The Jewel House Keeper’s Ghost: A Spectral Bear at the Tower of London

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.

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.

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