Post by lozwinter on Oct 29, 2005 8:08:35 GMT
taken from:
www.livingtv.co.uk/MHL1005/locations.html
JACK THE RIPPER - the history and locations*
By Most Haunted Live historian and author and Ripper expert Richard Jones
Although Jack the Ripper was not the world's first serial killer, he was certainly its first media murderer.
His crimes took place in an era when literacy amongst the general populace was increasing and the press at large was very much a catalyst for social change. Articles about the murders appeared in the newspapers on a daily basis and fostered a general fascination that, at times, bordered on hysteria.
Indeed, the very name "Jack the Ripper" was probably the invention of a journalist and it was press coverage that helped turn the murders into a phenomenon and transformed a sordid back street killer into an international legend.
THE FIRST JACK THE RIPPER MURDER
On an early morning in late August, a carter was making his way along Bucks Row, Whitechapel in East London, when he noticed a bundle lying in a gateway. Presuming it to be a tarpaulin, and thinking that it might prove useful, he went to examine it. As he got closer he froze in horror when he saw that it was in fact the body of a woman.
She was lying on her back, her skirts pulled up almost to her stomach. "I believe she's dead," the man told his companion, who was crouching over her, trying to hear whether or not she was breathing. She wasn't. But when he felt her breast he thought he detected a slight movement. "I think she's breathing" he exclaimed, "but very little if she is."
Late for work, the two men went on their way intending to inform the first police officer they encountered. What neither man had noticed, however, was that her throat had been cut so savagely that her head had almost been severed from her body.
That discovery was made by a policeman as he walked his beat at approximately 3.45am. He had passed the site thirty minutes earlier and noticed nothing out of the ordinary. This time he found the body, and with the aid of his lantern was able to examine the woman more closely than the first two men had been able to do.
Moments later the PC noticed a colleague passing a nearby street, and flashed his lantern at him to attract his attention. " Here's a woman with her throat cut", he called across, and told him to beckon for the doctor.
An ambulance was called and the doctor arrived soon after. He told the officers to move the body to the mortuary.
The body was duly lifted onto an ambulance and taken to the mortuary in Old Montague Street. It was there that the inspector discovered something that everyone had so far missed. Beneath her blood soaked clothing, a deep gash ran along her stomach - she had been disembowelled. Jack the Ripper's reign of terror had begun.
The woman was a prostitute, who had been ejected from her lodging house just two hours earlier, because she didn't have the money to pay her rent. "I'll soon get my doss money", she had confidently predicted, "See what a jolly bonnet I've got..." That bonnet now lay trampled and bloodstained in a Whitechapel gateway.
THE SECOND VICTIM:
In the week that followed the murder, the press began to publish lurid and sensational stories. They had wrongly blamed two earlier killings, on the murderer of this prostitute.
They had even come up with a possible suspect in the form of a man whom the local prostitutes knew of and whom, they were claiming, had been making violent threats toward them, including that he was going to "rip them up".
All they had was a nickname for him, and didn't know his name or location. They could only identify him by the type of clothes and hat he wore.
A man fitting this description was identified in September, talking to a prostitute in Hanbury Street. At around 6am market porter, went into his backyard at 29 Hanbury Street and discovered a woman's mutilated body. Several parts of her body had been removed or dismembered. A few feet away lay a clue for the police - an article of clothing that fitted the earlier description of the man the prostitutes had mentioned to police.
Since the clothing was a part of the standard work outfits worn by a wide range Jewish workers from butchers to tailors, the finding of just such a garment in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, coupled with the frenzy that was being created by the press, caused the neighbourhood to erupt into anti - Semitism.
Innocent Jews were attacked by angry mobs claiming that no Englishman was capable of committing such murders. However, the media frenzy would come to an end shortly afterwards when a man was arrested for the crime - however, he had a cast iron alibi and was released.
