The Jewel House Keeper’s Ghost: A Spectral Bear at the Tower of London
Date: 31 October 2024
Author: Dr Alden GregoryCurator Alden Gregory explores one of the many ghost stories associated with the palaces in our care: the Tower of London's Phantom Bear.
A frightening beginning
‘Oh and keep your eyes open for the bear; if you see the bear it’s likely that you’re about to die!’
I'll admit that those were not the words I was expecting to hear in my workplace induction when I first joined the team at the Tower of London, but then the Tower of London is not your normal workplace.
I'd seen the magnificent sculpture of Henry III's polar bear by the wonderful artist Kendra Haste on my way into the office that morning and had, so far, lived to tell the tale, but that was not the bear that my new colleague, a long-serving member of the team, had in mind.
There is, it transpired, an old story that the Tower of London is haunted by the grisly apparition of a bear; a sight so fearsome that those unfortunate enough to see it, suffer fatal consequences. It is, without doubt, one of the more unusual workplace risks.
Now, I'll also admit that I don't really believe in ghosts – although my job does take me to some pretty spooky corners of our palaces that I choose not to dwell in for too long! But, as a historian, I've always been fascinated by the origins of ghost stories and, whilst I'm not always keeping my eyes peeled for bears, I do keep a look out for evidence of where these beliefs began.
On animal magnetism
Flicking through some old newspapers as part of my research into something else, I stumbled across an article from 1888 recounting, in gloriously gothic tones, the story of the Tower's spectral bear. It led me back to William Gregory's 1851 book On Animal Magnetism, the first record, as far as I could tell, of this spooky tale.
In William Gregory’s telling – itself recounted to him by a friend – the events took place on a sultry evening in the year 1821. The Keeper of the Crown Jewels, at home with his family in their apartments in the Martin Tower, was suddenly alarmed by an apparition; a cloud of smoke which formed, in front of his eyes, into ‘a pyramid of dark thick gray [sic], with something working towards its centre’. Alarmed, the Keeper hurled his chair at the spectre, but it passed straight through and struck the opposite wall.
The evening was sultry, and the door stood ajar, when something suddenly rolled in through the open space... Miss S. felt an indescribable sensation of chill and horror... [she] screamed out, 'Oh! Christ! It has siezed me!'... The Colonel took a chair, and hurled it at the phantom, through which it passed.
Extract from 'On Animal Magnetism' by William Gregory, 1851
In that moment the cloud disappeared through the door and down the stairs, at the bottom of which stood a soldier on sentry duty. As the soldier turned towards the door to investigate the commotion inside, he was alarmed by a ‘dreadful figure [that] had issued from the doorway, which he took at first for an escaped bear, on its hind legs. It passed him, and scowled upon him with a human face, and the expression of a demon’.
The shock of this encounter was so severe that the unfortunate soldier collapsed on the spot. He died in the Tower’s medical bay just 48 hours later.
Physician, chemist, mesmerist
William Gregory (1803-1858), the author of this strange ghostly tale, was an eminent Edinburgh-born physician and chemist. He studied and later taught Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh and was elected a fellow of both the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. William was, therefore, one of the leading scientists of his day and his book, On Animal Magnetism, was not a collection of throwaway ghost stories but a serious scientific tome on the, sometimes controversial, topic of mesmerism.
Like many scientists working in the early 19th century, William Gregory had been influenced and inspired by the theories of the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815). Writing in 1779, Mesmer had proposed the idea that all creatures and inanimate objects are possessed of a natural energy that can transfer between them and influence their behaviours. Mesmer named this energy animal magnetism. One of the effects of animal magnetism that Mesmer noted was that it enabled him to put his patients into a trance-like state; a condition later renamed by another Edinburgh-based scientist as hypnosis.
For William Gregory, stories such as that of the Tower’s ghost were proof of the existence of animal magnetism. The swirling grey pyramid and the form of the demonic bear-like creature were, for William, a manifestation of the natural energy contained in all objects and beings. He called this visible mesmeric phenomenon odylic light.
William was not, however, the first person to equate animal magnetism with spooky goings-on. Mesmerist ideas had also had a profound influence on artists and writers of the age. Authors from Mary Shelley – whose pioneering work of horror Frankenstein (1818) has characters falling into mesmeric trances – to Edgar Allen Poe, suffused their stories with themes of animal magnetism and, in doing so, created new genres of gothic literature. They were stories that tapped into, and encouraged, a widespread interest in spiritualism and the occult that, in turn, led to a Victorian craze for séances and the Ouija board.
The Keeper’s tale
It is tempting, therefore, as the sceptic that I am to re-read the story of the Tower ghost in the light of those great works of gothic fantasy and to suggest that William Gregory had been duped by a master storyteller. Or perhaps, more worryingly, that he was duping us. Could the Tower’s bear be just another work of fiction in the ghostly footsteps of Shelley or Poe?
