Case file · Apparition · Castle or palace

Tower of London

Also known as His Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London, The White Tower

Nine centuries of royal prisoners, executions and murders have left the Tower of London with England’s most famous crowd of ghosts, Anne Boleyn first.

William the Conqueror ordered a great stone keep built beside the Thames to overawe newly conquered London; work on what became the White Tower is usually dated to around 1078, under the direction of Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester. Over the next few centuries kings ringed it with walls, towers and a moat, and the fortress served by turns as palace, armory, treasury, mint, zoo and — most famously — state prison.

The prison years supply the ghosts. The sons of Edward IV, the “Princes in the Tower,” disappeared there after 1483, and two small skeletons found under a staircase in 1674 were later buried in Westminster Abbey as theirs. Henry VI died in the Tower in 1471. Only a handful of prisoners were beheaded inside the walls, on Tower Green, rather than in public on Tower Hill — among them Anne Boleyn in 1536, the elderly Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, in 1541, and Lady Jane Grey in 1554. Anne Boleyn lies in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, a few yards from the execution site.

The Tower’s best-documented ghost story is not a headless queen but something stranger. In 1860 the journal Notes and Queries printed a letter from Edmund Lenthal Swifte, Keeper of the Crown Jewels from 1814 to 1852. He described a Saturday night in October 1817 when, at supper in the Jewel House with his wife, son and sister-in-law, he and his wife saw a hovering glass-like tube filled with swirling white and blue “fluid.” His wife cried out that it had seized her; Swifte threw a chair at it. In the same letter he passed on the story of a sentry at the Jewel Office who lunged with his bayonet at a bear-like shape and collapsed, dying soon afterwards.

Around those accounts grew a much larger cast. Tower lore, retold for generations by the Yeoman Warders, has Anne Boleyn leading a ghostly procession through the chapel or walking near the White Tower, Margaret Pole re-enacting her botched execution, Lady Jane Grey on the battlements, the two princes hand in hand in the Bloody Tower, and Henry VI in the Wakefield Tower at midnight. A story from 1864 has a sentry who charged a pale female figure on Tower Green with his bayonet and then fainted, saved from punishment for sleeping on duty when an officer, Captain J. D. Dundas, said he had seen the figure too.

Historians point out that most of these tales were written down long after the events they describe, and many cannot be traced to a named witness at all. The Tower remains a working royal fortress run by the charity Historic Royal Palaces, home to the Crown Jewels and to the Yeoman Warders and their families, and its ghost stories are now as much part of the visitor experience as the ravens.

What people report

Apparitions of Anne Boleyn (sometimes headless) and other executed prisoners, a pale female figure on Tower Green, two small boys in period dress, a phantom bear near the old Jewel House, Swifte’s glowing “tube,” screams attributed to Margaret Pole, and vague shapes and feelings of being followed reported by night sentries and staff.

Where and when

Tower Green and the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula (Anne Boleyn, Margaret Pole); the Bloody Tower (the princes); the Wakefield Tower (Henry VI, near midnight); the Martin Tower, where the Crown Jewels were kept in Swifte’s day (the bear and the tube); the Queen’s House and the Salt Tower (night sentries’ reports).

Timeline of the haunting

May 19, 1536
Execution of Anne Boleyn Tower Green, Tower of London
Henry VIII’s second queen was beheaded inside the walls after a trial for adultery and treason that most historians regard as a pretext. She was buried in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, and she became the Tower’s signature ghost.
January 1816
The sentry and the bear Jewel Office, Martin Tower
According to the story later passed on by Swifte, a night sentry outside the Jewel Office stabbed at a huge bear-like figure, saw his bayonet stick in the door, and fell in a fit. He is said to have died within days; no official record of the incident has been produced.
October 1817
Swifte’s “cylindrical figure” Jewel House, Tower of London
Keeper of the Crown Jewels Edmund Lenthal Swifte and his wife said they saw a hovering tube of white and pale blue matter at supper; his son and sister-in-law, at the same table, saw nothing. His wife exclaimed that it had seized her.
1860
The account appears in print London
Answering a reader’s question in Notes and Queries, Swifte published his recollection of the 1817 incident and the sentry’s bear more than forty years after the fact. The letter remains the primary source for both stories.
1864
A sentry charges a white figure Tower Green, Tower of London
In a tale retold in most Tower ghost books, a soldier facing a court-martial for fainting on duty was cleared after Captain J. D. Dundas testified he too had seen a whitish female figure approaching the guard post.
1957
A face at the Salt Tower Salt Tower, Tower of London
Tower lore records a Welsh Guardsman on sentry duty at the Salt Tower reporting a shapeless form with a young woman’s face. Like most modern Tower sightings, it survives only as an anecdote retold by tour guides and ghost writers.

What could explain it?

Most of the famous sightings were written down decades after the fact, or cannot be traced to a named witness; Swifte’s 1817 account was first published in 1860.
Swifte himself noted that young women living in the Tower had been suspected of “phantasmagorial experiments” — magic-lantern-style projections — at their windows shortly before his sighting, an obvious possible source of a moving glowing image.
Sentries on long night watches in a dark, echoing fortress are prime candidates for fatigue, hypnagogic imagery and suggestion, especially in a place where everyone knows the ghost stories.
The Yeoman Warders’ tours have kept the stories alive and polished for more than a century; some details (a headless Anne carrying her head) owe as much to Victorian romance and the 1934 comic song “With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm” as to any witness.

Ghost tours, books and screen

Yeoman Warder tours mix executions with ghost stories, and the Tower appears in nearly every British ghost anthology from Christina Hole’s Haunted England (1951) onward. Anne Boleyn’s headless ghost inspired the 1934 music-hall song “With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm,” and the Tower’s ghosts have featured in countless television specials.