London Haunting: A Tour Through A. Rushby's Favorite Spooky Spots in England's Capital

If you’ve ever been to London before, you’ve surely seen all the glittering highlights—Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, the British Museum, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. Maybe you’ve even dipped a toe into the darker side of things at the Tower of London, learning about some of the city’s more gruesome history, or on a night-time ghost walk, hearing about its haunted streets.

And maybe you liked it?

If so, on your next visit, you might want to think about truly slipping into the shadows and dining on some of London’s darker delights. Sounds good? Here are a few of my favorite finds.

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Highgate Cemetery

I’m a serious super-fan. I have set not one book here, but three and am desperately trying to work out how I’m going to get away with a fourth. Both the East and the West sides of this Victorian cemetery are open to the public and both are worth touring, but it’s really the West you will want to visit if you are short on time. Dripping with ivy, teeming with foxes and other wildlife, its incredible architecture such as the Egyptian Avenue and the vaults of the sunken Circle of Lebanon are worth getting lost in for several hours.

For a laugh, read up on the Highgate Vampire before you go. Have a lot more time in London? Feel free to visit the other six “Magnificent Seven” Victorian cemeteries—also incredible in their own right.

Try a Feminist Jack the Ripper Walking Tour.

There are lots of Jack the Ripper walking tours, but not many that I feel are worth going on. Why? Well, let’s face it—Jack the Ripper was not a very nice person and you know what’s more interesting than skeevy murderous men? The fact that we can delve into the lives of the women he murdered, understand more about them and how they came to be living the vulnerable lives that saw them preyed upon.

If you’d really like to dive deeper on this one before visiting, try Hallie Rubenhold’s amazing book The Five.

The Greenwich Foot Tunnel

The Greenwich Foot Tunnel is just that—a pedestrian tunnel that runs under the River Thames. But it’s also so much more. It’s the ultimate in liminal spaces—gloomy, creepy and uncanny. Reputedly haunted, people claim to have seen ghosts, to have heard unexplained noises, seen flickering lights and experienced phantom footsteps. And if you don’t experience anything exciting? Try the Woolwich Foot Tunnel which people claim to have experienced time anomalies in.

St Martin-in-the-Fields Café in the Crypt

After all those ghosts and time anomalies, you’re probably peckish! Head over to St Martin-in-the-Fields Café in the Crypt on the edge of Trafalgar Square and have a little Devonshire Tea. It’s lovely to sit beneath its wonderfully lit brick vaulted arches and not at all scary (unless you worry about a few tombstones on the floor), but you need to be well fed and caffeinated in order to keep up your energy on your macabre wanderings.

The Hunterian Museum

What goes better than scones with jam and cream and a big pot of English Breakfast tea than bladder stones in a commemorative box, Winston Churchill’s spare dentures, a large selection of bone-cutting instruments and an eighteenth-century sheep-gut condom? You’ll find all these items and more besides at your next stop—The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons.

Cross Bones Graveyard

Not far from the iconic building The Shard, you’ll find Cross Bones Graveyard. This is the site of a paupers’ graveyard—unconsecrated ground home to an estimated fifteen thousand souls. It was also once quite a lawless area of London where sex workers gathered and so there is a lovely memorial to the thousands of sex workers buried here also.

The Hardy Tree in Old St. Pancras Churchyard

What’s better than tombstones? Tombstones piled up in weird formations! You might have noticed by now that there isn’t a cemetery I haven’t visited and loved and so we’re going to visit another one (yes, my children just adore traveling with me and visiting cemeteries rather than Disneyland).

The Hardy Tree in Old St Pancras churchyard has unfortunately fallen (due to fungus, I believe, which is a little bit macabre in itself?), but the tombstones stacked around its base in an unusual pattern remain and are well worth seeing.

The Old Operating Theatre

That’s a lot of tombstones, even for me, but it’s been a hot minute since we saw something vile and medical, so best zip over to The Old Operating Theatre now. My husband is a medical specialist and so I have been to many an old operating theatre (including some incredibly beautiful ones in Italy). But this one…hmmm….

There is something particularly disturbingly clinical and scrubbed-wooden-surfaces about this one which is tucked high into the roof (or perhaps it’s the fact that it used to be used for women’s surgery). Hang out in the amphitheater and imagine life before anesthesia. No thank you.

Absinthe at The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art and UnNatural History

After imagining all that, you surely need some absinthe. Make your way to The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art and UnNatural History. There you can sip absinthe (or the cocktail of your choice) as you sit next to a stuffed lion wearing a top hat, the skeleton of a two-headed kitten and the largest jar of moles’ feet you will ever see (hopefully).

The London Month of the Dead

Lucky enough to be in London in October? Perfect! It’s the London Month of the Dead. You have hit the jackpot my friend, because this month is crammed full of the most fascinating talks and screenings and tours and all sorts by experts in their particular areas. Take an immersive forensic workshop or a bat skeleton mounting workshop, tour the catacombs at Kensal Green Cemetery, or the Spitalfields Charnel house, listen in to a talk on Britain’s haunted highways, or resurrection men.

But get in quick as events sell out fast!

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