In the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, the intensification of police activity had seen a dramatic downturn in the crime rate. There were newspaper reports that "a dreadful quiet has descended onto the East End of London", and people began to hope that the murders had come to an end. This, however, was not to be.
THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS CONTINUE
At around 1am on 30th September 1888, a hawker returned to Berners Street, having spent the day trying to sell cheap jewellery at Crystal Palace. As he turned his pony and cart into the yard of the Jewish Socialist Club at number 30 Berners Street, the pony suddenly reared in alarm and pulled to the left.
Looking around to find what had distressed the animal, the man saw what appeared to be a pile of clothes lying on the ground. He poked at them with his whip and then lit a match. In the flicker of the light, he saw that it was the body of a woman, and he ran for the police.
The woman's throat had been slashed. But police felt that the murderer had somehow been interrupted in his grisly business. Could it have been the sound of the horse and cart coming around the corner?
THE NIGHT OF THE DOUBLE MURDER
The previous night, a woman was arrested on Aldgate High Street and charged with being drunk and disorderly. She was taken to Bishopsgate police station, placed in a cell and left to sober up.
As the other woman met her grisly end, the drunken lady was deemed sober enough for immediate release. At about 1:30am, three Jewish men were leaving the Imperial Club at 16 - 17 Duke Street. They noticed a man and a woman talking with one another at the corner of Church Passage. One of the three would later give the police a detailed description of this mystery man and maintain that the woman whom he saw was definitely the drunken lady.
Fifteen minutes later another PC walked his usual beat into Mitre square and discovered her mutilated body. He would later state "I have been in the force for a long while but I never saw such a sight. The body had been ripped open, like a pig in the market." If the killer had been interrupted with the second murder, his appetite had been more than sated on the unfortunate drunken lady. Her body was completely and utterly mutilated and body parts splayed on the street, and some removed. The murderer had then left the scene and headed off into the streets of Spitalfields.
THE MYSTERIOUS MESSAGE ON THE WALL
In Goulston Street there still stands a sturdy building that in 1888 provided accommodation for Jewish traders who dealt in second - hand clothes on Petticoat Lane or traded shoes at the footwear market on Wentworth Street. Known as The "Wentworth Model Dwellings", it was here in a doorway that another officer discovered a section of the drunken woman's clothing.
There were bloody finger marks on it and it was evident that the blade of a bloodied knife had been wiped clean upon it. This clue, tells us exactly where the murderer was heading, and confirms the theory that he was an East-ender living in the area.
But the doorway also contained a much more famous and, subsequently promoted, clue. For, scrawled in chalk on the wall above the apron, was the message "The Juwes are the men That Will be blamed for nothing" (although several observers remembered slightly different wording to the Graffito). The Met Police Commissioner at the time, fearful of a resurgence of the anti - Semitism that had swept the neighbourhood in the wake of the earlier scare, ordered that the message be rubbed out, and it was duly erased before a photograph could be taken of it.
THE LAST OF THE VICTIMS
In the aftermath of the "Double Event" police activity intensified throughout early October. The "Jack the Ripper" correspondence letters had led to great media speculation. The East End was in the grip of panic coupled with a grim curiosity that saw morbid crowds gathering at the murder sites to speculate on the killer's identity and motives.
Despite lurid rumours and several scares, the intensification of police activity appears to have deterred the "Ripper" and the month passed with no further murders, although the atmosphere remained tense.
Large bodies of plain-clothed men were drafted to the Whitechapel district from other parts of London, along with other detectives.
In early November, a man named George met a young lady on Commercial Street. She cheerfully asked him for sixpence, to which he replied that even this amount was beyond his modest means. She laughed, told him she'd "just have to find it some other way" and continued to the junction with Thrawl Street, where she met with another man.
The first man saw the two chat a little, then watched as she led the man into Dorset Street, where they entered her room in Miller's Court. Forty five minutes later neither had emerged from the room and Hutchinson left the scene. Shortly before 4am several of the young woman's neighbours were woken by a cry of "Murder!" but all chose to ignore it.
