The Tower of London Ghosts: History and Reality

Tower of London ghosts are supposed to gather at Tower Green — a patch of grass, maybe the size of a modest garden, hemmed in by Tudor brick and the black glass beams of the White Tower behind it. In the middle sits a sculpture: a glass cushion, roughly pillow-sized, resting on a plinth engraved with ten names. Tourists photograph it, read the names, move on toward the Crown Jewels queue. It takes less than a minute to stand where it happened.

Here is the detail that doesn’t survive the photograph, and the one this piece is actually about: standing on that lawn was the good outcome.

In nine hundred years of Tower history, only seven people were beheaded on Tower Green. Most other prisoners condemned to die after confinement here — traitors, heretics and the merely inconvenient — were taken two minutes’ walk away to the public scaffold at Tower Hill, in front of crowds who queued for the view the way people now queue for the Jewels. Private death, on the quiet lawn, away from the mob, was not a punishment. It was the mercy reserved for people the Crown still, in some sense, respected. You had to matter to the state to be allowed to die out of its sight.

That is the shape of what still walks here, if you believe the stories. Not a haunted building in the generic sense — a headless queen, a weeping child, pick your gothic furniture. Something closer to a filing system: who the state chose to kill quietly, who it chose to kill loudly, and who it chose to display afterward on spikes above the gate for the rest of London to see on the way to market. The Tower of London ghosts that persist, if they’re anything, are what’s left when a government spends nine centuries perfecting the choreography of who gets to disappear with dignity and who gets to serve as a warning.

Nobody built the Tower to be haunted. They built it to be watched. It’s worth asking, four hundred years on, whether those ever turn out to be different things.

The Tower of London

The Tower of London sits on the north bank of the Thames at the eastern edge of the old City, a squat concentric fortress that has spent nine hundred years being rebuilt around the same stone core. The White Tower — the original keep, pale limestone under a later coat of Victorian scrubbing — stands at the centre of two full rings of curtain wall, a design copied from Norman castles across the Channel and expanded outward, decade by decade, by whichever monarch needed more wall between themselves and the people they governed. A moat once surrounded the whole complex; it was drained in the 1840s and is now, faintly absurdly, a sloped lawn where school groups eat lunch.

The Tower is not one building but a small fortified town: twenty-one towers, a chapel, a parade ground, barracks, and — since the seventeenth century — the Crown Jewels, guarded now behind glass rather than armed men. Traitors’ Gate opens onto the river on the south side, the water-entrance through which condemned prisoners were once rowed in by barge, arriving beneath a portcullis that has not lifted for that purpose in centuries. The Tower traditionally keeps at least six ravens, usually with one or more reserves, under the care of a dedicated Yeoman Warder known as the Ravenmaster. Their flight feathers are periodically trimmed to discourage them from straying. Every night, at exactly 9:53pm, the Chief Yeoman Warder begins locking the main gates in the Ceremony of the Keys — a ritual maintained for at least seven hundred years. The Blitz caused rare disruption, but the tradition endured. It is one of the oldest continuously observed military ceremonies in the world, and it happens whether or not a single visitor is there to see it. Millions of people walk through the gates in a typical year. Almost all of them are heading for the Jewels. Fewer stop long enough at Tower Green to notice it is the size of a modest garden, and fewer still are thinking about Tower of London ghosts in that particular moment — which is, in its own way, the point.

The History of the Tower of London

William the Conqueror began the White Tower around 1078, twelve years after Hastings, and its purpose was never subtle: this was a Norman king telling a recently conquered city, in stone visible for miles, who was in charge now. Over the following centuries the Tower accumulated functions the way old buildings do — royal residence, armoury, treasury, menagerie (lions and a polar bear, gifts to Henry III, were kept and occasionally let swim the Thames on a chain), the Royal Mint, a public record office, and, running underneath all of it for most of its history, a prison.

