On the 12th of February 1957, a young Guardsman named Johns was on duty at the Tower of London when something slammed into him from behind with enough force to knock him to the ground. He scrambled to his feet, bayonet fixed, and challenged the empty air. Nothing. The Tower’s logbook records the incident without drama: “Guard Johns fainted at his post.” But Johns did not faint, not according to the testimony he gave to his superior officer, nor according to the dozen other guardsmen who have reported something similar over the centuries: a sudden, violent pressure, a chill that has nothing to do with the temperature, the sense of a presence just behind the shoulder, and then, nothing. The Tower of London is 950 years old and it has been a palace, a prison, an execution ground, a menagerie, and a treasury. It has also been, if you believe the thousands of people who have reported something they could not explain, the most haunted building in England. Here is a quick guide to the ghosts of the Tower.

The Tower’s Most Famous Ghosts

• Anne Boleyn, the most famous ghost in England: Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, was beheaded on Tower Green on the 19th of May 1536. She was 35 years old, she had been Queen of England for three years, and she was executed by a French swordsman imported from Calais, a final, expensive mercy from the king who had ordered her death. Anne has been reported more than any other ghost in the Tower: a figure in white, her head, depending on the account, tucked under her arm or fully attached, gliding through the corridors of the Queen’s House (where she spent her final days) and across Tower Green. The earliest recorded sighting dates to 1536, the year of her death, when a guard reported seeing a figure matching the executed queen’s description. The most famous sighting was in 1864: a sentry found a door to the Lieutenant’s Lodgings standing open and, investigating, encountered a figure in a white coif and a Tudor dress. He raised his bayonet (which passed through the figure) and fainted. The guard was court-martialled for sleeping on duty, until two officers testified that they had seen the same figure from a window. The guard was acquitted. Where to look: Tower Green and the Queen’s House
• The Two Princes, the most tragic ghost: In the summer of 1483, the 12-year-old Edward V and his 9-year-old brother Richard, Duke of York, entered the Tower of London. They were never seen again. The princes were the sons of Edward IV and the legitimate heirs to the throne; their uncle, Richard III, had declared them illegitimate and taken the crown for himself. The boys disappeared, and their fate, murdered, probably smothered on the orders of Richard III, though the evidence is circumstantial, is the most famous cold case in English history. In 1674, workmen excavating beneath a staircase in the White Tower discovered a wooden chest containing the skeletons of two children. They were reburied in Westminster Abbey under the orders of Charles II (who accepted that they were the princes), and in 1933 the bones were examined and confirmed as the remains of two children of approximately the right ages. The ghosts of the Two Princes, two small figures in period clothing, holding hands, silent and frightened, have been reported in the Bloody Tower and on the staircases of the White Tower for over 500 years. The last widely reported sighting was in the 19th century, but the sense of something, a cold spot, a silence that is deeper than silence, persists in the Bloody Tower. Where to look: The Bloody Tower and the White Tower staircase
• The White Lady and the screaming children: The White Lady, thought to be the ghost of a woman who died of a broken heart after her lover was executed, has been reported waving from the windows of the White Tower, an expression of infinite sadness. The ghosts of children, laughing, screaming, crying, have been reported across the Tower; the Beauchamp Tower (where prisoners scratched their names into the stone, the graffiti of the condemned) has produced more reports of unexplained sounds than any other part of the fortress. The Tower is full of children, in life and in death, the princes, the children of prisoners, the children of guards, the children of the royal household, and their presence, joyful and tragic, is one of the most consistent features of the Tower’s paranormal history
• Your odds of seeing a ghost: The Tower receives 3 million visitors a year. The number of reported ghost sightings averages… perhaps one or two a year, if that. Your odds of seeing Anne Boleyn are approximately the same as your odds of winning the lottery. But the history, the real, documented, bloody, tragic history of the Tower, the stories of the people who lived and died within its walls, is more compelling than any ghost, and the experience of standing on Tower Green, the site of the scaffold where Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, and Lady Jane Grey were executed, the ravens croaking from the Tower walls, the sense of the weight of the centuries pressing down, is as powerful an encounter with the past as you will have in England