Later that morning, a man called by the room to collect her overdue rent and discovered her body. She lay upon her bed, her head turned to the left. Again, her body had been severely mutilated and body parts removed in an utterly heinous fashion.
The murderer had left the tiny room in Miller's Court and disappeared into the early morning. What no-one gazing upon the body of this poor, unfortunate woman could have realised was that, in the blood-bath of Millers Court, the Ripper's reign of terror would end as suddenly and mysteriously as it had begun. As he left the bloody scene in that tiny room that morning, the Whitechapel Murderer may have performed his swansong, but the legend of Jack the Ripper was only just beginning.
For more info, visit: www.jack-the-ripper-walk.co.uk
THE BLIND BEGGAR
Close to the site of where the first Jack the Ripper murder took place, lies a public house. In the 1200s, one of those manor houses where the Blind Beggar now sits belonged to Simon de Montford - the young lord who is today remembered by Montford House, a red-brick block of flats on the north side of Victoria Park Square.
His story, and how he went from landed gentry to poor beggar, became hugely popular in early Tudor times.
Simon was a soldier in the service of the king, and fought at the Battle of Evesham, in the West Country, in 1265. According to the legend, he fell at the battle and was found wandering, blinded, by a nobleman's daughter. She nursed the wounded soldier back to health, they fell in love and were married.
In time a daughter arrived, but although Besse was beautiful she couldn't find a husband - the problem being her father. Besse was courted by four suitors; a rich gentleman, a knight, a London merchant and the son of an innkeeper.
Most of them withdrew their suit when they met Montford to ask for the old soldier's consent to the marriage.
Montford's reduced circumstances were related through a popular song of the time: "My father, shee said, is soone to be seene The siely, blind beggar of Bednall-green, That daylye sits begging for charitie, He is the good father of pretty Besse. Hie makrs and his tokens are knowen very well; He alwayes is led with a dogg and a bell; A seely old man, God knoweth, is he, Yet he is the father of pretty Besse."
In a predictably medieval twist, the courtly knight was the only man who could see past the seeming lack of a decent dowry to the woman he loved. He received his reward, as the couple received a dowry of £3,000, plus £100 for Besse's wedding dress. The benefactor? Grandfather Henry, who was still a rich man.
The legend persisted. Samuel Pepys visited fashionable Bethnal Green to stay with his friend, Sir William Ryder; Ryder's house occupied the very same spot as the Montford mansion. The great diarist records the occasion on June 26, 1663: "By coach to Bednall-green, to Sir W Ryder's to dinner. A fine merry walk with the ladies alone after dinner in the garden; the greatest quantity of strawberries I ever saw, and good. This very house was built by the Blind Beggar of Bednall-green, so much talked of and sang in ballads."
By 1690, the Bethnal Green beadle bore the badge of the Blind Beggar on his ceremonial staff. And in the 18th century every pub in the area bore the image of the beggar on their signs. Even Kirby's Castle was dubbed the Blind Beggar's House in 1727.
Kirby's Castle was demolished to make way for post-War redevelopment, Montford's House is buried in mystery, and today only one pub bears the sign of the Blind Beggar.
But Besse is remembered in Besse Street, and the mayor bears an image of Simon and Besse on the borough's ceremonial badge.
WAREHOUSE AND STABLES
Not far from Hanbury St where a horrible Jack the Ripper murder played out, is a derelict warehouse and perfectly preserved stables just off busy Commercial Street. Nearby Spitalfields Market was built on a Roman burial site, where thousands of remains were said to have been unearthed. Builders also apparently found a plague and pox pit. At the time of The Ripper, the Market area was already rife with crime – a mecca for casual labour and the transient community, this was not an area where “decent” folk would venture at night.
THE COMMERCIAL TAVERN
Opposite the Commercial St. Police station where all Ripper suspects were questioned and from where Police Officers were hailed to crime scenes, lies the Commercial Tavern.
