Day 28

Sunday was a boring day; I woke up feeling tired and generally 'meh', and stayed that way throughout the day. My mood wasn't helped by the weather, which was the stereotypical English weather: cold, rainy, and dreary. So my day consisted of lounging around, doing homework and browsing the Internet until 6:30 rolled around.

This was the ghost-hunting hour, and the weather was perfect for hunting spirits. A group called Walk London, sponsored by the Transportation for London Bureau, was offering free guided walks throughout the weekend to encourage Londoners to walk and relieve the congestion of the Tube and roadways. I had elected to go on the 'Haunted London' tour.

Unfortunately it ended up being more a 'random historical facts' about the City than a ghost tour, but as it was free, I couldn't really complain. The City is the financial district of London, a square mile borough that is defined by the limits of the old Roman city of Londinium, and tonight we had it all to ourselves. The only signs of life were passing cars; we saw no other pedestrians in our two-hour walk. The strange thing about London, being as it is a huge cosmopolitan city, is that everything closes early: the pubs close at midnight, the stores at nine, and on Sunday? Good luck finding anything open past eight. It's very odd, but at least it lent the City a sort of post-apocalyptic feel. The guide at one point went off on a huge tangent about Harry Potter and led us to the market which they used as the set for Diagon Alley. I, having stopped reading after the fifth book, was insuf So anyway, pictures and commentary below. Also, I'm not skilled in photographing anything at night, and it was raining, so any supposed 'ghostly orbs' you may see are just raindrops.

This is the Monument to the Great Fire of London in 1666. It burned 30,000 homes, gutted the City, and yet only six deaths were officially recorded. For a long time, Londoners believed that French agents had started the fire, even though it was known to have started in one of the King's bakeries, and so an inscription condemning the French and detailing the fire itself was cut into one side of the column. Later, when the English and French were in one of their periodic times of amity, the English realized the French-hating segment was still there and so erased it, leaving a large gap in the inscription to this day. As for ghosts, a young woman named Jenny Cooper killed herself by jumping from the top of the Monument and is said to haunt Fish Street Hill to this day.

London Bridge. There's no real story about this bridge, beyond the fact that the original, massive bridge which had buildings up to seven stories high on it during medieval times is now sitting in a lake in Arizona; I just thought the lights were pretty.

That's Tower Bridge, which sadly isn't as old as it looks: merely Victorian. In the 1920s, a policeman was walking across the walkway, which is barely visible at the top and allows pedestrians to cross the river even when the bridge is up to allow ships to pass through. Supposedly, all around him he saw hundreds of black figures climbing the railings of the walkway and hurling themselves into space, but heard no splashes below: the ghosts of suicides reenacting their last decision. As the witness was a policeman, his story is lent a bit more credibility. Also in the 1950s, a bus was crossing the bridge when it started to lift. The driver, realizing he was beginning to slide backwards, floored it and jumped the gap, saving all of his passengers' lives.

The older sections of the Guildhall, where Lady Jane Grey was tried and sentenced to execution by Mary I. Today it is the headquarters for the city council of London. There have been buildings on this spot since Roman times; when the city excavated around the Guildhall to add new offices on, they found the remains of a Roman amphitheater, which explained why there had been reports of ghostly Roman gladiators and legionaries walking about for decades. After the Romans, the site of the current Guildhall housed a building erected by the Anglo-Saxons for the purpose of collecting taxes.

Where we ended our tour: beneath the shadow of St. Paul's massive dome.