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"It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years": why the modern world was born of bloodshed
In the 18th century, developments in finance, weapons and industry converged to create a modern economy born of bloodshed. Clifton Crais explores how killing powered the industrial age
Imagine you’re in Nebraska, standing on North America’s Great Plains, where the broad Platte and Missouri rivers join on their way to the mighty Mississippi. It’s 1804, and in the blistering 36°C heat of summer you’re accompanying Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark as they head west towards the Pacific Ocean, exploring the commercial possibilities of this vast new country. Stretching away in front of you is a sea of chocolate-brown: thousands of animals, each standing as high as a man and weighing upwards of 900kg. Now picture putrefying carcasses and heaps of bleached bones extending as far as the eye can see. “The bones were everywhere,” homesteaders complained, “as thick as cones under a big fir tree”, and so numerous that it was impossible to plough the land. That was mere decades after Lewis and Clark’s fabled expedition. By the end of the 19th century, America’s population of bison had been reduced from tens of millions to around 350. Much of this killing unfolded over the course of just a few years – one of the most concentrated acts of ecological destruction in history. The usual explanation for the slaughter of the American bison ties it to the government’s decision to solve its ‘Indian problem’ – kill the bison and you destroy the Indigenous peoples’ food supply. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who had fought in the Civil War before heading west to subdue the Native American population. But politics didn’t kill the bison. Economics did. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-515301392webready-0494d00-e1771951017974.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing large piles of bison hides piled up after many animals have been killed for their skins" title="Thousands of bison hides lie in huge piles in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878. Advances in chemistry enabled hides to be processed and used in belts in industrial machinery (Image by Getty Images)" /> General Philip Sheridan, another Civil War veteran who led the Indian Campaign across the Great Plains, knew as much. These hunters “have done more in the last two years… to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years”, he said. “Send them powder and lead, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.” A combination of guns, finance and industry made the near extinction of the bison possible. New advances in firearms made the act of slaughtering bison faster and achievable from a far greater distance. Banks rushed across the Mississippi, lending money to hunters and turning them into “businessmen with rifles”. Advances in chemistry transformed the animals’ body parts into saleable commodities, especially their notoriously difficult-to-process hides. Many of these hides ended up in factories – somewhere between 2 and 6 million in England in the 1870s and 1880s alone. Skins became drive belts that were integral to the machinery of mass production in the industrial revolution. Until the advent of rubber, industrial belting was made from hides, including those of the American bison. Meanwhile, American settlers gathered millions of tonnes of bison bones. Railway companies laid down branch lines for the sole purpose of collecting the bones and shipping them east, where they were processed in places such as the Michigan Carbon Works in Detroit – that state’s largest factory before the automobile revolution. Bones were turned into fertiliser, carbon filters and inks. For a time, bison bone could be found in ‘fine bone’ china and even in mascara. Back on the Great Plains, wealth accrued by killing and bone harvesting supported the rise of farming and ranching. Read more | These three unsuspecting inventions won the American Wild West – but did they destroy it too? What unfolded on the killing fields of the US was part of a global phenomenon. Industrial capitalism’s ‘big bang’ and our current age of global warming emerged out of the greatest act of violence the planet had seen since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, when a meteor crashed into the Yucatán, killing off the dinosaurs and enabling the rise of mammals. The development of modern finance and the mass production of guns, bullets and gunpowder made killing for capitalism possible. This also helps explain the rapid rise to global economic dominance of the UK and the US: two countries that were adept at extracting wealth from destruction. By the first decade of the 19th century, the US’s GDP per capita was on a par with the UK’s. The economic historians Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson have written that the US became “one of the first, if not the first, [countries] to join the modern economic growth club” pioneered by the UK. The two would soon account for a large percentage of global wealth and until 1900 were responsible for most global industrial CO₂ emissions. Firearms have a long history – almost 1,000 years – but in the 18th century the flintlock musket became the ubiquitous weapon of choice. A dramatic improvement on earlier guns that used matchlocks, it was versatile and cheap to produce – the Ford Fiesta of firearms. An experienced marksman could get off three shots in a minute. Workshops and factories across the western world scrambled to meet the insatiable global demand for the new weapon. England became the world leader in musket manufacture and distribution, beginning in London’s East End before spreading to Birmingham and Liverpool. Muskets were useless without gunpowder and lead, and England had plentiful supplies of the latter. Mines in Northumberland and Derbyshire yielded thousands of tonnes of the metal each year. When it came to gunpowder, the British East India Company’s exploitation of the subcontinent’s resources proved vital, especially the principal chemical, saltpetre. The monopolistic East India Company considered its control over the saltpetre trade to be “combined and interwoven with the welfare and even with the existence of the empire in India”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL44583webready-ef1bf1a-e1771951145854.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Workers inside a brick‑walled workshop tend large heated pans built into furnaces while others handle tall conical molds set over containers, with steam rising from the equipment. Metal vessels filled with processed gunpowder materials are scattered across the floor, showing multiple stages of early gunpowder production." title="Gunpowder is made at the Woolwich Arsenal, c1750. Controlling large reserves of Indian saltpetre, an ingredient of gunpowder, Britain became a major player in arms manufacture (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Thanks to the research of Dr Nicholas Radburn at Lancaster University, we have quite precise figures for the millions of pounds of saltpetre imported into the UK, and the overall production of British gunpowder, across the entire 18th century. Between 1698 and 1808, Britain produced more than 522 million pounds of gunpowder. Much went to its military, especially the navy, where a single shot from a 16-pound cannon used 8 pounds of powder. But more than 78 million pounds were exported to Africa, the Caribbean and what would become the United States and Canada. These are just the official numbers, though; the real totals are probably higher. In any case, that was enough powder for more than 1.25 billion musket shots – a number greater than the entire global population in 1750. Other nations got in on the action, too, especially the French and the Dutch. Americans weren’t far behind, and by the 1820s US-made weapons were being sold far and wide, especially across the Pacific Ocean and into China, where American Colt pistols were used in the 1850–64 Taiping Rebellion – one of the most catastrophic wars in human history. Plying the world with weapons was a volatile business – literally. Stores of gunpowder and saltpetre frequently exploded. The 1794 Ratcliffe Fire in London, sparked when a barge loaded with saltpetre caught fire, was the worst conflagration in the capital since 1666. It was described by The Times as “a striking and awful spectacle” – devastation on a scale not matched in London until the Blitz of 1940–41. On the other side of the Atlantic, throughout the 19th century there were almost yearly accidents at the huge DuPont explosives factory in Delaware, where a local cemetery was filled with the victims. Murder and pillage are nothing new. In fact, both are as old as our species. However, with the widespread proliferation of weapons in the 18th century, killing became infinitely easier. Read more | Did Aztec civilisation really ‘collapse’? The reality isn’t as simple as you might think This is where modern finance enters the picture. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Spanish were outstanding at pillaging, producing men such as Hernán Cortés who rampaged across Mexico. The Conquistadors ransacked from the Americas the equivalent of billions of dollars in today’s money, much of it in precious metals. But Spain struggled to convert wealth produced by violence into capital for investment and production – and capital is what capitalism is all about. Instead, it spent its fortunes on religious and dynastic wars, churches, art, buildings and other forms of conspicuous consumption. England’s financial transformation was a game changer, building on innovations pioneered by the Dutch in the 17th century. In the 18th century, there was a revolution in English banking, along with a tranche of developments including insurance, bonds, stock markets, patent law and an increasingly standardised currency. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the number of banks outside London increased 30-fold, and doubled in that city. London became the “capital of capital”, as the economic historian Youssef Cassis termed it, led by the Bank of England, which was established in the closing years of the 17th century. “The multiplication of banking companies,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776), was a great example of the virtues of competition and increased public confidence in the economy. Wealth – including that generated by violence – was free to become capital. By 1820, the US had just over 300 banks. Forty years later, that number had grown to more than 1,500 – a five-fold increase, and many more than in the UK. With banking came an array of financial innovations, from insurance to stocks and bonds. Like that of its former imperial master, the US legal system protected wealth – whether it was land, money or, across the South, human beings – which meant that it was easy to transform wealth into investable capital. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL87937webready-7efb6df-e1771951291786.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A busy 19th‑century city street where a crowd of men in top hats gathers in animated discussion, while two barefoot newsboys hold up papers in the foreground. Behind them, tall commercial buildings with large signs and a horse‑drawn streetcar marked “Broadway” frame the bustling urban setting." title="Crowds throng Wall Street, New York City’s banking hub, during a financial panic in 1857. The United States’ rise as an economic heavyweight was boosted by its ability to convert the wealth it accrued from the killing of bison, beaver and whales into capital for investment (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> This is how bison hides ended up in factories, and their bones in your ancestor’s teacup, connecting Manchester with Wyoming, halfway around the world. The connections to killing don’t stop there, though. Those factories required lighting. Sunlight alone was unacceptable to factory owners, who wanted their workers to be labouring as long as humanly (or inhumanly) possible, sometimes from five in the morning until well into the night. Until the advent of hydrocarbons such as paraffin and natural gas, it was whale oil that kept these places lit. England was soon consuming at least 50,000 barrels of the stuff each year, generating more than 3 billion lumen-hours of illumination. By the 1830s, most of the whale oil entering England ended up in its factories for lighting and lubrication. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, anywhere between a quarter and a third of sperm-whale oil (which produced the best light) harvested by American whalers made its way into factories. Whale oil was also used for lighting in Caribbean mills, where enslaved people were forced to work continuously to process the sugar-cane juice that helped provide cheap energy for the industrial working classes. Demand for lubrication and lighting in both factories and cities resulted in the mass slaughter of whales, from Greenland to the Indian Ocean. Though it is impossible to determine the exact scale of the killing, we do know that about 2 million whales were slaughtered between 1750 and 1900. Whaling produced huge profits until the number of those marine mammals dwindled, and whalers were forced to spend more time at sea, often returning home with empty casks. In the case of New England’s whale industry, profits were reinvested in a variety of businesses, from cotton mills to railways and the transition to fossil fuels in the US. One of the world’s largest textile factories – the Wamsutta Mills in New Bedford, Massachusetts – was funded by the harvesting of whales. And some of the early investors in what became John D Rockefeller’s powerful and notorious Standard Oil Company amassed their capital from hunting whales. People found many ways of turning into capital the natural resources in their surroundings. England’s land-enclosure movement was one of them, and has commonly been offered as an explanation for the development of capitalism, going back to the works of the classical political economists in the 18th and 19th centuries. But using violence to generate capital was a global process, and an ongoing one. It proved possible to turn just about anything into profit, from whales and bison to deer, beaver and African elephants – plus another mammal: Homo sapiens. The spread of guns led to a global increase in enslavement, most infamously across Africa. Beginning in the early 16th century and continuing for over 350 years, more than 12.5 million enslaved people were trafficked from Africa’s shores – by far the largest forced migration in human history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-517213402webready-820476d-e1771951455442.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting depicting a slave auction. A man in a blue suit and grey top hat stands on top of a large box, talking to a crowd of gentleman, pointing towards a group of people of colour sitting on the floor, looking sad" title="Enslaved African people are sold at auction in the US, c1852. Vast numbers perished as a result of the transatlantic slave trade (Image by Getty Images)" /> However, nearly 7.9 million people – 63 per cent of the total Atlantic trade in human beings – were moved in just 60 years from the mid-18th century, during the industrial revolution and just as weapons began flooding the continent. This rapid expansion of the slave trade precisely tracks the import of gunpowder into Africa, as Nicholas Radburn has demonstrated definitively. The UK alone exported more than 26 million kg of explosives to Africa in the 18th century, most of it after 1750. Weapons yielded the greatest gains. One result, as the tyrannical King Adandozan of Dahomey (reigned 1797–1818) bragged, was a kingdom where his people “cultivated not with hoes, but with guns”. People hunting people is part of the nasty and brutish reality of enslavement. But how many people lost their lives to produce the 7.9 million people shipped across the Atlantic, where nearly 10 per cent died along the way to the Americas? I have estimated upwards of 2–3 people died to yield a single enslaved person. In other words, perhaps as many as 24 million humans perished in the flood of weapons and enslavement. Similar ratios unfolded elsewhere in the world, where guns were used to hunt people. In the south-east US – where Indigenous people were employed to hunt and enslave other Native Americans – the hunters killed three Native Americans for every one they captured. We know that profits from the transatlantic trade increased dramatically in this period, as work by Nobel-Prize-winning economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson has demonstrated. The Caribbean sugar and American cotton that made its way into workers’ cups of tea and into the English textile mills – which were releasing CO₂ and beginning to warm the Earth’s atmosphere – were tied to Africa’s killing fields. The industrial revolution and our own age of global warming are inextricably tied not just to the institution of slavery – a continuing subject of debate across the world – but also to the mass destruction of people, animals and the environment that guns and finance made possible. Read more | The profits of slavery: the dire impact of empire on Britain's countryside This is the dark reality of capitalism’s creation myth – one that historians and climate scientists are now beginning to understand. The industrial revolution and the global warming that now threatens our very existence emerged from the globalisation of killing for profit. The deaths of millions of Africans that underpinned the entire Atlantic slavery complex is only the most obvious connection. While there were other factors at play here, the wealth generated by the system of slavery “contributed causally to Britain’s industrial revolution”, according to a 2022 study. This recognition underpins many ongoing and fraught discussions, especially in the UK – most recently the February 2025 parliamentary debates on reparations, and the July 2025 University of Edinburgh report on donor links to slavery. These conversations, however, miss something very basic. History’s horrors go deeper into the totality of destruction that made our world economy – one that entangles the deaths of Africans with the slaughter of bison and whales in addition to a vast number of other species. This is one reason why the popular term ‘Anthropocene’ may not suffice, and why I have suggested a different word to describe the epoch that created our contemporary planetary peril: the ‘Mortecene’ – the Age of Killing and Death. Clifton Crais is a professor of history at Emory University. His new book is The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (Picador, 2026) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