Built in 1865, the tavern is today a trendy meeting place with shuttered windows and chandeliers. But deep below the ground floor, there are dark and terrifying cellars and tunnels. These tunnels were said to link to the Police station and it is rumoured that John Merrick, The Elephant Man, may have hidden here or lived above the premises.
THE CLINK PRISON MUSEUM
The Clink Prison Museum is built on the foundations of one of the original prisons owned by the Bishop of Winchester. It is thought it got its name from the clinking of the manacles, fetters, chains and bolts that were used there. It was also the origin of the phrase "In the Clink", to mean in prison.
The prisoners were treated brutally and cruelly. But those with money and friends on the outside were able to pay the jailers to make their time better. The jailers came up with lots of ways to make money. They accepted payments for fitting lighter irons, and for removing them completely, for a fee prisoners would be allowed outside to beg, or even to work. Madams were allowed to keep a brothel going, with payments going to the jailers.
Poorer prisoners had to beg at the grates that led up to street level and sell anything they had with them, including their clothes to pay for food.
Life was very harsh inside the prison, and brutality was a part of life there. Beatings and kickings were common, irons and fetters were fitted to prevent sleeping or cause paralysis, and prisoners were forced to stand in water until their feet rotted. Murder and fighting were not unusual. Authorised torture included the rack, breaking on the wheel, or crushing under very heavy weights.
But this is just a brief look at what horrors happened inside The Clink. Today, the prison is used for an eerie museum.
What will Yvette, Derek and the Most Haunted team uncover here and at the other terrifying locations this weekend?
Find out by watching Most Haunted Live!
Books by Richard Jones:
Haunted Britain and Ireland ISBN 1 85974 881 3
Haunted London ISBN 1 84330 615 8
Haunted Houses of Britain and Ireland ISBN 0 7607 7224 - X
Mystical Britain and Ireland ISBN 1 84330 969 6
Walking Dickensian London 1 84330 - 483 - X
*Most names, dates and detail have been removed from this account.
www.livingtv.co.uk/MHL1005/locations.html
JACK THE RIPPER - the history and locations*
By Most Haunted Live historian and author and Ripper expert Richard Jones
Although Jack the Ripper was not the world's first serial killer, he was certainly its first media murderer.
His crimes took place in an era when literacy amongst the general populace was increasing and the press at large was very much a catalyst for social change. Articles about the murders appeared in the newspapers on a daily basis and fostered a general fascination that, at times, bordered on hysteria.
Indeed, the very name "Jack the Ripper" was probably the invention of a journalist and it was press coverage that helped turn the murders into a phenomenon and transformed a sordid back street killer into an international legend.
THE FIRST JACK THE RIPPER MURDER
On an early morning in late August, a carter was making his way along Bucks Row, Whitechapel in East London, when he noticed a bundle lying in a gateway. Presuming it to be a tarpaulin, and thinking that it might prove useful, he went to examine it. As he got closer he froze in horror when he saw that it was in fact the body of a woman.
She was lying on her back, her skirts pulled up almost to her stomach. "I believe she's dead," the man told his companion, who was crouching over her, trying to hear whether or not she was breathing. She wasn't. But when he felt her breast he thought he detected a slight movement. "I think she's breathing" he exclaimed, "but very little if she is."
Late for work, the two men went on their way intending to inform the first police officer they encountered. What neither man had noticed, however, was that her throat had been cut so savagely that her head had almost been severed from her body.
That discovery was made by a policeman as he walked his beat at approximately 3.45am. He had passed the site thirty minutes earlier and noticed nothing out of the ordinary. This time he found the body, and with the aid of his lantern was able to examine the woman more closely than the first two men had been able to do.
Moments later the PC noticed a colleague passing a nearby street, and flashed his lantern at him to attract his attention. " Here's a woman with her throat cut", he called across, and told him to beckon for the doctor.
