The Ghosts of the Tower of London – Ghost Bear

Another short from the “#TowerGhosts” series that Historic Royal Palaces, the charity in charge of the Tower of London, released on Halloween 2013. Filmed outside the Martin Tower, which the guide explains held the Crown Jewels for about two centuries, it tells a ghost story with no human ghost in it at all. The channel’s description dates the sighting to January 1815.

As the guide tells it, a soldier on guard at night saw smoke curling from beneath a door, which then took the form of a great grey bear. He lunged at it with his bayonet, driving the blade into the door, and died a day or two later — “probably of fright.” The story ends with the detail that it took two men to pull the bayonet out of the wood. Then, as in the Tower Green clip, the guide steps back from the tale to suggest why it caught on.

The bear story has a real paper trail, which is more than most Tower ghosts can claim. It was passed on by Edmund Lenthal Swifte, Keeper of the Crown Jewels from 1814 to 1852, in a letter printed in Notes and Queries in 1860, alongside his own account of a glowing, fluid-filled cylinder he and his wife said they saw in the Jewel House in 1817. Swifte was repeating what he had heard about the sentry, though, not describing something he saw, and he wrote decades after the event.

The guide’s suggestion that the tale was popular in the 1850s because a bear stood for Russia during the Crimean War is his own interpretation, offered as an opinion. A more down-to-earth backdrop is that the Tower really did keep bears. Its royal menagerie housed them for centuries — including Old Martin, a grizzly given to George III in 1811, just a few years before the sighting — until the animals were moved to the new London Zoo between 1831 and 1835. Sources even disagree on the year of the sentry’s encounter: the video gives January 1815, others January 1816.