Executions here fall into two entirely different categories, and the distinction is the spine of everything that follows. On Tower Hill, just outside the walls, a permanent public scaffold stood from 1485 onward. An estimated 112 to 125 people died there over the centuries — traitors, rebels, the politically inconvenient — in front of crowds who came for it the way people now queue for a matinee. Their severed heads were, for long stretches of this history, parboiled, dipped in tar, and displayed on spikes on London Bridge as a standing public notice of what treason cost.

Inside the walls, on the small lawn now called Tower Green, only seven people were ever beheaded across the Tower’s entire history: William, Lord Hastings, executed without trial in 1483 on the order of the future Richard III; Anne Boleyn in 1536; Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, in 1541; Catherine Howard and her lady-in-waiting Jane, Viscountess Rochford, together in 1542; Lady Jane Grey, sixteen years old and nine days a queen, in 1554; and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, in 1601. This was never mercy in the tender sense. It was a privilege of rank — a way of removing someone from public life without the political risk of a jeering crowd, and, just as often, without the public relations problem a sympathetic execution created for the Crown itself. Margaret Pole’s death, in particular, gives the lie to any idea that “private” meant “clean”: the diplomat Eustace Chapuys reported that a “wretched and blundering” executioner hacked at her head and shoulders, while a later account elaborated the scene into a pursuit around the block. The precise details are disputed; the botched violence is not — private, but not merciful in any way that mattered to her.

Historic Royal Palaces records ten executions on or near the Tower Green memorial site — seven by beheading and three by firing squad — and it also notes that fifteen men convicted of desertion or espionage were executed within the walls, including cases away from Tower Green.

The Tower’s most famous unsolved case predates the Tower Green executions by half a century. In 1483, the twelve-year-old Edward V and his nine-year-old brother Richard, Duke of York — the Princes in the Tower — were lodged in the fortress by their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, ostensibly for their protection ahead of Edward’s coronation. They were seen playing on the grounds through that summer. Then they were seen less. Then not at all. Richard took the throne as Richard III within months. In 1674, workmen renovating a staircase in the White Tower uncovered a wooden box containing two child-sized skeletons; they were reinterred at Westminster Abbey on the assumption — never conclusively proven, then or since — that these were the princes. Nobody has ever been definitively convicted, tried, or even formally charged with their deaths.

The Tower’s function as a prison for the powerful ran in parallel with its role as an execution site, and produced a longer, quieter history of its own. In March 1554, the seventeen-year-old Princess Elizabeth — later Elizabeth I — was brought to the Tower under suspicion of involvement in Wyatt’s Rebellion against her half-sister, Mary I. Popular legend has her arriving through Traitors’ Gate, the water-entrance reserved for the condemned; the more reliable record has her crossing by drawbridge instead, met by guards sympathetic enough to kneel as she passed. She was held in her own mother’s former apartments — Anne Boleyn’s, the Tower Green connection working itself out a generation later — and was eventually released into house arrest that May, on the anniversary of her mother’s execution. Sir Walter Raleigh, courtier, explorer, and repeated irritant to two monarchs, spent a cumulative thirteen years imprisoned in the Bloody Tower across three separate spells, the longest running from 1603 to 1616. Held there in relative comfort — his family visited, he kept a garden — he used the time to write The History of the World. He was eventually executed in 1618, not at the Tower but at the Palace of Westminster, on a treason charge fifteen years old.

The last executions at the Tower belong to the twentieth century, not the sixteenth: eleven German spies were shot by firing squad in the Tower during the two World Wars, the final one being Josef Jakobs in August 1941, parachuted into Huntingdonshire and captured within a day. He remains the last person ever executed at the Tower of London. The Tower’s very last prisoners, fittingly, were never executed at all: Ronald and Reginald Kray, the East End gangsters who would go on to define London’s criminal underworld a decade later, were briefly held here in 1952 for failing to report for National Service — the same state, exercising the same authority over the same ground, reduced five hundred years on to a paperwork infraction. It’s this history — not embellishment — that manufactures the Tower of London ghosts everyone comes looking for.