An ambulance was called and the doctor arrived soon after. He told the officers to move the body to the mortuary.
The body was duly lifted onto an ambulance and taken to the mortuary in Old Montague Street. It was there that the inspector discovered something that everyone had so far missed. Beneath her blood soaked clothing, a deep gash ran along her stomach - she had been disembowelled. Jack the Ripper's reign of terror had begun.
The woman was a prostitute, who had been ejected from her lodging house just two hours earlier, because she didn't have the money to pay her rent. "I'll soon get my doss money", she had confidently predicted, "See what a jolly bonnet I've got..." That bonnet now lay trampled and bloodstained in a Whitechapel gateway.
THE SECOND VICTIM:
In the week that followed the murder, the press began to publish lurid and sensational stories. They had wrongly blamed two earlier killings, on the murderer of this prostitute.
They had even come up with a possible suspect in the form of a man whom the local prostitutes knew of and whom, they were claiming, had been making violent threats toward them, including that he was going to "rip them up".
All they had was a nickname for him, and didn't know his name or location. They could only identify him by the type of clothes and hat he wore.
A man fitting this description was identified in September, talking to a prostitute in Hanbury Street. At around 6am market porter, went into his backyard at 29 Hanbury Street and discovered a woman's mutilated body. Several parts of her body had been removed or dismembered. A few feet away lay a clue for the police - an article of clothing that fitted the earlier description of the man the prostitutes had mentioned to police.
Since the clothing was a part of the standard work outfits worn by a wide range Jewish workers from butchers to tailors, the finding of just such a garment in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, coupled with the frenzy that was being created by the press, caused the neighbourhood to erupt into anti - Semitism.
Innocent Jews were attacked by angry mobs claiming that no Englishman was capable of committing such murders. However, the media frenzy would come to an end shortly afterwards when a man was arrested for the crime - however, he had a cast iron alibi and was released.
In the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, the intensification of police activity had seen a dramatic downturn in the crime rate. There were newspaper reports that "a dreadful quiet has descended onto the East End of London", and people began to hope that the murders had come to an end. This, however, was not to be.
THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS CONTINUE
At around 1am on 30th September 1888, a hawker returned to Berners Street, having spent the day trying to sell cheap jewellery at Crystal Palace. As he turned his pony and cart into the yard of the Jewish Socialist Club at number 30 Berners Street, the pony suddenly reared in alarm and pulled to the left.
Looking around to find what had distressed the animal, the man saw what appeared to be a pile of clothes lying on the ground. He poked at them with his whip and then lit a match. In the flicker of the light, he saw that it was the body of a woman, and he ran for the police.
The woman's throat had been slashed. But police felt that the murderer had somehow been interrupted in his grisly business. Could it have been the sound of the horse and cart coming around the corner?
THE NIGHT OF THE DOUBLE MURDER
The previous night, a woman was arrested on Aldgate High Street and charged with being drunk and disorderly. She was taken to Bishopsgate police station, placed in a cell and left to sober up.
As the other woman met her grisly end, the drunken lady was deemed sober enough for immediate release. At about 1:30am, three Jewish men were leaving the Imperial Club at 16 - 17 Duke Street. They noticed a man and a woman talking with one another at the corner of Church Passage. One of the three would later give the police a detailed description of this mystery man and maintain that the woman whom he saw was definitely the drunken lady.
Fifteen minutes later another PC walked his usual beat into Mitre square and discovered her mutilated body. He would later state "I have been in the force for a long while but I never saw such a sight. The body had been ripped open, like a pig in the market." If the killer had been interrupted with the second murder, his appetite had been more than sated on the unfortunate drunken lady. Her body was completely and utterly mutilated and body parts splayed on the street, and some removed. The murderer had then left the scene and headed off into the streets of Spitalfields.
