20 Victorian Ghost Stories With Surprisingly Real Origins

According to late Victorian magazines, guests and sailors supposedly met a horrible death at 50 Berkeley Square, terror-stricken by a “Nameless Horror” in the attic. However, there is absolutely no police or local government record to substantiate such stories, which were likely rumors spread by imaginative neighbors reacting to the house’s decay. 50 Berkeley Square’s infamous resident was the wealthy recluse, Thomas Myers. The house fell into decay during his residency, from 1859 until his death in 1874.

On October 21, 1888, Maggie Fox stood on a stage in New York and confessed that a whole movement had risen from what she said was her ability to crack the joints in her toes. In March of 1848, she and her sister Kate claimed that they could communicate with a rapping spirit called “Mr. Splitfoot” (allegedly Charles B. Rosna, a murdered peddler) in Hydesville, New York. Their story jump-started the Spiritualism movement, which centered on the belief that the living could communicate with the dead.

Beginning in October 1837, people in London started talking about a clawed creature that could leap walls and breathe blue flame. As newspapers and cheap, sensational “penny dreadful” stories picked up the tale, the original reports grew into something much larger than life. The attacks were almost certainly the work of human pranksters and assailants, amplified by press-driven panic. But in early 1838, Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales suffered real attacks, and Lord Mayor Sir John Cowan called public meetings and organized police efforts to identify those responsible.

Borley Rectory would later become famous as one of England’s supposedly most haunted houses, particularly after paranormal investigator Harry Price studied it in the 20th century. But its ghost stories started much earlier. Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull built Borley Rectory in Essex in 1863. Local lore held that a medieval monastery previously occupied the location and that a nun had been executed there. There is no historical evidence that a monastery ever existed on the site. By July 1885, Bull’s family and servants claimed to have seen a nun on what they called the Nun’s Walk and the ghost of a headless coachman.

Charles Dickens published “The Signal-Man” in December 1866, but the tale’s horror drew partly from two actual railway disasters: the Clayton Tunnel crash in Sussex (August 25, 1861, 23 people killed) and the Staplehurst derailment in Kent (June 9, 1865, 10 people killed). Dickens himself survived the Staplehurst derailment and, during the following two weeks, lost his voice.

The perils of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Arctic trip were real, but its ghosts were not. In 1880, a twenty-year-old Conan Doyle, years before creating Sherlock Holmes, sailed as a ship’s surgeon aboard the Arctic whaler Hope from March to September. He later turned that experience into “The Captain of the Pole-Star,” in which the captain hears cries on the ice and glimpses the ghost of his dead fiancée. The story was published in Temple Bar magazine in January 1883.

Frederick Fisher, an emancipated convict, disappeared in June 1826 in Campbelltown, Australia. His neighbor, George Worrall, claimed that Fisher had left on a ship to England. In October 1826, farmer John Farley reported seeing Fisher’s ghost pointing toward a creek, where police, assisted by tracking dogs, found Fisher’s body. Worrall was hanged in February 1827, not because of the reported vision, but because of physical evidence, including bloodstains. What began as a Georgian-era murder became a famous Victorian ghost legend.

In Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1839 “Schalken the Painter,” a fictionalized version of the real Dutch Golden Age painter Godfried Schalcken watches as his beloved is forced to marry a corpse-like specter. Schalcken himself was famous for eerie, shadow-heavy, candlelit paintings, which helped give Le Fanu’s supernatural tale its atmosphere. So while Schalcken was real, the story’s nightmarish events were not.

In May 1827, 25-year-old Maria Marten, lover of William Corder, was murdered in Polstead, Suffolk. After Corder fled, Maria’s stepmother, Ann Marten, claimed she had three dreams revealing the location of the body. While some were skeptical of the visions, believing ordinary suspicions may have led Ann to the spot instead, her statement led to the discovery of Maria’s body, concealed in Corder’s Red Barn. Although Corder had sent letters claiming that Maria was still alive, the body was unearthed in April 1828, and Corder was hanged in August.

During renovations at London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1848, workmen broke through a hollow wall in the upper circle, revealing a bricked-up room and a skeleton with a dagger among the remains. The discovery naturally added fuel to the theater’s older ghostly tale of the ‘Man in Grey,’ an apparition said to appear wearing a tricorn hat and riding cloak.

Published in December 1884, Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Body Snatcher,” about medical students obtaining corpses for dissection, drew on the real-life murders of Burke and Hare. In 1828 in Edinburgh, William Burke and William Hare killed 16 people and sold the bodies to anatomy lecturer Dr. Robert Knox for dissection. While Burke was hanged in January 1829, Knox was never prosecuted, although his reputation was badly damaged.