The Tower of London Ghosts

Given the volume of state killing this site absorbed, it would be more surprising if it had no Tower of London ghosts, and it has accumulated more than almost anywhere in Britain.

Anne Boleyn is the marquee haunting, reported carrying her own head under her arm near the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula, where she’s buried, and around the site of Tower Green. A widely repeated account, usually dated to 1864, tells of an unnamed sentry outside the Queen’s House who allegedly bayoneted a white, faceless figure, faced a court martial for sleeping on duty and was acquitted after another witness spoke for him. The difficulty is that modern retellings rarely provide the soldier’s name or a traceable trial record. It is one of the Tower’s best-known stories, but not a securely documented case.

Henry VI, murdered in the Wakefield Tower in 1471 while at prayer — tradition holds on the order of the future Richard III, the same man later blamed for the Princes — is said to pace the chamber each year on the anniversary of his death, fading into the stone at the stroke of midnight. The Princes themselves are reported as a pair of small figures in white nightgowns, holding hands, described by more than one witness as looking simply lost rather than menacing. A “White Lady” is said to haunt the White Tower itself, announced by the smell of cheap perfume before she’s seen waving from a window to children in the building opposite. Guards stationed near Henry VIII’s suit of armour have reported a sudden crushing sensation on the chest that lifts the moment they leave the room. And in one of the odder entries in the catalogue, a Victorian account describes a spectral polar bear — descended, in the story if not in fact, from the real menagerie animal once kept on-site — so frightening in its appearance that a soldier who encountered it reportedly collapsed and died shortly after.

No catalogue of Tower folklore is complete without the ravens. Legend holds that the Tower — and the kingdom with it — will fall if the ravens ever leave the grounds, a warning said to trace back to Charles II, who supposedly overruled his own royal astronomer’s complaints about the birds fouling the observatory rather than risk the prophecy. The Tower has kept ravens under close watch ever since, wings clipped, each one named and logged, with a dedicated Yeoman Warder — the Ravenmaster — responsible for their care. It’s the closest thing the Tower has to a living, breathing piece of folklore: not a story about the dead, but an ongoing ritual performed daily against the possibility of national catastrophe.

Margaret Pole’s death earns her own haunting distinct from the general Tower Green catalogue. Her execution, botched as it was, is said to replay itself on its anniversary — witnesses over the centuries have reported not just a figure but a scene, glimpsed in fragments: motion across the green, a suggestion of pursuit, gone before it resolves into anything nameable. Unlike Anne Boleyn’s composed, dignified apparition, Pole’s story is the one haunting here that preserves the violence of what actually happened to her, rather than smoothing it into something more picturesque.

Thomas Becket, murdered at Canterbury in 1170 and canonised soon after, is said to have taken a personal interest in the Tower’s construction over a century after his death — appearing during building work on the Inner Curtain Wall and striking part of it down with his cross, apparently in protest, since Henry III’s grandfather had a hand in his murder. Henry III is said to have responded by building a chapel to Becket within the Tower; the story goes that the disturbances stopped once it was completed, one of the few ghost accounts here that ends with the haunting being successfully placated rather than simply endured.

Sir Walter Raleigh, too, is said to remain — seen walking the stretch of outer wall between the Byward and Bell Towers that still carries his name, Raleigh’s Walk, worn into habit, according to the story, by the hours he spent pacing it during his thirteen years of confinement.

Arbella Stuart, a cousin of James I and, at various points in her life, a plausible claimant to his throne, was imprisoned in the Tower after an attempt to flee England and marry without royal permission. She died there in 1615, reportedly by self-starvation, and is said to remain in the Queen’s House on Tower Green — a quieter, sadder entry in the catalogue than the beheaded queens: a woman who never lost her head at all, just the freedom to leave.

