Paranormal record / 1889
May 1889. Upper Road, Plaistow. A dark, lonely road with the East London Cemetery on one side and a gas lamp burning. Every night for a month, a crowd gathered there. They had come to see a ghost. Somewhere among the tombstones, they believed, it was waiting. The lamp was the problem. With the gas lit, the ghost was hard to see. So one Saturday night, with about 200 people watching, a sixteen-year-old brass-moulder named George Orchard climbed the lamp post and turned the gas down. By Monday he was standing before the magistrate at West Ham Police Court. And the court had its own answer to what the crowd had been seeing all along.
Plaistow, in West Ham, lay on the eastern edge of London. Upper Road had no houses. It was dark. Along its western side ran the East London Cemetery. In October 1888, Elizabeth Stride, a victim of Jack the Ripper, had been buried there. By late May 1889, crowds had gathered on Upper Road every night for about a month. A ghost, they said, was residing among the tombstones.