THE MYSTERIOUS MESSAGE ON THE WALL
In Goulston Street there still stands a sturdy building that in 1888 provided accommodation for Jewish traders who dealt in second - hand clothes on Petticoat Lane or traded shoes at the footwear market on Wentworth Street. Known as The "Wentworth Model Dwellings", it was here in a doorway that another officer discovered a section of the drunken woman's clothing.
There were bloody finger marks on it and it was evident that the blade of a bloodied knife had been wiped clean upon it. This clue, tells us exactly where the murderer was heading, and confirms the theory that he was an East-ender living in the area.
But the doorway also contained a much more famous and, subsequently promoted, clue. For, scrawled in chalk on the wall above the apron, was the message "The Juwes are the men That Will be blamed for nothing" (although several observers remembered slightly different wording to the Graffito). The Met Police Commissioner at the time, fearful of a resurgence of the anti - Semitism that had swept the neighbourhood in the wake of the earlier scare, ordered that the message be rubbed out, and it was duly erased before a photograph could be taken of it.
THE LAST OF THE VICTIMS
In the aftermath of the "Double Event" police activity intensified throughout early October. The "Jack the Ripper" correspondence letters had led to great media speculation. The East End was in the grip of panic coupled with a grim curiosity that saw morbid crowds gathering at the murder sites to speculate on the killer's identity and motives.
Despite lurid rumours and several scares, the intensification of police activity appears to have deterred the "Ripper" and the month passed with no further murders, although the atmosphere remained tense.
Large bodies of plain-clothed men were drafted to the Whitechapel district from other parts of London, along with other detectives.
In early November, a man named George met a young lady on Commercial Street. She cheerfully asked him for sixpence, to which he replied that even this amount was beyond his modest means. She laughed, told him she'd "just have to find it some other way" and continued to the junction with Thrawl Street, where she met with another man.
The first man saw the two chat a little, then watched as she led the man into Dorset Street, where they entered her room in Miller's Court. Forty five minutes later neither had emerged from the room and Hutchinson left the scene. Shortly before 4am several of the young woman's neighbours were woken by a cry of "Murder!" but all chose to ignore it.
Later that morning, a man called by the room to collect her overdue rent and discovered her body. She lay upon her bed, her head turned to the left. Again, her body had been severely mutilated and body parts removed in an utterly heinous fashion.
The murderer had left the tiny room in Miller's Court and disappeared into the early morning. What no-one gazing upon the body of this poor, unfortunate woman could have realised was that, in the blood-bath of Millers Court, the Ripper's reign of terror would end as suddenly and mysteriously as it had begun. As he left the bloody scene in that tiny room that morning, the Whitechapel Murderer may have performed his swansong, but the legend of Jack the Ripper was only just beginning.
For more info, visit: www.jack-the-ripper-walk.co.uk
THE BLIND BEGGAR
Close to the site of where the first Jack the Ripper murder took place, lies a public house. In the 1200s, one of those manor houses where the Blind Beggar now sits belonged to Simon de Montford - the young lord who is today remembered by Montford House, a red-brick block of flats on the north side of Victoria Park Square.
His story, and how he went from landed gentry to poor beggar, became hugely popular in early Tudor times.
Simon was a soldier in the service of the king, and fought at the Battle of Evesham, in the West Country, in 1265. According to the legend, he fell at the battle and was found wandering, blinded, by a nobleman's daughter. She nursed the wounded soldier back to health, they fell in love and were married.
In time a daughter arrived, but although Besse was beautiful she couldn't find a husband - the problem being her father. Besse was courted by four suitors; a rich gentleman, a knight, a London merchant and the son of an innkeeper.
Most of them withdrew their suit when they met Montford to ask for the old soldier's consent to the marriage.
Montford's reduced circumstances were related through a popular song of the time: "My father, shee said, is soone to be seene The siely, blind beggar of Bednall-green, That daylye sits begging for charitie, He is the good father of pretty Besse. Hie makrs and his tokens are knowen very well; He alwayes is led with a dogg and a bell; A seely old man, God knoweth, is he, Yet he is the father of pretty Besse."