Between 1882 and 1889, the occupants of a house in Cheltenham, England, reported seeing an apparition: a tall woman dressed in a widow’s black clothes and carrying a handkerchief. Medical student Rosina Despard, writing about herself under the pseudonym “Rose Morton,” investigated thoroughly and even tried trapping the apparition using pieces of string stretched across the stairs. Psychical researcher Frederic Myers later published an account of the case in 1892 through the Society for Psychical Research, an organization founded to investigate supposedly paranormal phenomena. Although the figure was tentatively identified as former resident Imogen Swinhoe, this was never confirmed. The case remains unexplained.

In February 1897, Scottish aristocrat the Marquess of Bute rented Ballechin House in Perthshire to investigate claims of poltergeist activity and an apparition of a nun connected to former owner Major Robert Steuart, who had died in 1876. Writer and paranormal investigator Ada Goodrich Freer directed the investigation and later published a book about it in 1899. But her methods soon became part of the controversy. The Society for Psychical Research criticized her methods and distanced itself from the Ballechin investigation, while the case sparked debate in The Times.

English novelist Wilkie Collins’ 1874 publication “The Dead Alive” was based on a real case of a supposedly murdered man turning up alive, which Collins learned about during a lecture tour in America. That man, Russell Colvin, had disappeared from Manchester, Vermont years earlier. In 1819, two brothers, Stephen and Jesse Boorn, were convicted of his murder and sentenced to death by hanging. Convicted on rumors and even dreams, the brothers were due to be executed until Colvin turned up alive and well in New Jersey. That is one way to overturn a murder conviction.

Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of King Henry VIII, was executed for treason in February 1542. According to a much later legend, she once escaped from her guards at Hampton Court Palace and ran screaming down a corridor toward the Royal Chapel. The ghost story took off after Queen Victoria opened Hampton Court Palace to the public for free in 1838. Visitors and guards reported hearing screams and seeing a white phantom in the same corridor, which they identified as Catherine. Victorian historians, including Agnes Strickland, and guidebooks perpetuated the legend.

The poltergeist case involving Esther Cox, a young Nova Scotian woman, began in 1878 in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and involved claims of spontaneous fires, flying objects, knocking sounds, and messages mysteriously etched into plaster. The alleged haunting began after Cox survived a traumatic assault. Modern researchers have suggested the events may have involved a combination of psychological trauma and possible deceit. In 1879, writer Walter Hubbell lived in the home to witness the supposed phenomena himself. In 1888, Hubbell published a bestselling book entitled The Great Amherst Mystery.

In the 1890s, dinner-party circles repeated a supernatural story supposedly told by Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, a British diplomat and former Viceroy of India. Legend has it that Dufferin once saw a mysterious man carrying a coffin and later recognized the same man’s face on an elevator operator at a Paris hotel. He refused to board the elevator, whose cable then supposedly broke and killed everyone inside. There is no mention of such a fatal Paris elevator accident in Paris police or hotel records.

The ghost stories around Sarah Whitehead only started after her death, but her real story started long before that. Her brother, Philip Whitehead, was a Bank of England clerk who was executed for forgery in 1811. From 1812 to the late 1830s or early 1840s, Sarah visited the Bank’s offices on Threadneedle Street almost every day, wearing a thick veil and black mourning dress to ask the clerks about her brother. The Bank directors took pity on Sarah and granted her a small allowance. Only later did stories transform the grieving woman into the ghost known as “Black Sarah” or the “Black Nun of the Bank.”

In Rudyard Kipling’s “The Phantom Rickshaw,” published in December 1885, British civil servant Jack Pansay cruelly abandons his lover, Agnes Keith-Wessington. After Agnes dies, her ghost and her yellow-paneled rickshaw torment Pansay on the mountain roads of Simla until his complete breakdown. Though Pansay and Agnes are wholly fictional characters, the setting was very familiar to Kipling, who spent time working as a journalist in Simla, then the summer capital of British India.

On July 11, 1881, 16-year-old Prince George, the future King George V, was temporarily aboard HMS Inconstant off Australia while his own ship, HMS Bacchante, was undergoing rudder repairs. He and other crew members reported seeing a spectral, red-glowing ship pass across their bows at 4:00 a.m. The sighting was recorded in the voyage journal associated with George and his older brother, Prince Albert Victor. The lookout who first spotted the apparition was said to have fallen from the mast and died a few hours later. Some maritime historians suggest the mysterious ship could have been a Fata Morgana, a type of mirage caused when layers of air at different temperatures distort distant objects, but this isn’t certain.

This content was created with the help of AI.