He's the Victorian serial killer you've never heard of – and we may now know who he was
By 1889, Jack the Ripper’s grisly murders had sparked terror across London. So when a woman’s headless, mutilated body was found near the Thames, a coded alert was dispatched to police: “Another Whitechapel.” But her killer wasn’t Jack. Lucy Worsley investigates the horrifying crimes of the ‘Thames Torso Murderer’
In the final years of the 1880s, it truly wasn’t safe for women to venture out alone onto the streets of London. Extraordinary though it seems, there was not one but two serial killers on the loose in the same corner of the capital. We’ve all heard of Jack the Ripper, the notoriously brutal criminal who cut the throats of at least five women in and around Whitechapel – and, in doing so, triggered a firestorm of speculation over his identity that continues to rage to this day. But another murderer was plying his grisly trade along the banks of the Thames. He is the scariest Victorian serial killer you’ve probably never heard of – a man who became known as the ‘Thames Torso Murderer’. Because the Ripper slayings attract so much attention, that contemporary killer has been almost completely forgotten. There may be several reasons for this. The Ripper victims were all identified, the killings took place in a shorter time within a close community, and there were various ‘clues’ and ‘sightings’. In addition, the Ripper was clearly motivated by a hot rage against women. The Torso killer, much colder and better at planning, seems less knowable. Yet though he had a very different character and method, his crimes against women were every bit as shocking. In both cases, studying the evidence for their crimes and the lives of their victims reveals a wealth of information about life on the fringes of society in 1880s London, the most populous city in the world at the time. And now, nearly 140 years since the first of the Thames Torso Murders was committed, the culprit in this very cold case has – to my satisfaction, at least – at last been identified. The evidence I’ll lay out here, which I share in my new BBC Two series, would not stand up in a court of law. But researchers using modern techniques and, in particular, analysing large sets of data, have come up with a compelling theory. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/1362213-2webready-0141b36-e1771417616576.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black-and-white Victorian newspaper illustration about the Whitechapel murders. At the center is a circular portrait of a curly-haired woman labeled “The Berner St. Victim.” Surrounding panels show scenes from the investigation: on the left, two men stand over a covered body on a table; below, a man discovers a woman’s body lying on a dark street. In the middle foreground, a uniformed police constable raises his arm to signal for assistance while two men crouch beside another woman’s body on the ground. On the right, small panels depict a police inspector in profile, a meeting of officials seated around a table, and a nighttime street scene marked as the “fatal spot” in Mitre Square, Aldgate. A bold headline across the center reads, “Two More Whitechapel Horrors. When Will the Murderer Be Captured?”" title="Jack the Ripper’s killing spree makes the front page of The Illustrated Police News, September 1888 (Image by Topfoto)" /> Gruesome discovery On 10 September 1889, a woman’s body was found by a police constable in Whitechapel, beneath railway arches bordering Pinchin Street, placed there in the early hours of the morning. Those arches are still there; in fact, you can still walk along many of the streets, riverbanks and water-stairs that form the backdrop for this story, which unfolded mainly in central London, along the Thames between Tower Bridge and Battersea Bridge. Distressingly, only the torso was discovered beneath the arches; the legs and head had been removed. Read more | Nell Darby's historical cold cases: murder in the year of the Ripper She was the fourth such mutilated victim to turn up. Three more, also women, had already been found in and around the Thames. Each had been dismembered, their severed limbs and other body parts being discovered piecemeal by horrified members of the public. There was a torso in the river at Rainham, Essex in 1887, followed by more remains left in the city. Then, in 1888, parts were dumped at spots around Whitehall. The torso of that victim was carefully placed for discovery in the unfinished new headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, which looks very much like jeering at authority: ‘catch me if you can.’ And in June 1889, various remains from another victim were found, mostly in and around Battersea. None of the women’s heads were located. Why did police conclude at the time that all were victims of one killer? As well as the strange disposal of body parts along the Thames, there was a common method to the way the bodies were cut up. The Irish pathologist Dr Marie Cassidy, one of our experts in the series, points out that such dismemberment was slow, skilled work that must have been done in a place of privacy, perhaps a house or workshop. But a new factor in the fourth case was the placing of the torso away from the river and – perhaps not coincidentally – on territory by then deemed to ‘belong’ to the Ripper. Perhaps the Thames Torso Murderer was jealous of the media attention that ‘Jack’ had attracted. Perhaps he even wanted to taunt the Ripper by working on ‘his’ patch. A recent Dockers’ Strike, which saw 75,000 workers walk off the job, had prompted the deployment of 2,000 extra policemen into the East End. So the torso in Pinchin Street must have been placed in the railway arches very quickly and precisely between half-hourly police patrols. Carrying a torso through the streets was risky: the killer must have had nerves of steel. But this was his pattern: he’d managed to place the torso of his second victim in the middle of a busy building site without being detected. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-1645164483webready-c056b98-e1771418656980.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a large brown brick wall curving from the right to the left, with several arch imprints on it. There is a white road sign that reads PINCHIN STREET on the right hand side. Behind this large wall, there is a tall grey and brown tower block" title="The mutilated body of a woman was found near Pinchin Street. To do this, the killer must have carried the torso through busy streets patrolled by police (Image by Getty Images)" /> The fourth murder was a little different, though, maybe because the third hadn’t gone to plan. Clearly contrary to the killer’s intentions, that victim was identified. One of the body parts had been wrapped in fabric from a distinctively checked coat. The friends of a woman who’d gone missing came forward to say they’d recognised descriptions of the garment as one belonging to Elizabeth Jackson. Elizabeth’s life story demonstrates something that was probably true of the other victims, too: that women living precariously on the fringes of society were very vulnerable. Poor Elizabeth was pregnant without being married. She had left her job in domestic service and became estranged from her Catholic family, turning to the workhouse rather than asking them for support. In the last days of her life she had been sleeping rough by the river. She had a friend called ‘Ginger Nell,’ who was described at the time as “an unfortunate”, which means she probably sold sex. Ginger Nell warned Elizabeth to look out for bad men down by the river. It was wise advice that proved sadly prescient. Read more | These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators? The identity of the person who’d killed Elizabeth and her unborn child, along with the three other unnamed victims, remained a mystery. The case stumped those investigating at the time. Modern analysis of the police surgeons’ reports shows that they didn’t do a bad job of seeking clues from the human remains, but they lacked two advantages we have today: the science of psychological profiling, and the ability to search large sets of data. A history of violence The person who I believe has identified the Thames Torso Murderer is researcher and author Sarah Bax Horton. She decided that the killer must have had a close connection to the Thames, where so many body parts were found. She also thought that he likely had a history of violent crimes against women. Her real act of genius, though, was to search the online database of British newspapers within the timeframe of the four murders, looking for crime stories containing mentions of the river Thames and violence against women. Among the names emerging from her search, one stood out: James Crick (1862–1907). Crick, Bax Horton’s research reveals, was a waterman, ferrying passengers across the Thames in his skiff. His boat could have provided the private place that the murderer required in which to kill and dismember his victims. Crick operated from Horselydown Old Stairs leading to the water near Butler’s Wharf. These water-stairs are now a hotspot for tourists and Instagrammers because they offer a wonderful view of Tower Bridge. At the time of the murders in the 1880s, the bridge was still under construction. Enabling rapid river crossings, it would eventually steal watermen’s livelihoods. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL2801843webready-8207f7d-e1771417994352.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white illustration depicting a man in a long black coat and a tall black hat, rowing a boat in a river. To the left are two other men in sitting in the boat. Behind them all are some sketches of tall buildings with lots of rectangular windows" title="An 1857 illustration of a London waterman ferrying passengers on the Thames. Might the killer have been such a man, using his boat to carry off, kill and dismember women? (Image by Bridgman Images)" /> Crick was first mentioned in the papers for an alleged assault against his wife, Rosina. He’d kicked her, causing her to scream loudly enough to bring the police to their house. Rosina said that her husband was often mysteriously missing at night. But he was not convicted of any crime. Basically, Rosina wasn’t believed. Next came a report that Crick had been accused of raping 31-year-old Jessie Miller. She had a low-skilled job folding paper for the book trade, she was separated from her husband, and she was short of money. On 1 July 1889, the Shah of Persia arrived in London aboard his yacht to visit Britain’s royal family, his progress up the Thames being observed by huge crowds. On this festive day, Crick tempted Jessie into his boat with the offer of a free ride. He then “did ravish and carnally know” Jessie in his boat, but she jumped into the water and escaped. Again she was not believed in court – and, again, Crick got off. Three of the Thames torsos had been discovered before Jessie’s ordeal. The fourth was discovered that September in Pinchin Street, across the river from Horselydown Old Stairs. That October, a 39-year-old named Sarah Warburton, whose poorly paid job was to sew fur trimmings onto clothes, had the misfortune to accept a lift in Crick’s boat. An illiterate mother of three, Sarah was, like Jessie before her, separated. On this occasion, though, Crick’s luck failed. To assault Sarah, he took his skiff to an out-of-the-way spot alongside a steamer moored underneath the half-finished Tower Bridge. But she hit him on the head with an iron bolt and fled, screaming, onto the ship’s deck. There she was heard by a passing police boat, and Crick was apprehended by Inspector Charles Ford as he tried to row away. At last, James Crick was convicted. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/dreamstimexxl150941857webready-75f4182-e1771418129790.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of Tower Bridge in London, lit up at night. Taken from below, there is a set of stone steps and a railing in the foreground, with the two towers of the bridge standing in the middle of the images. The bridge is lit up with yellow lights and the sky is a dark blue behind it." title="The remains of Horselydown Old Stairs leading to the river at Tower Bridge, which was being built at the time of the murders. It was from here that waterman James Crick worked – and perhaps picked up women to kill (Image by Dreamstime)" /> I suspect that was only because Sarah’s witness statement was backed up by that of a Metropolitan Police inspector. With his support, her testimony, so bravely given and so cleverly recovered by Sarah Bax Horton, was enough to put Crick behind bars. And once he was in prison, the bodies stopped appearing along the Thames. Chillingly, Sarah also reported something Crick had said to her during the attack: “I intend to settle you, as I have done other women that have been found in the Thames.” Was that a confession? I believe so. Read more | Hallie Rubenhold: “To most people, the women killed by the Ripper are just corpses. I want to tell a different story” Unmarked graves What became of the victims? Elizabeth Jackson was given a pauper’s burial in Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey, the largest graveyard in the world at the time. The torso found in Whitehall was also buried at Brookwood; neither grave is marked. The woman found in Pinchin Street was buried in the East London Cemetery, where she didn’t even get a funeral. Records do roughly indicate where their bodies lie, and these burial grounds are moving places to visit. In death, we can give these women the remembrance and respect they deserve. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-90748470webready-76d630c-e1771418795616.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white illustration showing an arched entrance to a train station, with ornate gates across the arch. Over the arch, the words CEMETERY STATION are written. At the top of the building, the word NECROPOLIS is written. To the left of the station entrance, there is a three storey building with four windows visible" title="The London terminus for the Necropolis Railway serving Brookwood Cemetery, where third victim Elizabeth Jackson was given a pauper’s burial (Image by Getty Images)" /> I believe that the Thames Torso Murderer claimed more victims than the four we know. If he truly was James Crick, then his abused wife, Rosina, and his rape targets Jessie and Sarah were also his victims. Rosina and Sarah managed to get on with their lives. The unfortunate Jessie did not. After a spell in the workhouse, she died at the age of 43 as “a drunkard and an unfortunate under the wheels of an omnibus”. She was a casualty not only of a terrible man but also of a society offering no safety net for women who fell on hard times. Three in the frame Which of these men might have committed the Thames Torso Murders? Jack Fairclough was a one-time partner of Elizabeth Jackson, and possibly the father of her child. They lived an itinerant life together, building up debts, and witnesses report that Jack had “unnaturally used” her. The police were obviously interested in this itinerant stonemason and army deserter, but Jack could prove that, at the time of Elizabeth’s death, he’d been away from London looking for work. James Hardiman was a cats’ meat man, a door-to-door pet-food salesman who worked with a barrow that would have been ideal for transporting a torso through London’s streets. The body of Ripper victim Annie Chapman was found in his mother’s backyard in Hanbury Street, Whitechapel, leading some to speculate that Hardiman was both Jack and the Thames Torso Murderer. However, their methods of killing seem too different. James Crick was a waterman who rowed passengers on the Thames in his boat Ally Sloper. Crick had the physical strength to commit the crimes. He also had the perfect means of distributing the body parts by water, and his boat could have provided a place where he could have dismembered the bodies out of sight. He had a history of violence against women, too. After Sarah Warburton, the target of his final identifiable rape attempt, gave testimony at trial, he was convicted and imprisoned – and the killings on the river ceased. (He was released in 1902, and died in 1907.) Crick, then, must be considered the prime suspect. This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
Medieval vampire slayers: why did our ancestors dig up and dismember the dead?