The Evidence

Start with the ravens, since the raven legend underpins almost every other Tower of London ghosts claim that follows. The legend holds that the kingdom will fall if the ravens ever leave — usually attributed to Charles II, sometimes wrapped in a story about him overruling his own astronomer. There is no documented trace of this legend before the late nineteenth century. No contemporary Restoration source mentions it. The clipped-wing, ceremonially fed raven-keeping tradition as it exists today is most plausibly a Victorian invention, arriving alongside the Tower’s transformation from working fortress into tourist attraction — which makes it not a medieval superstition but a marketing decision that has simply had a hundred and fifty years to calcify into “ancient tradition.” Historic Royal Palaces still gives the legend a prominent place in its visitor storytelling.

The same pattern shows up in miniature with the phantom bear. The story is traceable to William Gregory’s 1851 On Animal Magnetism, written at the height of Victorian interest in mesmerism and the occult, but it offers no regimental record or independently recoverable account. The real Tower menagerie supplied the raw material; repetition did the rest.

The source problem comes before the psychology in the 1864 sentry story. Without a named soldier or recoverable court-martial record, the polished version now repeated cannot be treated as testimony filed under oath. Even if an incident lies behind it, solitary night duty, fatigue, low light and expectation can produce a vivid experience without requiring either a ghost or a dishonest witness. The story is plausible as human experience; its evidential pedigree is not.

The building itself supplies the raw material even without a primed observer. Stone this old, in a structure of this scale, produces genuine cold spots from ancient uninsulated walls, draughts through five-hundred-year-old joinery that sound uncannily like breath or footsteps, and acoustic quirks — long stone corridors carry and distort sound in ways a modern building never would. The “cheap perfume” attributed to the White Lady is exactly the kind of half-memory a brain manufactures to explain an ordinary passing smell — from a cleaning product, from a fellow visitor, from nothing at all — once it’s already primed to expect a haunted encounter.

And it’s worth naming the incentive plainly, because it cuts against the Tower’s own authority as narrator here: Historic Royal Palaces, custodian of the site and the source for many ghost stories now in wide circulation, has marketed ghost-themed tours and seasonal Halloween experiences. That does not make private witnesses dishonest or the stories wholesale inventions — but it does mean the institution preserving the folklore also benefits from its appeal.

None of this closes the door on private experience. It does change the status of the evidence. Without a traceable military record or named witnesses, the sentry case belongs with the rest of the Tower’s folklore rather than above it.

My Thoughts

I keep coming back to the ravens.

Everything else in this piece is about a state deciding how the dead should be seen — publicly, on Tower Hill, as a warning; privately, on the green, as a mercy that was really just better public relations; or not seen at all, boiled and spiked on London Bridge as a notice nailed to the city’s front door. That’s history, four and five hundred years settled. But the ravens aren’t history. They’re a ritual still being performed, today, on a schedule, by a salaried employee of an institution that answers to the Crown — the same institution that locks the same gates at 9:53 every night, whether or not anyone’s watching, because that’s what it’s always done. A Ravenmaster still cares for the birds every day, and their flight feathers are periodically trimmed against the chance they might leave. That is not folklore in the past tense. That is a government-adjacent body maintaining, in the present day, an active insurance policy against a threat it does not believe in.

I don’t think the ravens are evidence of anything supernatural, and I don’t think the people who care for them think so either. What I think is that the Tower never actually stopped needing to control how its own dead were narrated — it just got quieter about it. Four hundred years ago that control looked like a scaffold and a choice about who got to die out of sight. Now it looks like a Ravenmaster’s daily rounds, a gift shop, a paid ghost tour, and a story about Charles II that almost certainly isn’t true, told anyway because an unbroken tradition is better content than an invented one from 1883. The instinct hasn’t changed. Only the weapon has — from an axe to a brand.

