The London Ghost Conference

The Ghosts of Senate House are travelling to east London to take part in The London Ghost Conference
organised by London Fortean Society

London Ghosts Conference
27 October 2012 10.30am-6.00pm
Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London, EC2M 4QH
£20 (plus 10% booking fee.)
Tickets from We Got Tickets.


London is a city with a ghost story on every street, from ancient spectres to haunted museums and theatres to contemporary ghosts in hospitals and tube stations.

The London Ghost Conferences is a day dedicated to talks covering many hauntings in the London. Our speakers include historians, parapsychologists, ghost hunters, occultists, Fortean researchers, folklorists, singers and artists each with their own idea on what London’s ghosts are and what they mean.

From the Victorian demon Spring-heeled Jack to the Enfield Poltergeist and from the ghosts of Southwark to what haunts Senate House and much more. The London Ghosts Conference is the ideal Halloween event for anyone fascinated by the mysteries of  ghosts and London.

The schedule is (hopefully not subjec to change):

Great Hall
10.30-11.30: Mike Dash - Spring-heeled Jack
11.30-12.30: Alan Brooke - The Haunted London Underground: What Lies Beneath?
12.30-1.00: Paul Cowdell - Ghosts in London’s hospitals and theatres 
1.00-2.00 Lunch
2.00-3.00: Mark Pilkington & Will Fowler - Vampires of London: A Cinematic Survey
3.00-4.00: Roger Luckhurst - The Priestess of Amen-Ra: The British Museum Mummy Curse
4.00-5.00: Sarah Sparkes - Ghosts of Senate House
5.00-6.00: Alan Murdie - The Enfield Poltergeist 

Courtyard Room
11.30-12.30: Rob Stephenson - Ghostly London In Your Mind and Under Your Feet 
12.30-1.00 : Spring-heeled Jane & The Upper Birth films by Mucky Puppets
1.00-2.00 Lunch
2.00-3.00:  Mario Lautier Vella – Like Home (An Illustrated Artist's Talk)
3.00-4.00:  John Fraser – Hunting London’s Ghosts: A fringe 'touristic' pastime or a serious pursuit?
4.00-5.00:  John Constable - Haunted Southwark 
5.00-6.00:  London Dreamtime - Night Walks

Newham Books bookstall and ASSAP stall.

Roger Luckhurst: The Priestess of Amen-Ra: The British Museum Mummy CurseThis talk will take us back to the Edwardian period, when stories about a cursed object in the Egyptian rooms of the British Museum began to circulate twenty years before Tutankhamen fever. The true story of how the object was acquired by the Victorian gentleman Thomas Douglas Murray in the 1860s and its adventures in London drawing rooms before arriving in the Museum in 1889 will be detailed. The cast of this odd story includes occultists, Egyptologists, theosophists, psychical researchers, stuffed Pekingese dogs and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 

Mario Lautier Vella – Like Home (An Illustrated Artist's Talk)
In 2009, artist Mario Lautier Vella discovered his home was haunted. Strange events prompted further investigation, resulting in new artwork that explores ideas around sensing and collaborating with the invisible as well as the uncanny domestic space.

Paul Cowdell: ‘The Grey Lady – and there IS a Grey Lady!’: ghosts in London’s hospitals and theatres. 
In a country that already has a reputation for ghosts, certain locations are especially notorious for being haunted. So common are hospital ghosts that one recent gazetteer of British ghosts listed them in a separate chapter, while theatre ghosts are such important indicators of a successful show that there’s a strong suspicion that some have been specially invented. Paul be talking about stories he was told during recent field research into contemporary ghost belief: he heard reference to older reported legends alongside unexplained personal experiences interpreted as ghosts. Paul will look at how the two types of story are connected in ghost reports from across the capital.  

London Dreamtime - Night Walks
A London ghost story with music from the moog and test oscilator inspired by Charles Dickens. 

Rob Stephenson - Ghostly London In Your Mind and Under Your Feet
The veteran and prematurely grey-haired survivor of many ghostly vigils around London will introduce the different types of hauntings reported in the metropolis.