At the turn of the 12th century, two men from a Staffordshire village died suddenly. A few days after they were solemnly laid to rest, they were spotted walking around the village, with their coffins on their backs. John Blair investigates the medieval terror of the living dead
In the last decades of the 12th century, the townsfolk of Annan in the Scottish borders were terrified by a sinister nocturnal revenant that stalked the dark byways. “Each night his corpse, driven by Satan, left his grave and wandered through the streets” accompanied by howling dogs and spreading sickness and death, according to the contemporary chronicler William of Newburgh. Desperate to put an end to the unholy scourge, two brothers whose father had been carried off by the plague opened the grave and “exposed the corpse, which was distended to a huge corpulence, with a swollen, livid face. It was observed that the shroud, which had been wound around it, was completely shredded up. Too angry to be frightened, the young men struck a blow at the lifeless corpse, whereupon such a flow of blood gushed out that they understood it to be a sucker of many people’s blood. Dragging it out of the town, they quickly built a pyre.” Recalling the accepted wisdom that such a being would burn only after they’d cut out its heart, the brothers took their shovels and hacked out the organ – after which the cadaver was immolated. The curse was finally over. Walking corpses To modern ears, this story stretches credulity far beyond breaking point. Not so to William of Newburgh: he recorded another three such tales, and hinted at many more. There are “numerous modern cases and abundant reports”, he wrote, but “it would be just too laborious and burdensome to write down all episodes of this kind that I have heard to have happened in our own times”. Yet though walking corpses were boringly commonplace in the 1190s, they had almost vanished from the English scene only a few decades later. Apparently they retreated northwards, leaving only occasional traces south of the border with Scotland. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/W45702webready-05b1689-e1769699879666.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration shows two people standing over a cut up body, with the person on the left handing the decapitated head of the body to the person on the right" title="A corpse is dismembered in a medieval illustration. During the Middle Ages, mutilation was inflicted on cadavers believed to be restless (Image by Alamy)" /> This spotlight on high medieval Britain illustrates a basic fact about ‘vampire’ beliefs in many periods and places across the globe: they tend to come and go. Though some societies retained low-level fears about dangerous corpses over many centuries, there have also been many short, sharp episodes of corpse-killing that reached an intensity justifying the label ‘epidemic’. Some are described in medieval texts such as William of Newburgh’s, covering a period from about 1050 to 1200. Others leave no written evidence, and must be inferred from distinctive patterns of mutilation found in excavated burials: corpses turned upside-down, hearts pierced or removed, limbs broken or bound, heads removed, craniums and jaws separated. Read more | Long before Dracula, an ancient Mesopotamian civilisation raised the world's oldest vampires Why do communities suddenly erupt into frenzies of corpse-killing? Fundamentally, the act reflects fear of social disruption, fear of political or religious change, or fear of disease. In fact, it can be defined as a form of persecution mania – that tragic, paranoid reaction that makes people turn against minority groups in their midst. But there is a crucial difference: unlike witches or heretics, corpses cannot suffer because they are dead already. Killing the dead is better than killing the living. Archaeological evidence from late Roman and early Anglo-Saxon England suggests several persuasive cases of posthumously ‘killed’ corpses. There are too few of them to suggest clear patterns – until we reach a group of distinctive female burials in Yorkshire and County Durham from c550–80 AD. These women were buried face-down – often accompanied by charms and other ritual items – in strange, contorted attitudes, often with one leg or arm raised so that it almost touched the surface of the grave. It looks as though these were traditional healers or ‘wise women’ – powerful in life and potentially troublesome after death, so measures to restrain them were necessary. In that society, as in many others, the dangerous dead were mainly female. Unholy nuns From around 650, that perception carried over to the new world of royal nunneries that dominated early Christian England. Traditionally powerful women could reinvent themselves as holy nuns and abbesses, exercising something like their erstwhile supernatural powers within the new belief system. One narrative from Wimborne nunnery in the 720s hints at corpse fears. It recounts the story of a sadistic prioress who died unreconciled with the young nuns whom she had tormented. They gleefully danced on her grave – but then, to the abbess’s horror, the grave-earth sunk, a phenomenon explained in later eastern European folklore as a sign that the corpse has climbed out. In England around 650–700, a series of non-monastic burials – almost entirely of young women – were mutilated in a consistent way: the corpse was pulled over onto its front, the heart was possibly removed or pierced, the head was removed, and the cranium and lower jaw were thrown back in different parts of the grave. Read more | Marvellous medieval medicine: why their curious cures were better than you think The seventh century was a period of rapid religious change and social transformation, so it is unsurprising that people felt disorientated, and that their fears focussed on certain ‘special’ women who were perceived to be reservoirs of supernatural power. Corpse anxieties seem to have died down across the eighth century, but did not disappear entirely. Young women were still sometimes targeted, their trussed and mutilated corpses laid face-down in boundary ditches. The gender balance then shifted. In a ninth to 10th-century cemetery at Godalming in Surrey, it was mostly male corpses that had nails and iron spikes driven into their shoulders, necks and knees. The age of castles, military power and ‘feudal’ dominance was approaching in northern Europe, and there was no lack of disruption and psychological trauma to breed paranoid fears. In this increasingly man’s world, as traditional wise women declined in power and status, violent corpses were increasingly envisaged as male. That brings us back to the lurid prose of William of Newburgh and his contemporaries. The high medieval British epidemic coincided with a period of greater theological sophistication in north-western Europe (including, for instance, the elaboration of the idea of purgatory), more complex scholastic thought, and higher levels of literacy. Accordingly, there was more questioning of received doctrine, and more concern by the clerical establishment to define, stigmatise and punish ‘heresy’. It is very interesting that, whereas the French persecuted heretics and not corpses, England saw virtually no heresy trials but widespread corpse-killing – an excellent illustration of how attacks on the dead can help to spare the living. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/BAL1278768webready-497e003-e1769698475877.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A red, blue and black stained glass window showing four people sitting alongside one another, praying" title="Souls in purgatory, shown in a 14th-century French stained-glass window. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory may have shaped medieval concepts about the dead who had not moved on (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Noxious corpses Ten stories survive from 12th-century England, all concerning noxious male corpses: excommunicates, oath-breakers, corrupt judges, dissolute priests. One Buckinghamshire man paid unwelcome night-time visits to his widow, “took to dancing around wildly among the animals”, and finally “started wandering around by day, frightening everyone though visible only to some”. For sheer excitement, a story recorded by a monk of Burton-upon-Trent, and set in a nearby village around 1100, is in a class of its own. Two perjured villagers died suddenly and were buried. They then appeared walking around the village, sometimes carrying their coffins on their backs and sometimes in the shape of animals. They behaved threateningly and spread disease, causing many deaths. When their graves were opened, the corpses proved to have resisted natural decay, and the cloths over their faces were “very horribly bloody”. Their heads were cut off and placed between their thighs, and their hearts were cut out and burned on a hilltop, where they crackled with a loud noise; a black crow flew up from the flames. Read more | “Ghoul-like beyond nightmare dream, they were the living dead”: belief in Vampires through history After 1200, most of the British evidence comes from Scotland. A story set in the Clyde Valley west of Glasgow in 1295 describes how an evil-living monk returned from his grave to visit a knight’s house. “Having assumed a body – it is uncertain whether natural or aerial, but it was dank, gross and tangible” – he appeared in broad daylight in his monastic habit, and took to climbing around on the roofs. People tried to shoot and stab him, but anything penetrating “that damned substance” immediately burned up. No later Scottish stories are quite so lurid, but a resilient substratum of belief can be seen in the many post-medieval oral ballads that describe dead relatives and lovers coming home in bodily form. A strand survived the Reformation and was assimilated into Calvinist theology in the idea that the devil could occupy the corpse of even a virtuous person. In his Daemonologie of 1597, King James VI (later I of England) observed reassuringly “that the Devil may use as well the ministry of the bodies of the faithful in these cases as of the unfaithful, there is no inconvenient: for his haunting with their bodies after they are dead can no-ways defile them, in respect of the soul’s absence”. Beliefs about the dangerous dead didn’t disappear from England entirely. There seems to have been an undercurrent of low-level but persistent anxiety that surfaced at different times and in different places. A 14th-century story from Byland Abbey in Yorkshire recounts that a local rector who died and was buried near the abbey’s chapter house developed “the habit of going out by night, and one night he put out the eye of his concubine”. His body was dug up and dumped in a local lake – though the oxen pulling the cart carrying the corpse “almost sank through fear”. Stone dead Some suggestively mutilated bodies from later periods have also been discovered. Perhaps the latest and strangest was a victim of the 1665–66 plague who was buried in a London church. He was later found to have a large stone in his mouth – a mode of corpse-killing that was standard in Lutheran Germany at the time but unknown in England. Was he a member of the immigrant mercantile community? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/BAL5864439webready-7cd79c8-e1769698055247.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white engraving showing a man standing facing a skeleton, representing Death." title="Death meets a German mercenary in an engraving. Beliefs in the dangerous dead led to stones being placed in the mouths of corpses to quell them (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> It’s not entirely clear why such beliefs were so rare in late medieval and early modern England at times when they assumed epidemic proportions in some parts of central Europe. For instance, the Black Death plague pandemic of 1347–51 seems to have whipped up corpse fears in Greece and Serbia – so why did it have no such effect in England? It may be because the people of England now widely believed in the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which offered a different framework for conceptualising the dead who had not quite moved on. Another factor could be the English enthusiasm for persecuting witches at points in the 16th and 17th centuries. Except in a few locations – Scotland and Moravia, for example – witch-killing and corpse-killing tended to occupy different spaces in early modern Europe, and seem to have provided alternative outlets for the same anxieties. European beliefs in the dangerous dead were never the same again after a series of lurid corpse-killings in Serbia in 1725–32 were widely reported for the first time in the western press. These reports brought with them a new word – vampire – that quickly drove out all synonyms. From that moment, folklore and fiction became inextricably entwined. Sensational novelists embroidered what they read, and their own readers in turn assimilated their work into popular beliefs. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871–72 novella Carmilla sensitively reworked the idea of a loving but predatory dead female derived ultimately from ancient Chinese tradition. But it was of course Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) that imposed an indelible – if highly misleading – image of the ‘European vampire’, overlaying and ultimately obliterating the last traces of genuine English popular belief. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/RJGAYDwebready-0963212-e1769700002267.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white engraving of a woman creeping towards a person laying in a bed, with her arm reached out towards them" title="An illustration from the 1871–72 Gothic novella Carmilla shows the eponymous bloodsucker approaching her victim. Sheridan Le Fanu’s tale drew on ancient stories of predatory dead women (Image by Alamy)" /> Remarkably, the idea of turning a potentially dangerous corpse upside-down survived a decade or two longer. In rural Devonshire sometime around the turn of the 20th century, a farmer was recorded telling the tale of a wicked local woman who had recently died “cussin’ and dam’in”, and whose coffin had been turned over. “Her ’ont be troublesome then, ’cause if her do begin to diggy her can on’y diggy downwards,” he claimed. The grim finale to this particular English superstition was acted out during the First World War, after a slim English youth had killed a “huge, scowling” German soldier. “Later,” an officer observed, “I found our men burying him most carefully – face downwards. You know why. If he began digging his way out, he would only go deeper.” Epidemics of the undead Five periods when fears of living corpses terrified societies around the world Ancient Mesopotamia: eternal non-sleeping Fears of the dead plagued inhabitants of the neo-Assyrian empire in the near east between c911 and c605 BC. An inscription (left) in the tomb of eighth-century BC queen Yabâ of Nineveh curses any robber by imposing “eternal non-sleeping on his corpse and ghost”. And an omen text of the mid-seventh century BC describes what will happen if one sees “a dead person restrained with cloths, uprising, complaining”. The silence of earlier and later sources suggests that this may have been an epidemic generated by the violence and trauma of imperial expansion in the provinces. Early 18th-century Serbia: dawn of Dracula In the western Balkans after 1700, the central European tradition of dangerous-dead beliefs converged with a Caucasian one. This highly coloured mixture of fantasies reached an epidemic scale on the violent, unstable military frontier between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Cases in 1725–26 and again in the 1730s came to the attention of the Habsburg authorities, whose reports created a Europe-wide sensation. The details were actually rather atypical – for example, in their emphasis on bloodsucking – but inspired a series of fictional works culminating in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. 16th-century Saxony: rise of the chomping dead Devastated by plague and destabilised by the Lutheran Reformation, after 1540 the German electorate of Saxony suffered the strange visitation of the ‘chomping dead’. It was widely believed that some corpses lay in their graves noisily eating their own shrouds, and that they spread plague among the living. This idea had older roots, but it reached epidemic levels in this traumatised society. The remedy was to open the grave to check for shroud-eating and, if evidence mandated action, to behead the corpse with a spade. Martin Luther himself spoke out against the belief, but it endured for several decades before dying away naturally around 1600. 19th-century New England: a war on organs As tuberculosis swept the US between the 1780s and 1890s, the strange idea developed that internal organs of buried victims were spreading the disease. Between 1784 and 1892, at least 70 exhumations are known to have been undertaken in New England, mostly involving turning the corpse face-down, extracting the heart, liver and lungs, and occasionally burning the body. At Altoona, Pennsylvania in 1949, the exhumation of a soldier to burn his uniform represents the last known ‘corpse-killing’ in any non-Balkan and non-Aegean western society. Independent Haiti: zombie slaves In the 19th and 20th centuries, many Haitians believed that some apparently ‘dead’ people had actually been poisoned by sorcerers to induce a death-like trance. The ‘corpses’ were then reputedly stolen from their graves, revived and made to work on sugar plantations. Famously, Clairvius Narcisse (1922–94), who claimed to have escaped from such a plantation, was photographed sitting on his own tomb (above). This strangest of variants – walking ‘corpses’ that had never died – had roots in African beliefs, but developed a unique twist in this fragile republic with its tragic origins, where the unquiet dead were enslaved. Professor John Blair is emeritus fellow in medieval history at Queen’s College, University of Oxford. His latest book is Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World (Princeton University Press, 2025) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
Humble Victorian heroes: the ordinary Britons who sacrificed their lives for others
Statues celebrate monarchs, rulers and conquerors – but who remembers the brave folk who gave their lives to save others? Anna Maria Barry recounts stories of self-sacrificing but otherwise ordinary people from the 19th and 20th centuries who are commemorated in one London park