That reframes the whole Tower of London ghosts catalogue for me, ghost by ghost. Anne Boleyn’s composed, dignified apparition isn’t dignified because that’s how she died — Tower Green wasn’t an act of tenderness, it was reputation management, hers and the Crown’s both, and the ghost story has quietly inherited that same PR instinct four centuries later: even in death, she gets the tasteful version. Margaret Pole doesn’t get that treatment. Her haunting is the one entry in this whole file that stayed ugly, that preserves the actual violence of what an execution can be when it goes wrong, rather than smoothing into something a tour guide can deliver with a straight face. I think that split tells you more about what we’re comfortable remembering than it tells you about either woman. We kept the beheading that plays well and let the one that doesn’t fade into a footnote about “reportedly chased around the scaffold.”

The Tower was never haunted by accident. It was built, expanded, and staffed for nine hundred years by people who understood — instinctively, then institutionally — that how you display a death is a form of power in itself, sometimes more durable than the power that did the killing. Tower Hill’s crowds are long gone. The spikes came down off London Bridge in the eighteenth century. But the impulse that put them there is still on the payroll, still tending ravens inside the walls, still selling tickets to the version of this story that photographs well.

That’s where I’ve landed. A state built an apparatus for controlling how its dead were seen, and never dismantled it — it just changed uniforms, from a soldier with an axe to a Ravenmaster with a clipboard and a gift shop by the exit. The instinct survived every reform that supposedly ended it.

So here’s what I can’t quite settle: when you buy the ticket, take the ghost tour, and stand on that lawn reading the ten names cut into the glass, whose choreography are you actually taking part in — the Crown’s, or your own? And if the machinery that once decided who got to die quietly and who got to die as a warning is still running, just wearing better branding, what does it say about us that we’re the ones still queuing up to watch it work?

Visitor Information

Affiliate disclosure: The Klook ticket link below is an affiliate link. If you book through it, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

The Tower of London sits a five-minute walk from Tower Hill Underground station (District and Circle lines), which has step-free access to street level and is by far the simplest approach. Tower Gateway DLR is a similar distance on foot; London Bridge and Fenchurch Street stations are both within fifteen minutes for anyone arriving by rail, and river boats stop beside the entrance at Tower Pier. There is no on-site parking. Tower Hill Coach and Car Park is the closest option, though driving into central London is rarely the easiest route.

Opening times vary by date and season, so check the official calendar before travelling. Allow around three hours for a proper visit, and arrive early if the Crown Jewels are a priority. Admission can be booked directly through Historic Royal Palaces; if you prefer a third-party option with flexible cancellation, you can compare Tower of London and Crown Jewels tickets on Klook. The Yeoman Warder tour is included with admission and is the best introduction to the execution history.

Tower Green is a small, unassuming lawn that is easy to pass without noticing; look for the glass memorial near the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula rather than expecting anything more dramatic. The chapel is included with admission but remains a working place of worship and may close for services. If you want to attend the nightly Ceremony of the Keys, it requires a separate advance ticket and currently carries a nominal charge. While standing on the green with a camera, give it the same quiet you would any place where people actually died.

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Sources

Books and Academic Works

Affiliate disclosure: The book links below are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you.

— Alison Weir, The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn — a detailed reconstruction of Anne’s arrest, imprisonment and execution.

— Nigel Jones, Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London — a broad history of the fortress and its changing political uses.

Official and Institutional Sources

— Historic Royal Palaces: Tower Green and Scaffold Site; Tower Hill Execution Memorial; and the Tower as a prison.

— Historic Royal Palaces: the Tower in the First World War; the Tower in the Second World War; and the history of the Ceremony of the Keys.

— Royal Collection Trust, Tower Green and the Place of Execution, for the documented execution landscape.

Folklore and Reported Hauntings

— Historic Royal Palaces, “Famous Ghost Stories of the Tower of London” — an institutional account of the Anne Boleyn, Henry VI, phantom bear and other legends discussed above.

— William Gregory, On Animal Magnetism (1851) — an early printed source for the phantom-bear story, best read in the context of Victorian mesmerism and spiritualism.