John Fraser - Hunting Londons Ghosts: A fringe 'touristic' pastime or a serious pursuit'?'
Programmes such as Most Haunted have popularised ghost hunting like never before , but is this simply something new for thrill seekers to add to their 'bucket list' , or is it something that has a possible end goal and that should be taken more seriously? John Fraser was former Vice Chair investigatons of the Ghost Club and is currently on the Council of the S.P.R. He is the author of the book 'Ghost Hunting - A Survivors Guide' . 

Sarah Sparkes - Ghosts of Senate House

Sarah Sparkes will talk about “The Ghosts of Senate House”, a creative research project, which collects and archives tales of hauntings and other unexplained happenings, centred at Senate House, University of London and its immediate surrounds. Sarah is Research Fellow at the SAS UOL and also an artist and curator. Her talk will include examples of some of the stories collected by herself and Christopher Joseph as well as actual recordings she collected for the project. 
She will also illustrate how research material was developed into a collaborative, public artwork “The Magical Library Presents: Ghosts of Senate House” for The Bloomsbury Festival in 2011. Sarah Sparkes runs the “GHost” project which she initiated with Ricarda Vidal in 2008.

The Haunted London Underground: What Lies Beneath?

The London Underground late at night has a haunting atmosphere with its labyrinth of subterranean tunnels, passages and disturbed burial grounds. This talk draws on material from The Haunted London Underground (The History Press, 2008) and explores the various stories and accounts of supernatural activity. 

"Helpful" ghost in the stack

The eighth floor on Senate House Library continues to be associated with some strange goings on and we have recorded several uncanny stories emanating from this level.
Here is the latest story, from an anonymous member of staff, proving that once again the lifts of Senate House live up to their other-worldly reputation.

"Members of staff in the Library routinely go to fetch books/periodicals from the closed stack.  The stack is the tower area of the Library occupying floors 8-19.  In order to reach the stack you have to get into an old lift with a slam door.  On this particular day I needed to fetch a book and a periodical on different floors.  I went to the floor for the book first and left the printout for the periodical inside the lift.  I then heard the sound of someone calling the lift so after I had got out on the 8th floor I closed the lift door so that the lift would be free for whoever called it.  After I had fetched the book I called the lift back and was astonished to find the periodical plus printout waiting in the lift.  This is not the sort of thing that another member of staff would do.  I questioned any likely members of staff and no one said they had done it.  I cannot offer any other explanation if this was not the case.   (There was nothing remarkable about either of the titles which were fetched incidentally and the date was not onerous in any way)".

more ghost stories from The Stack:
What's up on the eight floor?
More eight floor weirdness
Sudden temperature drop - utterly discomposed
8th floor ghost?

Adventures of a Séance Table

The Slade Table - not as innocent as it looks!

The Thanet Hotel stands at no 8 Great Bedford Street, just around the corner from Senate House. In 1876, a rather singular guest took up lodgings at this address - the notorious slate-writing medium Henry Slade.  

no. 8 Great Bedford Street, 2012

Slade had been a celebrated medium in America, his home country, for at least 15 years and had arrived in London to prove his psychic powers. He gave many sittings at his Great Bedford Street residence and was pronounced, by many of the notable Spirtualists of the day, to be psychically gifted.  Sittings took place in bright sunlight around a smallish table. Slade would place a slate underneath this table, later pulling it out into the sunlight to reveal scrawly writing across its surface - alleged communication from spirits of the dead.

Unfortunately Slade was not able to convince everyone of his powers and was eventually put on trial accused of faking the phenomena. For want of a more appropriate law with which to prosecute him, he was sentenced under the Vagrancy Act to three months' imprisonment with hard labour.  After an appeal the conviction was overturned on a technical point and he was released on bail. 

Slade returned to America, but his séance table remained behind where it was later acquired by non other than psychical investigator Harry Price. 

Price describes how "the Slade table" was being used as an ordinary writing table at the offices of the London Spirtualist Alliance when he first came across it.  Price went on to use the table in a series of  so-called "controlled sittings" or séances on "the electric girl",  a young dental nurse and alleged medium named Stella Cranshaw.

In 1925, Price's book reporting the findings, "Stella C. An Account of Some Original Experiments in Psychical Research", was published.  The Slade table's rather violent psychical activity at many of the sittings is documented in detail in this book.  

The table appears to take a particular dislike to a certain Colonel Hardwick, present at many of the sittings, physically attacking him to the point of actual bodily harm.