Tucked away in the City of London, a short walk north of St Paul’s Cathedral, lies a curious, oddly-shaped, leafy little sanctuary. Opened in 1880, Postman’s Park is named for the workers at the nearby General Post Office who liked to visit during their breaks. Today, though, it’s best known as the home of the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, honouring dozens of heroic Londoners who lost their lives while trying to save others, most in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Unusually, the memorial describes the details of each tragic death, from drownings and carriage accidents to house fires and poisonings. No wonder this moving, if somewhat macabre, celebration of bravery continues to fascinate. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1411624515webready-b2b4c26-e1769529632536.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a low, long wooden and brick structure against a building. In front of it there is a garden with a stone font in the middle" title="The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice honours ordinary people (Image by Getty Images)" /> Flames faced with fortitude One such quietly heroic Londoner was Alice Ayres. During the night of 24 April 1885, the 26-year-old lay asleep in her bedroom on Union Street, in the home of her older sister and brother-in-law, who employed her as a nursemaid and household assistant. Sharing this room were her nieces Edith, Ellen and Elizabeth, aged five, four and three, respectively. Shortly after 2am, Alice was jolted awake by the crackling of flames, and quickly realised that something was very wrong. Her brother-in-law’s oil and paint shop on the ground floor was on fire, and his wares were rapidly accelerating the flames. Alice had to think fast. Unable to exit the bedroom, she rushed to the window and threw it open to scream for help. She grabbed two bedsheets to tie together before realising that this makeshift rope wouldn’t enable her to lower her nieces to safety. Instead, she heaved a feather mattress out of the window to create a soft landing. By now, several neighbours had rushed to the property, and they suspended the mattress between them. First, Alice threw Edith out; next up was Ellen, who clung to her aunt in fear. Finally, Alice dropped Elizabeth down to the waiting neighbours before letting herself drop. Tragically, the fire claimed five lives: neither Elizabeth nor Alice survived their injuries, and Alice’s sister, brother-in-law and young nephew also perished. This sad episode was not soon forgotten, though, and created a sensation in the press, with articles focused firmly on the heroic actions of this brave young woman. “Death of the heroine Alice Ayres,” reported one paper, while another led with “A Heroine in Humble Life”. Alice’s courage was potent: many people were moved deeply by this story of a lowly nursemaid – a young, working-class woman who lost her life in the process of saving others. As historian John Price pointed out, many of these reports erased Alice’s familial relationship to the young girls. It seems that the story of a devoted employee giving her life to save her charges was perceived as more poignant than that of a frantic woman trying to save her own family. On the day of Alice’s funeral, as her coffin was carried by firefighters to its final resting place, admiring Londoners came out to line the streets in their hundreds. A memorial fund raised a significant sum, eventually paying for a large memorial that still stands over Alice’s grave in Isleworth Cemetery. And these were not the only tributes: in the months and years after her death, Alice underwent a process that historian Lara Perry has described as a “secular canonisation”. She became something of a folk hero, her act inspiring poets and writers and being cited as an example of everyday heroism among working people. Read more | For ordinary Tudors, death lurked around every corner with these surprising ways to die This impact even spread overseas: six years after Alice’s death, a poem published in a Toronto newspaper ended with the lines: She did not die. Such names as hers will never, never die; They make our British blood run hot, our British hearts beat high. And as we linger near her tomb, by grateful laurels crown’d, We ask, “What braver act than hers could on the earth be found?” On battle-fields, where strong men fight, what hero’s deed compares With the noble true, self-sacrifice of this nursemaid, Alice Ayres? Among the many people inspired by Alice’s story was George Frederic Watts. One of the most celebrated artists of the Victorian age, dubbed ‘England’s Michelangelo’, Watts was a gifted painter and sculptor known for his symbolist works, public sculptures and many portraits of the era’s great and good. His most famous work is the allegorical Hope (1886), which took on a new significance at the peak of the 20th-century civil rights movement in the US, when Martin Luther King Jr discussed the painting in a sermon. Much later, after hearing about it in another sermon given by pastor Jeremiah Wright, a young Barack Obama took inspiration from its message, later writing the 2006 book The Audacity of Hope. In 1887, two years after Alice’s death, Watts wrote a letter to The Times proposing a novel way to mark the forthcoming golden jubilee of Queen Victoria. “[I]t would surely be of national interest,” he suggested, “to collect a complete record of the stories of heroism in every-day life.” This would, he mooted, take the form of a memorial in London and, to illustrate his argument, he reminded readers of Alice Ayres: such “forgotten heroes”, he argued, should be remembered. “The material prosperity of a nation is not an abiding possession,” Watts concluded. “The deeds of its people are.” Inspiring other Britons This idea of celebrating heroism was very much in keeping with Victorian sensibilities. In 1841, Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle had published his influential On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, championing the importance of heroic individuals – typically, the ‘great men’ of history. There was also a widely held belief in improvement through example – the idea that studying great lives helped an individual to better themselves. Watts’ suggestion was very much in this spirit: he hoped that his memorial would articulate a type of selfless conduct that other Britons would be inspired to emulate through their own good deeds. Although Watts’ idea was not picked up immediately, it resurfaced in 1898 when the vicar of St Botolph’s offered him a site to bring his vision to life – a public park that had once been the parish churchyard and burial ground. It was here that the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice was finally unveiled by the lord mayor on 30 July 1900. Initially, just four people were commemorated, but batches of names were added steadily over the following years. After Watts’ death in 1904, the project was taken over by his wife, Mary, a talented designer, social reformer and (later) suffragette. Today, the memorial consists of 54 plaques celebrating a total of 62 individuals. Most of them are men, though nine women and eight children are honoured. The vast majority of those named were either Londoners or people who died in the capital. Though many of the subjects were working class – labourers and railway workers – there are also members of the middle class, including managers and medical men. The memorial takes the form of a wall bearing ornate ceramic plaques covered by a red-tiled roof, supported by columns. Each plaque records a name, dates and – most movingly – a short summary of the circumstances under which the subject died. A typical entry reads: Soloman Galaman aged 11 died of injuries Sept 6 1901 after saving his little brother from being run over in Commercial Street “Mother I saved him but I could not save myself” Another commemorates: Frederick Alfred Croft Inspector aged 31 saved a lunatic woman from suicide at Woolwich Arsenal Station but was himself run over by the train Jan 11 1878 <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-144844808webready-2d9e5af-e1769530315297.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="plaque tile dedicated to a man named Frederick Alfred Croft. The tile is beige with an orange outline and has a green and cream floral pattern around it. The words are written in blue" title="A plaque dedicated to Frederick Alfred Croft, who saved a woman from suicide at Woolwich Arsenal station, before being hit by the train himself (Image by Getty Images)" /> Each plaque tells a vivid story in a few short lines, offering a glimpse into everyday people’s experiences of life in the metropolis. The extraordinary nature of these ordinary Londoners’ deaths means that they generated a deposit in the historic record in the form of newspaper stories and inquest reports. These, along with the information given on the memorial – dates and sometimes even addresses – yields much historical material. Read more | The Bengal Famine was one of the 20th century's greatest tragedies – so why is there no memorial to it? Many of those commemorated suffered accidents at work. One plaque commemorates Walter Peart and Harry Dean, driver and fireman, respectively, on Great Western Railway’s Windsor Express. On 18 July 1898, they were both working on the 4.15pm service from Windsor to London Paddington when a rod in the engine broke, engulfing the boiler in flames. Though they were severely scalded and later died from their injuries, the two men succeeded in bringing the train to a safe stop, preventing further casualties. Both were married, and Walter left five children. One grateful passenger on the train was George Goschen, First Lord of the Admiralty, who wrote a letter to the Great Western Railway expressing his admiration for the men’s bravery and enclosing a donation for their families. Lost at sea Another plaque honours 44-year-old Mary Rogers, a stewardess on the passenger ferry Stella. On 30 March 1899, Mary was working on a voyage from Southampton to Guernsey with 147 passengers on board, many of whom were starting an Easter holiday. In heavy fog, the ship hit rocks, sinking just eight minutes later. Although some escaped in lifeboats, 86 passengers and 19 crew members were lost. One who made it safely off the ship was the famous opera singer Greta Williams, who sang hymns to calm survivors as they waited in lifeboats for rescue. Rogers, though, was not among them: she had given up her life jacket and refused a seat in a lifeboat, choosing instead to save a passenger. This story touched many, including writer Frances Power Cobbe, who penned an inscription for a monument to Mary containing the lines: Urged by the sailors to make sure her escape, she refused, lest she might endanger the heavily-laden boat. Cheering the departing crew with the friendly cry of “Good-bye, good-bye” she was seen, a few moments later, as the Stella went down, lifting her arms upwards with the prayer “Lord have me” then sank in the waters with the sinking ship. A monument to Mary’s bravery still stands in Southampton. It was funded by donations from an admiring public, who also raised a significant sum to support her elderly father and the two young children she left behind. Mary is one of the few heroes commemorated at Postman’s Park who did not die in London. Another plaque commemorates Sarah Smith, a “pantomime artiste” (real name Sarah Gibson) who reportedly performed an act of bravery during a show at the Princess’s Theatre in Oxford Street on 23 January 1863. She was on stage when the dress of her friend Anne Hunt began burning, set alight by a pan of fire that was being used in the performance. According to the plaque, Sarah rushed over to extinguish the flames but was so badly burned that she later died of her injuries. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/dreamstime98653751webready-8fe05fe-e1769530060418.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A plaque tile dedicated to a woman named Sarah Smith. The tile is beige with an orange outline and has a green and cream floral pattern around it. The words are written in blue" title="One plaque commemorates Sarah Smith, who sustained fatal burns when saving her friend from a fire in 1863 (Image by Dreamtime)" /> At the inquest into her death, the jury reprimanded the theatre for its insufficient fire precautions, and the coroner raised his concern about the flammable nature of women’s dress. “He thought it quite impossible by any amount of reasoning or warning to produce any effect on fashion,” reported one newspaper, concluding that “[h]e did not know how many women would be required to be burnt to death before any of their fair sex would give up wearing an article of fashion.” Read more | Why we should be better about talking about death, with Dr Helen Gittos Courageous children Some of the most moving plaques on the memorial honour children who died trying to save friends or siblings. One of these was 10-year-old John Clinton. On 16 July 1894, he was playing on the foreshore of the Thames, close to London Bridge, with another boy called Campbell Mortimer. When Campbell waded into the water and found himself out of his depth, John succeeded in rescuing him, but fell back into the river and drowned. Newspaper reports noted that John had saved another life not long before his death. His baby brother had accidentally started a fire while playing with matches, and John had had the presence of mind to roll him on the carpet to extinguish the flames while also removing a set of curtains that had been set alight. The son of a “struggling carpenter”, John was praised in the press as a “boy hero” and “a most dutiful and affectionate child”. At his funeral, the coffin was “almost hidden with wreaths”; one, reporters noted, “bore the simple words ‘He saved me.’” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-2169595312webready-b75a2d2-e1769529775392.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a green heart with the word GRENFELL written across it in yellow" title="The Grenfell Tower Memorial is one of many "attempts to ensure that the lives of ordinary people who made extraordinary sacrifices are not forgotten" (Image by Getty Images)" /> Though 120 tiles were originally planned, after GF Watts’ death the addition of new tablets became sporadic, and effectively ceased after 1931. The final plaque fixed to the memorial, in 2009, honours Leigh Pitt. He was 30 when he died in 2007 while saving a drowning boy from a canal in Thamesmead. In 2010, the group that looks after the Watts memorial decided that no more plaques would be added. In recent years, monuments have become focal points for political debate, and the wisdom of commemorating certain figures has been interrogated. Watts’ Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice seems to speak to the moment: it doesn’t celebrate military generals, politicians or monarchs, but instead pays tribute to the bravery and humanity of everyday people who were prepared to risk their lives for others. We might recognise echoes of this sentiment in the National Covid Memorial Wall on the South Bank or the Grenfell Tower Memorial Wall. All are attempts to ensure that the lives of ordinary people who made extraordinary sacrifices are not forgotten. Anna Maria Berry is a historian and writer This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
The Bengal Famine was one of the 20th century's greatest tragedies – so why is there no memorial to it?
Kavita Puri on the first event commemorating the 1943 Bengal Famine
In a museum in Manchester, on an autumn evening just a few weeks ago, history was made. I joined a group of people who had gathered to pay their respects to casualties of a long-overlooked episode of the Second World War. Curators, students, interested locals and descendants of those involved milled around, drinking chai, looking at pictures in a temporary exhibition. Organisers believe this was the first event to commemorate the estimated 3 million victims of the 1943 Bengal Famine. Those who died were Indians, but they were also British subjects. It’s one of the largest losses of civilian life among the Allies – yet there isn’t a memorial, a museum or even a plaque to them anywhere in the world. So that night – organised by the University of Manchester, Manchester Museum and the Imperial War Museum North, and inspired by my BBC podcast Three Million – marked a very special moment. Read more | The 1943 Bengal famine: "People began collapsing in the streets and dying on the pavements" The exhibition featured portraits of some of the survivors I had interviewed in the Bengal countryside. There was Jamuna Purkayeth, who had travelled to Calcutta (now Kolkata) as a little girl with her father in search of charity. When I spoke to her, she told me that she believed that if she had stayed in her village she would have died of hunger. Also on display were extracts of letters to and from Indian soldiers stationed in the Middle East, censored by colonial authorities for mentioning the extent of the food crisis. Now those letters – uncensored – were presented in a public space. There were also Japanese propaganda pamphlets encouraging the Indian population to rise up against the British. In one cartoon, the wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, is pictured feasting on a sumptuous roast chicken, while underneath the dining table are emaciated, dead Bengalis. The message is clear: Japan will feed you, but the British won’t. Also on display were evocative photographs of Sunil Janah, who documented the human cost of the famine in the communist newspaper People’s War. Among the speakers that evening was the narrative director from the Imperial War Museum, who talked of the silences in that museum’s war archive, and discussed what can be done to remedy the situation. Another was an eyewitness to the famine, Partha Mitter. He told how, as a little boy, he would look through the iron gates of his grand house and see starving mothers clutching their babies, begging for phan dao, water in which rice had been cooked. They never asked for the rice – Bengal’s staple food – because that would be too much to hope for. Read more | Who was to blame for the Irish famine? Eighty years since the end of the Second World War, it’s about time that these 3 million lives are remembered. They cannot be a mere footnote in history. They are part of Britain’s wartime story, and its colonial legacy, that has become contentious – but this night showed that it need not be so. History is never static. Time allows people to speak, and ask, and collectively to acknowledge and remember. Forgetting need not be permanent. There will be a time to ask some difficult questions – about how this was allowed to happen, and who was responsible – but this night was dedicated to those who died. There is a dignity in remembering them – a dignity they were not afforded in life. Who knows whether this will become an annual event, or if a more permanent memorial to the victims will be established. But something is changing – and I learned this night that history can be redemptive. Everyone who gathered felt it, and it was an unexpectedly uplifting experience. This column was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
She defied the Nazis and paid the ultimate price: why I'm in awe of Sophie Scholl's courage
Novelist Simon Scarrow chooses Sophie Scholl as his history hero
In profile Sophie Scholl was a German student and political activist in the White Rose, a non-violent resistance group opposed to Hitler. After being observed distributing anti-Nazi flyers at her university, Sophie, her brother Hans and their friend Christoph Probst were found guilty of treason and executed by guillotine; she was just 21. When did you first hear about Sophie Scholl? While I was doing research for my Nazi-era novels about a fictional German police detective. I came across the White Rose resistance movement, and that led me to Sophie. What kind of woman was she? First and foremost, she was an incredibly brave person – as was her brother Hans [co-founder of the White Rose]. She had a huge amount of integrity and wisdom for someone of her age, and understood what they were up against in opposing the Third Reich. I actually consider her a far more impressive figure than someone like Wilhelm Canaris [the German admiral and military intelligence chief executed for treason just before the end of the war], who was a Nazi for a long time before deciding that he wasn’t. What made her a hero? First, her realisation that she and her fellow White Rose activists were involved in a life-and-death struggle for the soul of Germany. Most students in Nazi Germany did themselves no good in terms of historical reputation – after all, they led the infamous Nazi book burnings. Sophie was one of a tiny minority of students who stood up to be counted. Second, her diehard courage. She pursued her anti-Nazi activism regardless of the consequences, and died a hero. If only there had been more like her in Germany at that time. Read more | Simon Schama on British history if Hitler had beaten Churchill: "The Holocaust would have happened here" What was her finest hour? Her refusal to flinch under interrogation or in the courtroom when she and fellow White Rose activists were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death by a Nazi judge, Roland Freisler. Her executioner, Johann Reichhart, who lived until the 1970s, later said that Sophie and her co-defendants were among the bravest people he’d ever put to death. Is there anything that you don’t particularly admire about her? I struggle to understand why she became ever more blasé in the way she resisted the Third Reich, openly distributing anti-Nazi leaflets around her university despite knowing the fatal consequences of her actions. By all means oppose the Nazi regime, but do so in the most effective way – and that surely means staying alive. Perhaps she was just resigned to the inevitable? Can you see any parallels between her life and yours? No. She was infinitely wiser, smarter and braver than I was at her age. However, I can see parallels between her and Greta Thunberg. If Greta had been around [during the Second World War], I think they would have got on like a house on fire. What would you say to her if you could meet her now? I’d ask if she ever considered not making a martyr of herself, instead using greater subterfuge in her fight against the regime. Simon Scarrow is a British author known for his historical fiction. His latest paperback, A Death in Berlin (Headline), is out now This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators?