In a predictably medieval twist, the courtly knight was the only man who could see past the seeming lack of a decent dowry to the woman he loved. He received his reward, as the couple received a dowry of £3,000, plus £100 for Besse's wedding dress. The benefactor? Grandfather Henry, who was still a rich man.
The legend persisted. Samuel Pepys visited fashionable Bethnal Green to stay with his friend, Sir William Ryder; Ryder's house occupied the very same spot as the Montford mansion. The great diarist records the occasion on June 26, 1663: "By coach to Bednall-green, to Sir W Ryder's to dinner. A fine merry walk with the ladies alone after dinner in the garden; the greatest quantity of strawberries I ever saw, and good. This very house was built by the Blind Beggar of Bednall-green, so much talked of and sang in ballads."
By 1690, the Bethnal Green beadle bore the badge of the Blind Beggar on his ceremonial staff. And in the 18th century every pub in the area bore the image of the beggar on their signs. Even Kirby's Castle was dubbed the Blind Beggar's House in 1727.
Kirby's Castle was demolished to make way for post-War redevelopment, Montford's House is buried in mystery, and today only one pub bears the sign of the Blind Beggar.
But Besse is remembered in Besse Street, and the mayor bears an image of Simon and Besse on the borough's ceremonial badge.
WAREHOUSE AND STABLES
Not far from Hanbury St where a horrible Jack the Ripper murder played out, is a derelict warehouse and perfectly preserved stables just off busy Commercial Street. Nearby Spitalfields Market was built on a Roman burial site, where thousands of remains were said to have been unearthed. Builders also apparently found a plague and pox pit. At the time of The Ripper, the Market area was already rife with crime – a mecca for casual labour and the transient community, this was not an area where “decent” folk would venture at night.
THE COMMERCIAL TAVERN
Opposite the Commercial St. Police station where all Ripper suspects were questioned and from where Police Officers were hailed to crime scenes, lies the Commercial Tavern.
Built in 1865, the tavern is today a trendy meeting place with shuttered windows and chandeliers. But deep below the ground floor, there are dark and terrifying cellars and tunnels. These tunnels were said to link to the Police station and it is rumoured that John Merrick, The Elephant Man, may have hidden here or lived above the premises.
THE CLINK PRISON MUSEUM
The Clink Prison Museum is built on the foundations of one of the original prisons owned by the Bishop of Winchester. It is thought it got its name from the clinking of the manacles, fetters, chains and bolts that were used there. It was also the origin of the phrase "In the Clink", to mean in prison.
The prisoners were treated brutally and cruelly. But those with money and friends on the outside were able to pay the jailers to make their time better. The jailers came up with lots of ways to make money. They accepted payments for fitting lighter irons, and for removing them completely, for a fee prisoners would be allowed outside to beg, or even to work. Madams were allowed to keep a brothel going, with payments going to the jailers.
Poorer prisoners had to beg at the grates that led up to street level and sell anything they had with them, including their clothes to pay for food.
Life was very harsh inside the prison, and brutality was a part of life there. Beatings and kickings were common, irons and fetters were fitted to prevent sleeping or cause paralysis, and prisoners were forced to stand in water until their feet rotted. Murder and fighting were not unusual. Authorised torture included the rack, breaking on the wheel, or crushing under very heavy weights.
But this is just a brief look at what horrors happened inside The Clink. Today, the prison is used for an eerie museum.
What will Yvette, Derek and the Most Haunted team uncover here and at the other terrifying locations this weekend?
Find out by watching Most Haunted Live!
Books by Richard Jones:
Haunted Britain and Ireland ISBN 1 85974 881 3
Haunted London ISBN 1 84330 615 8
Haunted Houses of Britain and Ireland ISBN 0 7607 7224 - X
Mystical Britain and Ireland ISBN 1 84330 969 6
Walking Dickensian London 1 84330 - 483 - X
*Most names, dates and detail have been removed from this account.