Here is the Colonel's own report of his encounter with the Slade Table:

"The table tipped towards me as usual...It began to hammer on my knees until the blows became painful and I consequently removed them, expecting the table to crash to the floor.  My knees were red from the blows...To my surprise the table did not go beyond the position where my knees would have been, but it made one or two smart blows as of to ensure that they had been removed."

If anyone knows the whereabouts of the Slade table today, please do get in touch - there are plenty of 'Colonels' in need of correcting!

Who called the lift?

Mick Lucette is the Building Services Manager at Senate House. 

Mick witnessed a mysterious, cloaked figure, moving on the stairs ahead of him, as he made his way towards  a lift in the building.

The same lift has been linked to sightings of what is assumed to be Sir Edwin Deller’s ghost. 

You can hear Mick recounting his story here: 

Glowing figure in doorway of Senate Room

The photographer was sure that the room was empty at the time; subsequently - examining the resulting image - they realized that a mysterious luminous figure could be seen in the doorway at the far end of room.

Is this the Blue Lady? Or a reappearance of the Time Warrior from the Tom Baker-era Dr Who?

Enigmatic manifestation in Senate House lavatory

A Senate House member of staff reports the following anomalous experience; they were leaving work and descending a staircase one evening in mid-June 2011:


" ...there's a ladies loo on that floor so I decided to use it. The stairs were quite quiet but you could tell there was a function going on in the vicinity from distant chatter. Not too close like floor below but somewhere in the building or perhaps Stewart House.

When I entered the loo, standing by the window to put my rucksack down I could hear there was some that function going on again which confirmed it for me. Voices were a distant murmur. You could tell they were adjacent to the loo.

As I exited the loo there was a huge, long, loud belly laugh from something in front of me and directly in my face and very close to me like someone standing immediately in front of me. The voice was far louder than the distant voices I heard by the window and far above the flushing sound of the loo as well. I couldn't see anything. It was almost deliberate as if having waited for me to exit the loo. I froze to the spot and was gripped with confusion.

There was clearly an invisible woman laughing loudly. I could even detect an accent as there intermittent mumbling (I feared curses actually). It was accented like the Gypsies that used to sell me flowers as a child. I became very hot as my face was quite red and sweaty from the panic of trying to work out where the voice was coming from and my stomach was in knots. The sound lasted no longer than 15 seconds and died away. I could then only hear the din from the party/conference by the window.

I convinced myself it was just a sound from the party/conference and began to wash my hands. As I was washing my hands the voice started laughing again behind me and then echoed around the room up to the ceiling and into the other toilet. There are two toilet cubicles. The door was open in the other loo so no one can hide in there. It was like someone using the Tannoy system to laugh but not that microphone sound just loudly projecting their voice.

The laugh started with huge volume and died down to tittering echoing around. I ran outside the loo to see if it was one of the cleaners and down to 2nd Floor toilet to see it there were any women or a single woman in there, there was no one around so no one was playing a trick on me. Was definitely odd as it was so close it could only be coming from inside the room.

The next evening around 5.30pm I used the same toilet again and heard a woman laughing. At first I thought it was the same thing happening again but this time I heard a second voice and could tell voices were coming from the floor below. I was then able to compare the sounds which convinces me that the first experience was closer and louder, almost in my ear and the 2nd was distant."

Question: Do Romany spirits haunt the building? And - if so - why?

More 8th floor weirdness

Regular readers of this blog may recall previous posts click here and here outlining some Library staff's odd experiences on the 8th floor of Senate House.


There have recently been reports of further incidents, although of a rather indeterminate nature. The current writer was, a few weeks ago, fetching books from the same room. As the only person in the stacks at the time, all was quiet. Even the famous Senate House howling wind was absent. Upon exiting the room, a very slight but definite touch of the hair on top of the head was felt, akin to walking through a cobweb. Upon re-examination of the doorway, no cobwebs were to be found. The 'presence' (if that is what it was) did not give an impression of being threatening or sinister, merely curious.


Another staff member reports fetching books on an adjacent floor recently, and hearing a loud, repeated clicking sound coming from this same 8th floor room. Again, there was no one else present - the person concerned had verified this to be the case.


Riddle: What makes a clicking sound and touches peoples' hair?