Women accused of violent murders have often faced assumptions about their motives and disbelief that the ‘gentle sex’ could commit such bloody crimes. Rosalind Crone investigates four cases from the 19th century
1. A female bodysnatcher? At a time when selling human bodies to anatomy schools reaped hefty payouts, some desperate criminals killed to get their hands on fresh corpses. Was Elizabeth Ross one such grasping murderer? In the early 19th century, ‘resurrection men’ dug up recently buried corpses to meet the huge demand for cadavers to use in teaching and surgical practice. Others were too impatient to wait for someone to die before snatching a body – and took matters into their own hands. Between 1828 and 1831, William Burke (operating with accomplice William Hare) in Edinburgh, and John Bishop and Thomas Williams in London, were convicted and hanged for murdering numerous people in order to sell their bodies to anatomy schools. Indeed, all of the infamous bodysnatchers of 19th-century Britain were male. It’s certainly conceivable that women were involved in the trade as helpmates – but could they ever have been the instigators, or even killers? Meet Elizabeth Ross (alias Cook), a 38-year-old Irish immigrant in London with a reputation for drunkenness, violence and petty crime. She had once been accused of skinning alive six of her neighbours’ cats, and it was rumoured that she had murdered a 14-year-old girl who went missing while in her care. Elizabeth’s common-law husband, Edward Cook, who worked as a nightwatchman for the parish of Aldgate, associated with resurrection men. Little wonder, then, that fellow parishioner Ann Buton was very concerned when her grandmother, Caroline Walsh – at that time an 84-year-old pedlar – accepted Elizabeth’s offer of cheap lodgings. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/Credit-Wellcome-CollectionEliza-Rosswebready-6e9dca8-e1766488850584.jpg" width="613" height="420" alt="A black and white sketch of an elderly woman wearing a frilly bonnet and a high necked coat" title="An illustration of “the atrocious Eliza Ross” from an 1832 book about London ‘Burkers’ – bodysnatchers – including an account of her murder of elderly Caroline Walsh (Image by the Wellcome Collection)" /> On 19 August 1831, Caroline moved into the small attic room occupied by the Cook family – Elizabeth, Edward and their 12-year-old son Ned – at 7 Goodman’s Yard. With only one bed and a small table, Caroline was expected to sleep on the floor in the corner of the room. The next morning, when Ann came to check on her grandmother, Caroline was nowhere to be seen. Missing, presumed dead After searching the streets, poorhouses, hospitals and prisons for her grandmother, Ann Buton became worried, and told the police about her suspicions. But it wasn’t until October that an officer launched an investigation and arrested all three members of the Cook family. Elizabeth appeared unfazed. “With all your trouble,” she remarked, “you have not found the old woman’s body.” Elizabeth’s son, Ned, soon explained why. He told the court that on 19 August, soon after Caroline Walsh had gone to bed, his mother had suffocated the old lady. His father had been leaning out of the window at the time. Elizabeth then “lifted [the body] off the bed herself” and carried it downstairs. The next morning, Ned saw a sack in the cellar, with “partly black and partly grey” hair poking out of the top. That evening, between 11pm and midnight, Ned watched his mother carrying the sack down Goodman’s Yard. “She told me,” he continued, “that she took the body to the London Hospital.” Read more | From murder bottles to arsenic wallpaper: 5 hidden killers in Victorian Britain Perhaps unsurprisingly, the surgeons at the hospital denied ever having received a body from Elizabeth Ross, but the rag sellers in the market testified that she had sold them distinctive items of clothing that belonged to Caroline Walsh. Elizabeth was convicted of murder (Edward was acquitted) and was hanged on 9 January 1832. But how reliable was the evidence of a 12-year-old boy? Could Elizabeth have carried a body by herself all the way from Goodman’s Yard in Aldgate to the London Hospital in Whitechapel? In the moral panic about bodysnatching that had erupted in the early 1830s, was Elizabeth – already a woman with a bad reputation – accused and convicted of a crime she did not commit? Or does her case suggest that we need to look more closely at female involvement in body snatching? 2. Matricide – or a terrible mishap? Kitty Newton, who grew up in a troubled family, was accused of murdering her mother – but it may have been a tragic accident At 2am on 5 December 1848, in a grand house on the banks of the river Severn in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, servant Mary Corfield woke to the smell of smoke and the sound of her disabled master, Mr Dyer, crying out. Mary rushed downstairs and out of the house to call for help. Neighbours quickly came to the aid of Mr Dyer, while Mary found evidence of a fire in the kitchen – a half-burned sofa and pillows, wet sheets, and oil on the floor. The previous evening, Ann Newton – mother of the housekeeper, Kitty Newton – had decided to stay the night and sleep in the kitchen. Her burned body was found lying face down in an outbuilding on the property. The police were called, and Kitty was arrested, accused of murdering her mother. An inquest was quickly convened and witnesses called. Mary Corfield claimed that Kitty and Ann had had a turbulent relationship. When Ann visited Kitty, mother and daughter would drink and quarrel, sometimes violently. On one occasion, Mary said, Kitty had beaten Ann with a hand-whip so severely that pieces of flesh were torn from Ann’s arms and a doctor had to be called. Kitty’s uncle, Ann’s brother, suggested that his niece might have killed his sister to get her hands on an inheritance. He reported that on one occasion, when he spoke to Kitty about ill-treating her mother, she replied: “I should like to see the d*** old bitch dead and cut in quarters! She has lived too long, and has kept me out of my money till the hairs of my head are got grey!” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-2227135159-e8bcfff-e1766488988940.jpg" width="1500" height="995" alt="A sketch of a woman in a long black dress and top hat leaning against the rail of a box in court, with a large crowd behind her" title="A Victorian illustration of a woman in a courtroom dock. When Kitty Newton was accused of murdering her mother, a botched post-mortem helped secure a not guilty verdict (Image by Getty Images)" /> Shamed and condemned Was Kitty’s uncle telling the truth? As the newspapers revealed, hers was a troubled family. Another uncle had been convicted and hanged for beating his pregnant wife to death. Kitty’s parents had had an unhappy and violent marriage. And as a teenager, Kitty had been sent to work as a housekeeper for a third uncle, and became pregnant with his child. While the child was accepted by the family, Kitty was shamed and condemned – by her own mother, too. However, other witnesses at the inquest testified that Kitty showed great care towards her mother. The local curate suggested that Ann “was in a troubled and unhappy condition, and wished to die”. Two medical men criticised the post-mortem examination, which failed to examine Ann’s larynx or trachea, making it impossible to determine the true cause of death. The inquest jury failed to reach a consensus and, after enduring three criminal trials and spending 15 months in prison, Kitty was found not guilty and set free. She moved into a small cottage in Bridgnorth, left to her by Mr Dyer who had died while she was awaiting trial, and lived off the inheritance from her mother. Was Kitty a greedy, murderous daughter? Or had Ann accidentally (or deliberately) set fire to herself on that fateful night? After all, Victorian kitchens, which combined naked flames with flammable liquids, could be dangerous places. We may never know. 3. Pathological lies or a cry for help? Accused of murder, Jessie McLachlan issued a string of contradictory statements – but proof of her guilt remained elusive On 7 July 1862, John Fleming and his son arrived home at 17 Sandyford Place, Glasgow, after spending the weekend at the family’s summer house on the Firth of Clyde. The two men were greeted at the door by John’s father, James, an old man in his eighties who had decided to forgo the family holiday. But opening the door was the job of the servant, Jessie McPherson. Where was she? James said that he had not seen Jessie since Friday night, and that her door was locked. The three men went to investigate. John found a key and opened the door to Jessie’s bedroom, where they found her dead body. Her head had been smashed in, she was naked from the waist down, and there were defensive wounds on her hands. Clothes and sheets were soaked in blood, and someone had attempted to wash the kitchen floor. A post-mortem concluded that Jessie’s injuries pointed “to a female or a weak man as having inflicted them”. Further investigation revealed that Jessie’s best clothes and some of the Flemings’ silverware were missing. Evidence on a plate The police arrested James Fleming on suspicion of murder, but their attention was soon drawn in a different direction. A pawnbroker claimed that a woman had sold him some plate that matched the description of the silverware taken from the Flemings’ house. That woman was 28-year-old Jessie McLachlan, a former servant of the Flemings and a friend of Jessie McPherson, who had married a seaman and had a child. McLachlan was arrested and brought in for questioning. Over the course of a week or so, she gave three statements in response to the discovery of new evidence linking her to the crime. Each contained lies and contradictions. James Fleming was released, and McLachlan was indicted for murder. At her trial between 17 and 20 September, McLachlan’s legal counsel argued that the prosecution could not prove that McLachlan had been at Sandyford Place on the fateful weekend. But, despite further compelling evidence – including some from friends of McPherson who claimed that James Fleming was sexually harassing his servant – it was a losing battle. The judge encouraged the jury to return a guilty verdict – which they did, after deliberating for just 15 minutes. Read more | Who were the real Forty Elephants? The true story of Mary Carr and the all-woman crime gang McLachlan responded by delivering yet another statement, which she had written while awaiting trial – though her lawyers had refused to use it in her defence. McLachlan admitted that she had been at Sandyford Place on the night when McPherson was killed – but she claimed that James had murdered McPherson after the latter rejected his sexual advances. James then secured McLachlan’s silence with a thinly veiled threat: “Don’t be feart, only if you tell you know about her death, you will be taken in for it as well as I… My life is in your power, and yours is in my power.” McLachlan’s statement was enough to cast doubt over her conviction, trigger an inquiry and save her from the gallows. Her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and she served 15 years behind bars. James Fleming , meanwhile, lived out his days as a free man. There is a further twist in this tale. McLachlan gave a fifth statement to her lawyer, in which she confessed to the murder. It was quickly retracted, but the question remains: was this an admission of guilt? Or a cry from a woman desperate to be heard, knowing that she would likely never see her young child again, and that her voice would be suppressed throughout a long prison sentence for a crime she did not commit? 4. Could a woman commit brutal murder? After a mother and baby were slaughtered, ample evidence pointed to a love rival, Mary Pearcey, as the culprit – but many couldn’t believe that a woman might be capable of such a vicious crime On the evening of 24 October 1890, the body of a brutally murdered woman was discovered behind a row of newly built houses in Belsize Park, London. Her head was “almost entirely severed from the body” and her skull, pierced in several places, had suffered “terrible blows from some penetrating instrument”. Newspapers declared that the victim must be a prostitute, the killer must be a man, and the murder could be the work of Jack the Ripper, who had not long ago terrorised the streets of the capital. They were wrong on all three counts. The body was identified next morning as Phoebe Hogg, a 31-year-old mother. She had last been seen on the afternoon of the discovery leaving the home she shared with her husband, Frank, with her 18-month-old baby, Tiggy. Her pram, covered with blood, had been found a mile and a half from Phoebe’s body. On 26 October, Tiggy’s body was found in some nettles near Finchley Road. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/BAL11978716webready-cabdf28-e1766489231180.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A sketch of a crime scene, with a woman killing another woman and a baby, with an upturned pram" title="The murder of Phoebe Hogg and her baby Tiggy by Mary Pearcey, as imagined in The Illustrated Police News. Tiggy’s pram (right) remains on display in Madame Tussauds wax museum, London (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> A search of the Hoggs’ home revealed in Frank’s coat pocket a key to the lodgings of a family friend, 24-year-old Mary Pearcey. The police decided to visit the property. Opening the door, they discovered a horrific scene: blood was splattered on the walls, ceiling and floor, and two kitchen windowpanes had been smashed. They found lace curtains, clothing, a poker and a big knife all covered in blood, and a button from Phoebe’s jacket. Mary claimed that she had been killing mice. The police arrested her for murder. Read more | Reading, writing and retribution: inside Victorian prison schools Suspicious minds The public could not believe that a woman had committed such a brutal crime, or even possessed the physical strength to dispose of the bodies. Suspicion continued to swirl around Frank, especially when it was discovered that he and Mary were lovers. Did he want to get rid of his wife to be with Mary? Yet Frank had an alibi for the time of the murder, and there was no evidence that he had encouraged or helped Mary to kill his wife. A neighbour claimed that she had seen Mary, alone, pushing a heavily loaded pram along the street an hour before Phoebe’s body was found. Mary admitted that she had invited Phoebe and Tiggy to tea that afternoon, but denied that she had killed them. “I would not do such a dreadful thing,” she declared, adding: “I would not hurt anyone.” On 3 December 1890, Mary was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. A plea for clemency on the grounds of insanity failed, and she was hanged at Newgate Prison on 23 December. She begged Frank to visit her before her execution. He had already left London – but not before he had sold Tiggy’s pram to Madame Tussauds wax museum in Marylebone Road. There it remains on display in the infamous Chamber of Horrors – a reminder that perhaps women have the potential to be killers just as brutal as men. This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Think you know everything about ancient Rome? These 25 facts will prove otherwise
Edward J Watts, author of The Romans: A 2,000-Year History, shares 25 things you need to know about one of the greatest civilisations of the ancient world – from their incredible feats of engineering to their sporting spectacles
