Macabre London.

Abney Park Cemetery with its overgrown grass and gothic chapel is one of London's many spooky sights if you venture off the city's beaten track (image credit below)

Paris may be the city of light but London has a very pronounced dark side.

From Jack the Ripper to Sweeney Todd, the city has some macabre tales and equally gruesome sights.  Let us guide you through the best of them…

I’m going to leave the ‘Ripper industry’ to one side because all you can experience these days is the horrors of your imagination.  You’re not actually going to see anything gruesome or macabre on your route through Whitechapel.  But there are plenty of other horrible things to see in London.

For instance, St Olave Hart Street in the East End – an otherwise innocent church – became Saint Ghastly Grim to Dickens.  It never fails to give me a thrilling shudder as I pass the little grinning skulls on its graveyard gate.  By the way, the woman who brought the plague to 17th century London is said to be buried here, one Mary Ramsay.  I dare say it’s only a myth…

Grinning skulls guard entry to St Olave Church in the East End (image credit below)

Highgate Cemetery is renowned as the favoured haunt of goths and ghouls.  But London has plenty of great cemeteries and my favourite is Abney Park in Stoke Newington.  It’s overgrown, has a looming Gothic chapel and is much more atmospheric and  Hammer Horror than Highgate.

And then there’s the London Dungeon with its torture implements and horror stories.  But I find it all a bit overdone and fake, a bit like a fairground ghost train.  It’s not real macabre.  So let’s look a bit harder…

Medical history gives us some excellent sights in London.  The Old Operating Theatre at St Thomas’s Hospital takes us back to the days of operating without anaesthetic.  It was progressive for its day and built like a lecture theatre, as medical students would watch the surgery taking place to learn advanced techniques; but it seems pretty gruesome now.

The Old Operating Theatre Museum is an unusual experience which will help you see why the words "operating" and "theatre" go together (image credit below)

You might think the Herb Garret sounds much less gruesome – but you’ll find a load of pickled body parts up there.  Not to mention the skin.  Don’t forget to buy a clockwork severed ear or a skeleton keyfob as a souvenir!

Also worth a visit is the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons, which includes some truly frightening surgical implements (“no, they’re not for picking your ears James”) as well as a load of pickled specimens.  They’re two of London’s fantastic lesser-known museums, as is the Grant Museum of Zoology – London’s “Aladdin’s Cave of Skeletons”.

If you like to see skulls of all sorts, the Grant Museum of Zoology presents a chilling variety of them for you to enjoy (image credit below)

I also get a bit of a thrill out of the dead monarchs at Westminster Abbey.  They’re incredibly lifelike and not mummies but effigies placed on top of the coffin at the state funeral.  Henry VII gives me the shivers – the head is all that remains of his effigy – so alert and real, he might still be alive (there’s apparently a hand and foot left too but I’ve chosen to forget them!)

Who needs to see celebrity waxworks at Madame Tussaud’s when these waxworks are the real thing (though to be pedantic, I should point out that not all are wax, with some made out of wood and plaster too).

You may also want to visit philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who still attends meetings of the council of University College London, despite being over 250 years old.  As a utilitarian, he instructed that his body be dissected after his death – believing this more useful to medicine than burying him intact.  His body was then stuffed (dressed in his everyday suit and sat on a chair) and put in a wooden cabinet where people could see it.

It’s eerie to look at a man dressed for a stroll, sitting with hat and walking stick ready for the occasion – realising he’s been dead nearly 200 years.  But it’s even more macabre when you learn what happened to his head.

It's a dark experience to come up close and personal to a man who's been dead for hundreds of years - just don't ask about his head! (image credit below)

Despite the fact that he walked around for years before he died with a pair of glass eyes he’d bought for the purpose, something went badly wrong when the time came to preserve his head.  A wax head was stuck on the auto-icon instead, with the real head stuck between the auto-icon’s legs!

After students pinched the real head in the 1970s, the head was removed from display and put in the college’s safe – where it remains to this day.

We may be getting a new gruesome attraction, too.  Scotland Yard’s Black Museum has never been open to the public – and some exhibits are apparently still considered too squeamish-making for us to be allowed to see.  But it’s possible a selection from the Black Museum could be made available for public viewing.  And if that happens, you can bet that everyone from Sherlock Holmes fans through Jack-the-Ripper conspiracy-theorists and mere rubberneckers will all be queuing round the block to get in!

As for hotels… are you feeling brave enough to stay at the Langham?

Room 333 is at the centre of the trouble: an Edwardian gentleman dressed for dinner apparently stalks guests angrily.  Napoleon III, meanwhile, lurks in the basement and there’s also a footman in blue livery with a powdered wig who prowls the corridors (though I’m not convinced as powdered wigs had long gone out of fashion when the hotel was built in 1865).

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A Regent Suite at the Langham: but would you dare to stay at Halloween?

We’ve blogged about the Langham’s eventful history while sharing some enchanting black and white photos.  And its newly-refurbished suites look sumptuous rather than scary, as does its award-winning afternoon tea.

The Langham’s website says nothing about the ghost – but does have the strapline ‘Enchanting encounters’.  Make of that what you will!

Here’s a guide for further things to do during Halloween 2010 in London and an article about haunted holidays in the UK.

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Photo credits: Langham London (Langham Hotels International), Fin Fahey’s photostream, Matt from London’s photostream, C. G. P. Grey’s photostream (also CGP Grey homepage), Catfunt’s photostream, Barbara Rich’s Flickrstream.

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