Perhaps. But there is a twist to this tale.
On 25 August 1860, a question appeared in the Victorian journal Notes and Queries: ‘Is there not a ghost story connected with the Tower of London? [...] Has not the ghost, or appearance, been seen once at least during this century, and with fatal results?’. Two weeks later Notes and Queries published two replies. One was from a George Offor who, remarkably, claimed to have been present at the burial in a graveyard near the Tower of the soldier who had been terrified to death by the bear. The other, more remarkable still, was from Edmund Lenthal Swifte, the Keeper of the Crown Jewels himself; the man to whom the apparition had appeared in the Martin Tower.
Their testimony set the record straight and corrected William Gregory’s errors. The ghost had appeared in January 1816, not 1821 as William Gregory had claimed, and what Edmund had witnessed was not a grey pyramid but a floating ‘cylindrical figure, like a glass tube ... its contents appeared to be a dense fluid, white and pale azure, like to the gathering of a summer cloud’. What all agreed upon, however, is that there had been a bear-like ghost and that the shock of it had proved fatal.
A cylindrical figure, like a glass tube ... its contents appeared to be a dense fluid, white and pale azure, like to the gathering of a summer cloud.
Edmund Lenthal Swifte, the Jewel House Keeper, writing to 'Notes and Queries' on what he saw in the Martin Tower
Phantasmagorical experiments
Edmund further revealed that he had not been aware of William Gregory’s theories of animal magnetism and had not realised that his story, albeit it with some errors, had been recorded for science and posterity. He also revealed another twist to the story; his own scientific explanation for the mysterious events of that tragic night.
‘Shortly before this strange event’, he reported, ‘some young lady-residents in the Tower had been ... suspected of making phantasmagorial experiments at their windows’. To prevent further such pranks by his neighbours, he went on, the guard on the Jewel House had been doubled.
Quite what the phantasmagorial or phantasmagorical experiments undertaken by the residents of the Tower were, is left to the reader’s imagination but they seem to reflect the early 19th century interest in spiritualism, the occult and, of course, mesmerism. The term phantasmagoria was often used to describe illusions and tricks played with light and mirrors but Edmund Lenthal Swifte’s suspicions about his neighbours and the doubling of the guard suggest more malign intentions.
The emergence of two eyewitnesses to the creepy happenings at the Tower gives me pause for thought. Could it be that residents of the Tower were trying, and perhaps even managing, to raise the dead? That the demonic spirit of a bear has stalked the Tower since at least 1816 claiming its unsuspecting victims? Or was the story of the Martin Tower’s ghost all part of some elaborate hoax?
A final twist to the tale
For a while this is where I thought the story ended and that all the questions might be left unanswered, but further trawling through the historic newspapers reveals another twist. As early as 1789 the Hereford Journal was already reporting that the Martin Tower had ‘long been disturbed with noises, and spectres in various fearful shapes’. Seven years earlier still, it noted, in about 1782 an overnight guard posted at the Martin Tower had been attacked by, ‘a spirit, in the likeness of a furious beast’ which had thrown the guardsman, ‘in a whirlwind, some yards off his post, where he remained till the relief came, at two in the morning, who found him speechless … wallowing in blood’.
So what was going on? Had the ghost appeared on more than one occasion in a determined attempt to terrify the Tower’s guards, or had the tale of this earlier haunting entered the Tower’s folklore and encouraged later residents of the Martin Tower to embellish it and place themselves into the story?
Well, it is clear from the Hereford Journal that the story had become common knowledge at the Tower long before Edmund Lenthal Swifte became the Jewel House Keeper in 1814. The same report reveals that on hearing a boastful Captain of the guards claim, one evening in 1789, that he had no fear of the Martin Tower’s ghost, a mischievous lady resident of the Tower took an old laundry mannequin draped in a sheet and hid it in a dark passage by the Martin Tower that the Captain was known to use. The trick had the desired effect, for on turning a corner and encountering the “ghost” the terrified Captain fled to safety. He was later said to have confessed that no danger he had ever encountered on the battlefield had prepared him for the fright he received that night.
In this light the sceptic in me finds it easy to imagine a scenario in which Edmund, who as well as being the Keeper of the Jewel House was also a published poet and author, regaled his friends, neighbours, and guests with these ghostly tales of the official home he occupied in the Martin Tower; tales into which he gradually wrote himself, and tales that eventually escaped the confines of the Tower and reached the ear of William Gregory.
But there is still an unanswered question; what of that first reported encounter between the ghost and the guardsman in 1782? Could that have been a real sighting of our spectral bear, or was it just another trick or story to scare the Tower’s guard? We may never know, and so whatever the case, I’ll probably be keeping my eyes peeled for bears, and perhaps you should too!
Alden Gregory
Curator of Historic Buildings, Historic Royal Palaces
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