1. The Romans lived in an independent state for more than 2,200 years According to tradition, Rome was founded in 753 BC, shortly after the beginning of the Italian Iron Age. Its inhabitants were Latin-speaking pagans who lived along the river Tiber in what is now central Italy. The empire of Trebizond, the last independent Roman kingdom descended from that state, was captured in 1461 by an Ottoman army equipped with gunpowder weapons. The people living in Trebizond also called themselves ‘Roman’, but they were Christians who lived in a city on the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey and spoke a language they called Romeika (which translates as 'Roman', but which we now call Greek). 2. The Roman empire once included all, or part of, nearly 50 countries At the empire’s greatest extent in AD 117, Roman territory stretched from what is now the Atlantic coast of Portugal to the Persian Gulf beaches in Kuwait, from southern Egypt near the current Sudanese border to northern England, and from just south of Casablanca in Morocco to the Caspian Sea shores of Azerbaijan. The land area of the Roman empire was smaller than Australia, but if one included the territorial waters controlled by Rome (as is customary with modern states) the empire would rank as the fifth-largest country on earth if it existed today. 3. As much as one-third of the world’s population lived under Roman control Late during the reign of the emperor Trajan (ruled AD 98–117), it is thought that the Roman empire reached a population of 80 million, out of a total world population of around 230 million. In modern terms, Rome’s share of the world population at that moment would be nearly equivalent to a country with the combined populations of India and China. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2GettyImages-1369193411-fa1bfb0-e1764241964618.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A yellow, blue and red map showing the Roman empire" title="The Roman empire reached its maximum territorial extent in the early second century AD, during the reign of the emperor Trajan. The empire would rank as the fifth-largest country in the world if it existed today (Image by Getty Images)" /> 4. Rome was the first city in the world with a million residents Rome reached a population of 1 million during the first century BC, and aside from temporary population decreases caused by plagues or natural disasters, did not fall below that level until the end of the fourth century AD. This is even more remarkable considering that poor sanitation and crowded conditions meant that the city lost as much as 3 per cent of its population each year to disease – a number far greater than the birthrate. Rome’s massive population was sustained through large-scale migration from other parts of the empire, nearly every year, for five centuries. 5. Hadrian’s Wall was NOT the longest Roman wall – and nor was it the most northern Almost everyone has heard of Hadrian’s Wall, the defensive structure that once stretched 73 miles across what is now northern England. However, an even longer fortification built under Hadrian and his successor, Antoninus Pius, extended nearly 190 miles across southern Germany. It began roughly where the Rhine turns west at Mainz, and extended to meet the Danube near Regensburg. Antoninus Pius also ordered the construction of the empire’s northernmost wall – the eponymous Antonine Wall – which stretched 39 miles across what is now Scotland, from the Firth of Clyde to the Firth of Forth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/3GettyImages-639158628-7d65967-e1764242013260.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A modern illustration depicting Hadrian’s Wall as it may have appeared during the second century AD. The 73-mile-long fortification stretched from what is now Bowness-on-Solway in Cumbria to Wallsend in Tyne and Wear (Image by Getty Images)" title="A modern illustration depicting Hadrian’s Wall as it may have appeared during the second century AD. The 73-mile-long fortification stretched from what is now Bowness-on-Solway in Cumbria to Wallsend in Tyne and Wear (Image by Getty Images)" /> 6. The Romans produced more than 25 million coins each year Following a reform instituted by joint emperors Diocletian and Maximian in AD 294, the Romans established a network of 15 mints across the empire – all the way from Londinium (London) to the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Although production slowed around 100 years later, no state in the world would again match Rome’s numismatic productivity until the 19th century. Read more | How the Romans "reversed circumcision" and 5 other shocking medical realities from the ancient empire 7. Rome’s ‘eighth hill’ is a load of old rubbish… literally The Testaccio region of Rome is now famous for its nightlife, but it takes its name from Monte Testaccio, an artificial hill that is 35 metres tall and created from the remains of ceramic shipping containers offloaded from barges along the Tiber. Most of the pottery has been dated to the period between AD 140 and 250, though the base of the hill may be much older. Despite its unusual provenance, Monte Testaccio is sometimes described as Rome’s ‘eighth hill’, in addition to the seven other hills within the city walls: the Aventine, Caelian, Capitoline, Esquiline, Palatine, Quirinal and Viminal hills. WATCH | Dr David Musgrove finds out what the Romans really got up to on the loo View Green Video on the source website 8. The Pantheon is the oldest intact, continually used building in the world Originally created in the style of a conventional Roman temple in the first century BC, the Pantheon was rebuilt under the direction of the emperor Hadrian in the AD 120s. The ground level was originally much lower than it is today, and when one approached the structure from the front, it appeared to be a normal temple because the structure’s 43-metre-wide dome was obscured by its triangular pediment (gable). Nearly two millennia later, the Pantheon’s dome remains the largest of its kind in the world – its survival no doubt linked to the decision to convert the building into a Christian church in AD 609. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/4GettyImages-1211436528-b8e4a0d-e1764242052537.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An aerial photograph of the Pantheon in Rome. It has a large dome roof with a hole in the top and is surrounded by several other red roofed buildings" title="Despite being nearly 2,000 years old, the Pantheon boasts the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world (Image by Getty Images)" /> 9. There was once a giant city plan, carved on marble blocks, that showed every street and building in Rome Between AD 203 and 211, the emperor Septimius Severus ordered the creation of a 234-metre-square map of the city of Rome that included accurate renderings of the ground-floor architectural plans for every building in the city. Carved on marble blocks, the map was hung on a wall of the Temple of Peace, which now forms the northern exterior of the Basilica of St Cosmas and Damian. As of 2025, more than a thousand fragments of the Severan Marble Plan have been discovered since the Renaissance, representing around 10 per cent of the original map. Because many of these include the name of the building they represent, it has been extremely useful for archaeologists looking to identify newly discovered architectural remains. Today, the fragments are on display in the new Museo della Forma Urbis on Rome’s Caelian Hill. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/5GettyImages-1925908763-d918fdc-e1764242087895.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of large white stone fragments with inscriptions on them" title="More than a thousand fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae (‘The Shape of the City of Rome’) have been discovered, giving researchers a remarkable window into early third-century AD Rome (Image by Getty Images)" /> 10. Rome is still surrounded by its ancient walls The Aurelian Walls that surround the city of Rome were built in the AD 270s, but they continued to be used by the city’s defenders until the late 19th century. The breaching of the walls by the army of the Kingdom of Italy in September of 1870 represented the final step in Italian unification. 11. You can find an ancient wall in McDonald’s The Servian Walls of the fourth century BC may be less famous than the Aurelian Walls, but they have much more character. Stretching around 12 miles, multiple fragments of the walls still speckle the modern city of Rome. The largest fragment can be found next to Termini Station, but the most memorable remains are now found in the McDonald’s restaurant on the train station’s lower level. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/6Termini-McDonalds5-c5a8b6d-e1764242135272.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a McDonald's ordering screen and behind it there is a large, old brick wall" title="Burger, fries… and a fourth-century BC wall? Visitors to the Roma Termini station branch of McDonald’s can marvel at a feat of ancient engineering while they get their fast food fix (Image by Edward J Watts)" /> 12. Rome’s walls were formidable… but Constantinople’s were MUCH more difficult to breach Rome has been captured numerous times since the Aurelian Walls were built, but the city of Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey) – which became the Roman empire’s eastern capital in AD 330 – has fallen to invaders on just three occasions. The city remained under Roman control for nearly 900 years until its walls were breached by the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, before being recaptured by the Romans in 1261. It then fell to the Ottomans in 1453, but has not been seized since. 13. The Roman empire was home to one of the most fought-over cities in the world Although only 134 miles from Constantinople, Adrianople (modern Edirne, Turkey) has been the site of at least 15 different battles and sieges. The last two occurred in 1913 when Bulgaria captured the city from the Ottoman empire before losing it again later that year. 14. The Colosseum was the largest (but not the only) amphitheatre Rome’s Flavian Amphitheatre, or Colosseum, was once capable of seating 50,000 people, making it almost 30 per cent larger than the empire’s next-largest arena in Capua. But the Colosseum was unique because of its remarkable size, not because amphitheatres were rare. In fact, the remains of more than 230 amphitheatres have been found in former Roman cities, stretching all the way from Britain to Israel. One such example in Cahors, France, was discovered during the construction of a car park that is now aptly named the Parking Amphithéâtre. Another, found in suburban Paris, now serves as the courtyard for a high school. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-1451938726-d5b4185-e1764246957408.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A computer generated image of the Colosseum, a large circular building with several arches" title="A computer-generated image depicting the Colosseum during its ancient heyday. The amphitheatre is now a World Heritage Site and a symbol of both modern Italy and ancient Rome (Image by Getty Images)" /> 15. Arenas weren’t just for gladiator fights Thanks in part to the 2000 movie Gladiator and its recent sequel, Roman amphitheatres are now commonly associated with clashes between sandal-wearing warriors. However, gladiator battles weren’t the only events to take place in these ancient arenas. In fact, spectators were as interested in events that displayed exotic wild animals like rhinos, lions and ‘camel-leopards’ (giraffes). The largest games on record – the 100 days of spectacles marking the opening of the Colosseum in AD 81 – saw upwards of 9,000 animals killed. Read more | Sharks in the arena? Gladiator II's real history and historical accuracy explained 16. Commodus was a much better fighter than Hollywood would have us believe In comparison to Maximus (Russell Crowe), Gladiator’s main antagonist, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), is depicted as an unremarkable fighter – but this is a distortion of the truth. Following a failed assassination plot orchestrated by his sister Lucilla, the real-life Commodus sent for instructors from around the world to teach him how to shoot arrows, throw javelins, and excel in hand-to-hand combat. As his skills increased, Commodus wanted to show his subjects what he could do. In one memorable display in the Colosseum, the senator Cassius Dio witnessed the emperor “dispatching, with his own hands, five hippos and two elephants in two days. He also killed rhinos and a camel-leopard”. Another time, Commodus arranged for “a hundred lions to appear in one group” and then “killed the entire hundred with exactly one hundred javelins” so that “no one saw a single extra javelin.” While Dio did not approve of these displays, even Commodus’s worst critics could not deny his talent. WATCH | Historian Alison Futrell discusses the real history behind Gladiator II View Green Video on the source website 17. Chariot racing was HUGELY popular The Circus Maximus in Rome, the main site for chariot races, adjoined the imperial palace and had seating for at least 150,000 people. On competition days, 800 horses could race in as many as 24 different contests. The last races held in the Circus Maximus took place in AD 549, but racing continued at Constantinople’s 100,000-seater Hippodrome into the 13th century. 18. Chariot racing was the football of its day Rome originally had four charioteer teams: the Reds, Whites, Greens and Blues. The Reds and Whites were the most historic, but they were surpassed in prominence by the Greens and Blues during the first century AD. The teams had franchises that competed in major cities across the empire and even boasted organised groups of supporters (akin to modern football ultras) prone to riotous behaviour. Star drivers, who could often change teams during their careers, frequently earned enormous amounts of money. The tombstone of Gaius Appuleius Diocles, one of the greatest charioteers of the second century AD, mentions that he won 1,462 races and earned 35,863,120 sesterces in prizes across a 24-year career spent racing for the Reds, Whites and Greens. Although he is believed to have died at the age of 42 and would have kept only a portion of his winnings, his career earnings exceeded the fortunes of most Roman senators. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-520726031-6041b74-e1764247102231.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A chariot race in the Circus Maximus depicted by 19th-century painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Star drivers could earn huge sums of money (Image by Getty Images)" title="A chariot race in the Circus Maximus depicted by 19th-century painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Star drivers could earn huge sums of money (Image by Getty Images)" /> 19. Rome became the first large empire to enact universal citizenship In AD 212, the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus – better known by his nickname, Caracalla – issued a law making all free people in the empire Roman citizens. The new citizens had to legally change their names to honour their new benefactor, flooding the Roman bureaucracy with tens of millions of people now bearing the name ‘Aurelius’. The reason for Caracalla’s generosity? He wanted everyone in the empire to celebrate the murder of Geta, Caracalla’s brother and co-emperor who was killed in his mother’s arms. 20. Roman trade across the Indian Ocean was hugely lucrative When we think of ancient trade, the Silk Road – the sprawling network of trade routes stretching some 4,000 miles between China and the Mediterranean – often springs to mind. Yet, it wasn’t the only source of wealth for the Romans. Merchants also travelled across the Indian Ocean to Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, carrying gold coins and bringing back spices and exotic animals. At times, the demand for Roman coins in India and Sri Lanka so exceeded the supply that Indian mints struck their own coins featuring the portraits of Roman imperial figures and legends written in Latin. 21. The Romans developed a sophisticated financial system From the second century BC, Roman bankers managed investment accounts that their clients could use for depositing money and making transfers. The system was so sophisticated that emperor Trajan used subsidised government loans to fund social welfare programmes in the second century AD. 22. The Romans invented some truly terrifying military technology The Romans developed a napalm-like substance commonly known as ‘Greek fire’ which was placed in hand grenades or sprayed from hoses equipped with special nozzles – usually against enemy naval forces. When the substance ignited, it even burned on water. The technology was first deployed in AD 672 and was used for more than 500 years against the navies of the Bulgars, Rus’ and Arabs. The empire lost the ability to manufacture Greek fire just before AD 1200, although no one really knows why. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/9Greekfire-madridskylitzes1-760acd4-e1764242423636.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration of two boats with men in them. The boat on the left are blowing fire over the one of the right" title="A 12th-century AD depiction of Greek fire being used against the rebel Thomas the Slav in AD 821. The exact composition of this devastating incendiary substance has been lost" /> 23. The longest-serving Roman emperor was actually pretty unremarkable He ruled for 66 years between AD 962–1028, but Constantine VIII’s passions for fine food and horses meant that he took little interest in state affairs until the last three years of his life. He instead trusted his older brother and co-emperor – the much more famous and capable emperor Basil II – to govern the empire for most of their lives. Coincidentally, Basil’s term in office (AD 960–1025), is the second-longest in Roman history. Read more | Step inside the ancient Roman empire's gladiatorial arenas, and witness 24 hours of shocking violence 24. TWO emperors share the record for the shortest reign Father-and-son duo Gordian I and Gordian II ruled for a mere 22 days in AD 238. The Gordians, who were governing a province in north Africa without an army stationed there, foolishly rebelled against Maximinus Thrax – one of four other men who also claimed to be emperor that year. Although the Gordians received senatorial support in Rome, they were quickly dispatched by a general loyal to Maximinus. As for the second-shortest reign, the emperor Nepotian barely outlasted the two Gordians by holding Rome for 28 days in June of AD 350. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/10Gordian-II-238-ADEdward-Watts--Author-1d53219-e1764242478419.jpeg" width="850" height="413" alt="Coins issued by the emperor Gordian II, who – along with his father, Gordian I – ruled for just 22 days in AD 238 (Image by Edward J Watts)" title="Coins issued by the emperor Gordian II, who – along with his father, Gordian I – ruled for just 22 days in AD 238 (Image by Edward J Watts)" /> 25. It took a VERY long time for the Romans to adopt Christianity When Constantine I famously converted to Christianity in AD 312, the territory he ruled was only around 10 per cent Christian. In fact, the Roman empire did not become a Christian-majority state until the AD 390s, and some pagan-majority communities lasted long enough that they negotiated the surrender of their cities to Muslim generals in the AD 630s. The Syrian city of Harran (now part of modern Turkey) even maintained temples dedicated to its moon god into the 11th century AD. Edward J Watts is Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of the The Romans: A 2,000-Year History (John Murray Press/Basic Books, 2025)
