. The Keeper and his family lived above. From 1814 that Keeper was Edmund Lenthal Swifte, an Irish-born barrister and poet who would hold the office until 1852.

One Saturday night in October 1817. The family sat at supper in the sitting-room of the lodging. Swifte, his wife, their son of about six and Mrs Swifte's sister. Then Mrs Swifte cried out. "Good God! what is that?"

Between the ceiling and the table hung "a cylindrical figure, like a glass tube, seemingly about the thickness of my arm." Its contents "appeared to be a dense fluid, white and pale azure, like to the gathering of a summer cloud, and incessantly rolling and mingling within the cylinder."

For about two minutes it stayed in place. Then it "began slowly to move before my sister-in-law; then, following the oblong shape of the table, before my son and myself; passing behind my wife, it paused for a moment over her right shoulder." Mrs Swifte crouched down, both hands covering her shoulder. "O Christ! it has seized me!"

Swifte caught up his chair and struck at the wainscot behind her. He ran upstairs and told the terrified nurse what he had seen. The cylinder disappeared in the recess of the opposite window. Only Swifte and his wife had seen it. Their son and his sister-in-law saw nothing.

Swifte discussed the night with the Tower chaplain. Can the senses be deceived? If two people could be deceived, he later argued, so could two thousand, and historical testimony itself would fall. One encyclopedia entry adds that no optical action from outside could have produced the effect, without saying who established it.

He waited 43 years to publish. His letter appeared in Notes and Queries in 1860 and in The Spiritual Magazine in 1874. It also told of a sentry at the Jewel Office who saw "a figure like a huge bear issuing from underneath the jewel-room door." Swifte saw the man in the guard-house, prostrated with terror. In two or three days, he died.

No one has alleged a hoax. The questions are about memory. Beachcombing, writing on strangehistory.net in 2015, notes that Swifte wrote in his eighties and admitted errors. He suggests the events may really belong to January 1816, when a newspaper reported disturbances at the regalia depot and blamed wind, animals and suggestion. Sceptics read the two-witness sighting as a shared illusion, a folie à deux.

The story also grew. In Elliott O'Donnell's 1932 retelling, the chair passes right through the thing. Later versions add a candlelit table and bubbling blue fluid. Beachcombing traces these as unsourced additions. In 1860, Swifte struck the wainscot.

The Jewel House ghost is still told. Historic Royal Palaces curator Alden Gregory wrote it up in 2024, and Ruth Cannon in 2023. The bear, meanwhile, found its way into Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell as the Tower Monster.