From tragic Tudor queens to restless Roman soldiers: Britain's 8 most haunted houses
From tragic Tudor queens to restless Roman soldiers, Caitlin Blackwell Baines introduces us to the terrifying cast of phantoms said to dwell within the nation’s spookiest homes
1. Stirling Castle, Scotland From elusive sea monsters to shrieking banshees, Scotland is home to a host of supernatural beings – including, of course, ghosts. One of their best-known spectral celebrities is the ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots, who is said to haunt a staggering 10 properties, making her, perhaps, the best-travelled ghost in the nation. Among her main haunts is Stirling Castle, her childhood home in central Scotland. Perched atop a volcanic crag, surrounded by cliffs overlooking the River Forth, Stirling Castle was constructed in the early 12th century, originally as a military stronghold, acting as a strategic line of defence during the Wars of Scottish Independence (1296–1357). However, almost from the very beginning, Stirling was also a favourite royal residence. By the time a young Mary Stuart lived there in the 1540s, it was as much a palace as it was a fortress: her father, James V, had transformed it into one of the most opulent homes in Renaissance Britain. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/Stirling-Castle-Bannockburn-1-8d83973.jpg" width="1200" height="960" alt="A large brown castle stands on a tree-covered hill, against a dark grey cloudy sky" title="Stirling Castle is one of several historic buildings said to be haunted by the ghost of Mary, Queen of Scots – the ill-fated monarch who was imprisoned – and executed – upon the orders of her cousin, Elizabeth I (Image by SpookyScotland.net)" /> Whatever happy childhood memories Mary may have had of Stirling would be tainted by the events of 21 April 1567. It was here on this day that the embattled queen would see her infant son (the future King James VI & I) for the last time. Soon after, she was forced to abdicate, flee the country, and eventually, in 1587, she was executed for treason under the orders of her cousin, Elizabeth I. Perhaps it is for this reason that the melancholy monarch returns to the castle, perpetually searching for her long-lost child, even in the afterlife. She is said to be kept company by a dutiful servant – a young woman in green, who purportedly died in a fire while attempting to save her mistress. They are also joined by Stirling’s notorious ‘Highland Ghost’ – a mysterious man adorned in full Highland regalia, who is often mistaken for a costumed tour guide. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/Raynham-Hall-ghostWHB5WT-f2f1e5a.jpg" width="4218" height="5059" alt="A black and white photograph of a staircase with a white ghostly figure in the middle" title="This photograph of Raynham Hall’s ‘Brown Lady’ – purportedly the ghost of former resident Lady Dorothy Townshend – caused a stir when it was first published in 1936 (Image by Alamy)" /> 2. Raynham Hall, Norfolk At its height in the Georgian period, Raynham Hall was nationally renowned for its innovative architecture, priceless art collection and powerful owner. Though originally constructed in the early 1600s, the stately red-brick manor we see today was largely the work of eminent early 18th-century architect William Kent, acting under the direction of Charles, 2nd Viscount Townshend, a leader in the House of Lords. Like the house he lived in, Townshend was an imposing figure, known for his fiery temper and blustering delivery in parliament. And rumour had it, his aggressiveness was not solely reserved for political opponents. His long-suffering wife, Dorothy, may have also been a target of his ire. The story goes that Lady Dorothy Townshend (née Walpole, sister of prime minister Robert) endured an unhappy marriage. Some say she was unfaithful, while others claim it was her extravagant spending that incurred her husband’s wrath. In any case, she purportedly died under mysterious circumstances and continues to roam Raynham’s halls to this day. Read more | Five shocking tales from Britain’s royal palaces Over the years, there have been numerous reported sightings of Lady Townshend – or ‘The Brown Lady’ as she has come to be known, on account of the colour of her silk brocade dress – but perhaps none so dramatic as the encounter of photographers Hubert Provand and Indre Shira. In the autumn of 1936, while on assignment for Country Life magazine, Provand and Shira prepared to take a photo of Raynham’s main staircase. Just as they were setting up the shot, they suddenly caught sight of an ethereal, veiled form floating down the stairs. Acting fast, they snapped their photo and captured what is widely considered to be one of the most famous examples of ‘spirit photography’ in history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/50-Berkeley-SquareK07JMM-ffef8a3.jpg" width="743" height="1153" alt="A black and white photograph of a dark front door. Either side of it are iron railings, and there is an arch over the two steps leading up to it" title="Dare you open the door? Visitors to 50 Berkeley Square have been reporting strange goings-on since the mid-19th century (Image by Alamy)" /> 3. 50 Berkeley Square, Mayfair, Greater London With its elegant Georgian townhouses, luxury boutiques and Michelin star restaurants, the upscale district of Mayfair in central London may not seem like the natural setting for a ghost story. And yet, it is home to a property once christened the ‘Most Haunted House in London’. The offending structure can be found on Berkeley Square, a residential block first laid out in the mid-1700s by architect William Kent (the man behind Raynham Hall). From the outside, there’s nothing much to distinguish the townhouse at No 50 from its neighbours – but don’t let its staid, neoclassical façade fool you. The first reports of unusual activity at No 50 occurred in the mid-1800s. Nearby residents noticed strange sounds and smells, lights flickering in the windows at all hours of the night, and the noticeable signs of decay and abandon. Sceptics chalked this up to the eccentric habits of its owner, Thomas Myers, a recluse left heartbroken by the rejection of his fiancée. Nevertheless, rumours soon swirled that the house was haunted. View Green Video on the source website Some believed the ghost was a young woman who had jumped from an upper-storey window. Others claimed it was Myers himself, who had locked himself in the attic and driven himself mad. Still others maintained it was a preexisting entity that had possessed both Myers and the suicidal woman. Whatever the case, most Londoners came to fear and avoid No 50 – all save for a brave and foolhardy few. One such daredevil was Lord George Lyttleton, a Conservative statesman, who, in 1872, accepted a bet to stay a night alone at the house. Though incredulous of the stories, Lyttleton packed a pistol and was probably quite pleased he had done so, for when a dark, tendrilled apparition advanced towards him, he was able to defend himself. Firing a few rounds, he was certain he’d hit his mark. Yet, when the smoke settled, it revealed only spent shell casings and an empty attic. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/Chillingham-Castle2BYB32Y-e4a1674.jpg" width="5081" height="3381" alt="A black and white photograph of a large castle with crenellated towers" title="This photograph of Chillingham Castle may be in black and white, but the building’s paranormal history is certainly colourful: its most famous ghoul is a boy in blue who appears to visitors inside a pink bedroom (Image by Alamy)" /> 4. Chillingham Castle, Northumberland Touted as Britain’s ‘Most Haunted Castle,’ Chillingham has a long and violent history. Once one of nearly 100 fortifications that dotted the bleak borderlands of England and Scotland, this 13th-century fortress served a pivotal role in the centuries-long rift between the two warring kingdoms. It was here, in 1298, that King Edward I launched his attack on William Wallace during the First War of Scottish Independence. Over the years, hundreds of England’s enemies were killed at Chillingham, many of them by torture in the castle’s dungeon and torture chamber – a cramped windowless pit located in a cellar beneath what is today a public tearoom. Strangely, however, these prisoners are not among the castle’s best-known ghostly residents. Instead, the most familiar phantom faces are those of women and children. There is the mysterious ‘Radiant Boy’ – an unknown child in blue who materialises before guests in the castle’s ‘Pink Bedroom’. And the legendary ‘Grey Lady’ – believed to be the ghost of Lady Mary Berkeley, whose husband, Ford Grey, 1st Earl of Tankerville, reportedly jilted her for her younger sister, leaving her alone and heartbroken in the castle. Modern visitors report the sounds of sobbing, the rustling of a heavy gown dragging along the castle’s corridors, and the faint aroma of rosewater. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/Blickling-HallBPB4N5-54b2853.jpg" width="5637" height="3775" alt="A large red brick palace lit up from below by floodlights. Behind it, there are many trees in shadow and the sky is deep blue" title="Anne Boleyn is said to haunt several palaces and stately homes, including Blickling Hall near Norwich. The Tudor queen is thought to have been born at the manor that previously stood on the site (Image by Alamy)" /> 5. Blickling Hall, Norfolk Blickling Hall might be considered the English counterpart to Scotland’s Stirling Castle – though, on the face of it, they would seem to have little in common. Where Stirling is a medieval citadel looming over the gateway to the Scottish Highlands, Blickling is a Jacobean manor nestled in the heart of the Norfolk Broads. Just 20 miles east of Raynham Hall, one would think it would have more in common with its ‘haunted’ East Anglian neighbour. But as the presumed birthplace of Anne Boleyn, Blickling has a far stronger symbolic link to the childhood home of Scotland’s own tragic queen. Read more | Your history guide to Frogmore Cottage: who has lived there before? The existing structure, built for Sir Henry Hobart in 1616, was erected atop the ruins of a Tudor manor house once belonging to Thomas Boleyn, 1st Earl of Wiltshire – whose youngest daughter had the unfortunate honour of becoming Henry VIII’s second wife. On 19 May 1536, after just three years of marriage, Anne Boleyn was beheaded for adultery and treason. Like her Scottish counterpart, Anne is thought to haunt a number of historic properties, including Hever Castle (another childhood home), Windsor Castle (a brief residence), the Tower of London (the site of her death), and, of course, Blickling. Here, she is said to appear every year on the anniversary of her death, in a carriage driven by headless horses. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/Heol-FanogGettyImages-1281060558-a4fffad.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="A black farmhouse stands on a hill, with a single light shining in the middle. The farmhouse has a chimney at either end of the roof and behind it, the sky is dark grey" title="A spooky farmhouse. One such building, Heol Fanog (Welsh for ‘Road to the Peaks’), gained notoriety in 2022 when it became the subject of hit podcast The Witch Farm (Image by Getty Images)" /> 6. Heol Fanog, Brecon Beacons, Wales A relatively recent entry into the annals of haunted historic Britain, Heol Fanog farmhouse in South Wales has gained contemporary notoriety thanks to the exposure of the hit BBC Sounds podcast, The Witch Farm (2022). The series focuses on the occupancy of the Rich family, who lived on the farm for a seven-year period from 1989, during which time they claim to have experienced a litany of terrifying events. From cold spots to disembodied footsteps, inexplicable power surges to noxious odours, and even full-blown apparitions and demonic possessions, the experiences of the Rich family have been likened to that of the Lutz family of Amityville Horror fame. While these stories are relatively new – and, indeed, the farmhouse itself is less than a hundred years old – legends about the isolated rural property have circulated for well over a century. The area’s strong association with witchcraft, occultism and Celtic mysticism, combined with the dark legacy of a gruesome local murder in the 19th century, have earned the property its nickname: ‘The Witch Farm’ or ‘Hellfire Farm’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/Hampton-CourtG37YX0-eab2b03.jpg" width="4458" height="2903" alt="Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour, is supposedly one of Hampton Court’s many resident phantoms. Early 20th-century postcards depicted the queen’s ‘ghost’ using a crude double-exposure effect (Image by Alamy)" title="Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour, is supposedly one of Hampton Court’s many resident phantoms. Early 20th-century postcards depicted the queen’s ‘ghost’ using a crude double-exposure effect (Image by Alamy)" /> 7. Hampton Court Palace, Greater London Historic Royal Palaces certainly have their hands full. In addition to managing some of the nation’s highest profile heritage landmarks, catering to some 4 million visitors each year, they also have ghosts to contend with. Several properties in their portfolio – including the Tower of London, Kensington Palace and Kew Palace – are allegedly haunted. And while it’s hard to say which one of them is the most haunted, Hampton Court is definitely a strong contender. Construction on the iconic Tudor palace began in 1515 under the direction of Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York – Henry VIII’s chief advisor. At the time, Wolsey was one of the kingdom’s richest and most influential figures and he intended to build a home to reflect his position. In this he succeeded; however, within just a few years of his home’s completion, Wolsey had fallen from favour. Shortly before he died in 1530, he was ordered to surrender the palace to the king. Just 15 miles from London, the palace quickly became a favourite royal retreat. Read more | Seven of history's most disturbing ghost ship stories that will haunt your dreams While many monarchs have resided in Hampton Court over the centuries, the palace is indelibly linked with the reign of Henry VIII. As such, it should come as no surprise that the most familiar phantoms are members of the Henrician court. There’s Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife, who died from complications of childbirth, and allegedly still holds a solemn vigil on the palace’s Silverstick staircase; Catherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife, whose ghost is said to run screaming down the aptly-named ‘Haunted Gallery’, endlessly replaying a failed attempt to reach her husband to beg him to spare her from execution; and maybe even Old King Hal himself. Some believe it was the ghost of the king who was captured on the viral CCTV footage that made headlines around the world in the winter of 2003. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/Treasurers-HouseTopfoto0780551-5b87db0.jpg" width="3442" height="2284" alt="A cellar with dirty brick walls. To the left, there is an empty fireplace with a dark tunnel, and on the right, there are two boxes stacked on one another" title="The infamous cellar at the Treasurer’s House, York. In 1953, a young plumber’s apprentice claimed to have witnessed Roman soldiers marching through a wall (Image by Topfoto)" /> 8. Treasurer's House, York, North Yorkshire Beneath the soaring spires of York Minster, scores of visitors amble along pedestrian thoroughfares lined with gastropubs, gift shops and historic buildings. The din of casual conversation is occasionally interrupted by the booming oratory of tour guides who lead groups of tourists down winding cobble-stoned lanes and narrow alleyways (idiosyncratically referred to as ‘snickleways’ by the locals). These merry little bands are on the hunt for haunted houses, and in York – reputedly the ‘Most Haunted City in Britain’ – they will not be disappointed. Dozens of properties compete for the title of ‘Most Haunted House’ in York, and while there is no clear victor, there is one property that can lay claim to what is, perhaps, the best authenticated ghost story in British history. That is the Treasurer’s House – a Grade I listed National Trust property with foundations dating all the way back to the early 12th century. Its best-known ghost story, however, has nothing to do with its medieval history. In 1953, an 18-year-old apprentice plumber called Harry Martindale was hired to install a boiler in the property’s ancient cellar. Working alone and in silence, Martindale was startled by the distant sound of a trumpet. The sound grew closer, and suddenly, what appeared to be a Roman soldier with a plumed helmet emerged from a wall, followed by a cart horse and a band of other soldiers, all dressed in green and carrying round shields. If this weren’t strange enough, the soldiers appeared to be cut off at the knees. Though Martindale’s claims were initially dismissed as hallucinations, the subsequent discovery of the Via Decumana, a Roman road lying about 15 inches below the cellar floor, gave credence to his story. What’s more, his description of the soldiers’ attire – originally deemed inaccurate based on existing historical knowledge – was later confirmed to be consistent with the regiment stationed at the Roman outpost of Eboracum (i.e. modern-day York). Caitlin Blackwell Baines is an art historian and author who specialises in Georgian art and architecture. She is the author of How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession (Profile Books, 2025) This article was first published in the Apple News October 2025 bonus issue
The assassins' reign of terror: how these 12th-century killers spread fear in the Middle East
In the 12th century, a sect of killers spread fear across the Middle East, executing a series of high-profile political murders. Steve Tibble introduces the original Assassins
There were 13 men: unlucky for someone. They were dressed to kill – but so was everyone else. In what was essentially an army camp, crammed with armed men, the assailants blended right in. Moving casually but intently through the bustling camp outside Aleppo in Syria, past stalls and shopkeepers, beggars and soldiers, they headed towards their target. Suddenly their progress was checked by a shout from behind: “What are you doing here?” Cover blown, their response was shocking: an explosion of violence, weapons flashing, blood splashing. The team of Assassins erupted into the tent where their victim sat unawares, surrounded by generals, lackeys and bodyguards. The attackers’ daggers and swords struck once more. The target that day in January 1175 was a Kurdish general, Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub – better known to us as Saladin. He had displaced the Fatimid dynasty to rule as sultan of Egypt, and was now muscling in on Syria. That vicious attack on his life failed – for now. But who were these men? And why had they launched such a murderous and seemingly suicidal assault? Power through murder Those brutal killers were Assassins. The upper case seems pedantic, but it is important. In the true medieval sense, that term was used for members of the Nizari Ismailis, a Shia Muslim sect who sought to defend themselves and to project power through political murder. The word ‘Assassin’ (or hashishin) was used as a pejorative by those on the receiving end of their remorseless hit squads in the 12th and 13th centuries. And the name stuck, becoming synonymous for premeditated murderers or contract killers – even though most of the broader Nizari Ismaili community were in fact peaceful peasants, scholars and merchants. The origins of this sect lay in the chaos of the Middle East in the late 11th century. Turkic tribes from the Eurasian steppes had stormed into the region and seized power from local Arab rulers, before starting to jockey among themselves for control of these new lands. Then, between 1092 and 1094, most of the major political leaders in the region died, including the vizier and caliph-imam of Fatimid Egypt, and the Seljuq sultan Malik-Shah, who ruled a vast empire stretching from Anatolia through the Middle East to central Asia. The resulting power vacuum was quickly filled with mayhem. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/2S98R0TWeb-Ready-a1f81d5.jpg" width="1477" height="984" alt="An illustration showing a man in a white and red robe and red hat, standing in front of a group of four others, holding instruments. They are surrounded by a low white wall and there are two trees in the background" title="Hasan-i Sabbah, 11th-century founder of the Nizari Ismaili sect – and its band of fidais, highly trained killers – depicted in an early 14th-century illustration (Image by Alamy)" /> The Nizari Ismailis were widely despised by their powerful Sunni Muslim neighbours as heretics and traitors, so launched an audacious uprising against the Sunni Seljuq Turks in Persia – and, importantly for our story, sent out missionaries to set up bases in the mountains of Syria. This was occurring in the last decade of the 11th century, around the same time as the crusaders were sweeping into the area, carving out kingdoms of their own from which to defend the Holy Land. Read more | Saladin: a hero of Islam and scourge of the crusaders By the start of the 12th century, the entire region had become disastrously fragmented. For the Nizari Ismailis – and for the recently arrived crusaders – Syria now seemed a land of opportunity. Members of this small breakaway sect were small in number and without obvious economic assets, but they had a terrifyingly effective secret weapon: the savage skills and unquestioning loyalty of a cadre of elite killers – the fidais. Promise of death During the crusades, most major players employed a similar strategy: channel enormous amounts of money and energy into acquiring big armies, the basic building blocks upon which almost all power structures were built. But assembling these voraciously expensive and disruptive armies was a big enough challenge for wealthy nations – how could minor players survive? The short answer is that, in most cases, they did not. Before long, almost all of them were swept away. The Nizari Ismailis chose a revolutionary alternative: rather than rely on the generality of death embodied by large (and expensive) armies, they chose the specificity of death. Individuals are afraid of violent endings, so any power that could spark and exploit that primal fear had no need of costly, clumsy armies. For the Nizari Ismailis – now, for our purposes, synonymous with the Assassins – violent, targeted death became their power, and their promise. Their overall goal was to secure the survival and growth of the sect in a hostile environment, but specific tactical objectives varied. Murders were perpetrated for political reasons, to intimidate, for revenge, for money – for example, to pay for the construction of castles – out of personal animosity or, frequently, a combination of these reasons. In their remote bases in Syria, the Assassins perfected and professionalised their squads of fidais. Only the most committed and able, mentally as well as physically, were chosen to receive the rigorous training needed to fulfil their highly dangerous missions, often with slim chances of survival. Most of their attacks were on high-profile individuals, and took place in very public spaces. Every member of a fidai team had to be courageous and committed to the cause. They were described by their enemies as fanatical and brainwashed, but by admirers as dedicated and skilful. Regardless, the fidais were extraordinarily focused and effective – the ninjas of the 12th century Middle East. Then, as now, there were many lurid descriptions of the Assassins as drugged-up, deluded fanatics eager to die for a twisted cause. But this was all part of the illusion – an essential element in the promise of ‘unstoppable death’ at the heart of the brand. The fear sown by the fidais – along with their own fearlessness and relentlessness, which made them such terrifying and efficient killers – was at the core of the Assassins’ power. As one of their leaders retorted to an attempt at intimidation by an enemy, a general commanding vast armies: “Do you threaten a duck with the river?” If death was a river, in other words, the fidais were all too happy to swim in it. Most of the associated rumours were untrue. It is unlikely, for instance, that fidais were given drugs such as hashish (cannabis resin) to numb their senses and inspire fanaticism before they carried out a hit. Being under the influence of narcotics would have been counterproductive: a skilled Assassin needed to have his wits about him. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/2B02RYDWeb-Ready-6d625b4.jpg" width="5000" height="3334" alt="An illustration showing a group of men stabbing another man in the centre of the image" title="A disguised fidai fatally stabs the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk in 1092 – the Assassins’ first major hit – as shown in a 14th- century manuscript illustration (Image by Alamy)" /> Old Man of the Mountain The Assassins’ political murders started with a huge success in 1092, when a fidai named Bu Tahir Arrani stabbed the Seljuq vizier Nizam al-Mulk as he was being carried in a litter towards Baghdad. Other Sunni leaders were then attacked and killed, including Janah al-Dawla, the Turkic governor of Homs, in 1103. Even Mawdud, the ruler of Mosul and the general entrusted with coordinating the campaign against the crusaders, was killed in Damascus in 1113, despite being surrounded by the best bodyguards that money could buy. Mawdud’s successor, Aqsunqur al-Bursuqi, fared no better, assassinated while at his prayers in the Great Mosque of Mosul in 1126. Members of the fidai squad were, as usual, cut down by the numerous bodyguards stationed around the target, with only one, “a youth from Azaz”, surviving. (This was highly embarrassing for his mother, who was deeply proud of the celebrity status her brave son enjoyed in the sect and was already in mourning for him when he returned alive.) By the mid-12th century, the Assassins had become feared across the region. This reputation was further confirmed under the rule of Rashid ad-Din Sinan, known as Sinan, who became ruler of the de facto Nizari Ismaili state in Syria and Persia in 1162. He strengthened the Assassins’ network of mountain fortresses and perfected their deadly craft. Under him, the fidais became an even more professional and fearsome weapon – more formalised, better trained and increasingly highly motivated. Read more | Step onto the medieval Silk Road and you'll witness its intense wonders – and its hidden horror Sinan was an extraordinary figure: highly intelligent, a great leader and capable of acting with profound strategic insight. He was also a man of a deeply esoteric, mystical and, some would say, even ‘magical’ disposition. As one Sunni commentator later wrote, “the Ismaili sect followed him as they had followed no one else, and he was able to achieve what no other had achieved”. The main Nizari source about his life, an early 14th-century biography, was written by the scholar Abu Firas, who went to some lengths to emphasise the leader’s orthodox Islamic credentials but also listed Sinan’s supposed occult achievements. There were stories of telepathy and clairvoyance. Sinan was never seen eating, and he did not say much, but deliberately adopted strange poses. There were rumours among his own people that he did not cast a reflection in water. He became known as the ‘Old Man of the Mountain’ – a title that, though originally a personal honorific, was later used to signify the Assassins’ leader in Syria, a little like ‘Caesar’ or ‘Sultan’. This helped create a sense of fear that transcended death: regardless of who was in charge at any moment, there was always an ‘Old Man of the Mountain’. The ‘death cult’ image that Sinan so fastidiously cultivated was a huge success. The Assassins’ enemies fomented ‘legendary’ tales in attempts to denigrate and isolate their ruthless foe, but the killers benefited from the additional fear these stories fuelled. As one Nizari poet put it, a single fidai could strike fear into the heart of the most powerful king. And there was one particular ‘king’ that the Assassins had in their crosshairs. Saladin, a usurper desperate to shore up his image as a legitimate ruler, found it useful to pose as the champion of Sunni orthodoxy – and as Shia ‘heretics’, the Nizari Ismailis were handy scapegoats. They, along with the crusaders, were the unifying bogeymen of his self-justification. The Assassins correctly identified that his new Ayyubid empire posed an existential threat to the Nizari Ismaili sect – and decided that he should be eliminated. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/2B01T3YWeb-Ready-59a4a5a.jpg" width="4714" height="3143" alt="An illustration showing a small group of men approaching an orange castle on horses. In the castle, there are other men, attempting to defend it. One is at the front of the castle, riding a blue horse" title="A medieval miniature illustration shows Mongol warriors capturing Alamut Castle, the Nizari Ismaili sect’s headquarters in northern Persia (now Iran), in 1256 – auguring the end of the Assassins (Image by Alamy)" /> Hard target As outlined at the start of this story, and reported by the chronicler Ibn al-Athir the following century, the first fidai team struck while Saladin was besieging Aleppo in 1175, when 13 men armed with knives were dispatched to kill him. The attack was timed to coincide with the communal meal, when servants and guests would be distracted. But, as we’ve seen, on that occasion the fidais were thwarted by a piece of bad luck. An emir in Saladin’s camp recognised them as Nizari Ismailis, and asked: “What has brought you here? On what business have you come?” Knives were drawn: the Assassins stabbed the emir “with some deadly blows, and one of their number charged towards Saladin to slay him but was killed before he could reach him”, said Ibn al-Athir. The fidai who got closest had his head hacked off by an emir, and Saladin’s chancellor, Imad al-Din, wrote that “the others were not killed until they had killed a number of people”. The Assassins failed on this occasion – but they did not die quietly. The next year, Saladin was besieging the castle of Azaz, belonging to one of his Sunni rivals, north-west of Aleppo. Here the Assassins launched another, even more deadly attempt on his life, with a smaller but more focused team ordered to strike Saladin’s neck and head. Al-Athir wrote that “while Saladin was in a tent belonging to one of his emirs, [an Assassin] leapt on him, struck him on the head with a dagger and wounded him”. The blade met iron rather than flesh and bone. Spooked by the earlier attempt on his life, Saladin was almost totally covered in layers of concealed armour. “Had it not been for the mailed helmet under his cap,” wrote Ibn al-Athir, “he would have been killed. Saladin grasped the [Assassin’s] hand in his, although he was unable totally to prevent him striking a blow.” Read more | The crusade against the odds: how the First Crusade succeeded despite the obstacles The sultan’s men rushed to his aid, and killed that assailant. Another member of the hit squad killed one of Saladin’s commanders; a third fought on until he was killed by Saladin’s brother. The last surviving fidai escaped from the tent but was torn apart by the crowd outside. A bloodied Saladin was hustled away “in a state of shock, hardly crediting his escape… The sultan rode to his tent, terrified by this event, with his blood flowing down his cheek and the collar of his chain mail wet.” Saladin quickly sent a reassuring message back to Egypt to dispel any sign of weakness and to discourage possible uprisings. “There was only a scratch with some few drops of blood,” he wrote. But he knew that he could no longer ignore the Assassins. In July 1176, Saladin moved his armies into the heart of Nizari Ismaili territory and “ravaged their land, destroying and burning”. His armies besieged their fortress of Masyaf, about 30 miles north-west of Homs. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/BAL258593Web-Ready-be0b21a.jpg" width="3367" height="2244" alt="A photograph of a large grey ruin on top of a stone hill, against a dark blue sky" title="The ruins of Masyaf Castle in western Syria, one of the Assassins’ isolated fortresses from which the sect’s fidais were dispatched to kill Sunni adversaries and other targets (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> No further hostilities developed. Sinan did not want a huge army camped outside his castle, ravaging the hard-won Nizari lands in Syria. Saladin wanted to preserve his life and family, and he had plenty of other enemies to attend to. Both sides quickly sought peace. After this, the Assassins generally remained neutral, presumably having given reassurances to Saladin about his personal safety. He seems to have pulled back from further antagonism, and even included them in treaties that might affect their interests. End of the Assassins Ultimately, the Assassins failed to overthrow the Seljuq Turks or their successors. They carved out a couple of minor principalities for a time, but little more, and did not hold any major cities. They were eventually brushed aside by much larger, more violent and less easily intimidated military opponents. In 1256–57, they were destroyed by the Mongols in Persia, then neutered by Sultan Baybars and the Mamluks in Syria after 1265. The Assassins had persisted for more than a century and a half – far longer than might have been expected. Despite being vastly outnumbered by their Sunni enemies, they had made themselves heard, hated and feared. They pushed the bounds of dedication and commitment to new limits. And it is that extraordinary legacy, with all its faults, that deserves to be remembered. This article was first published in the October 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine