Latest / The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales / Tardis, Nutkin & The Chelsea Football Club | Brompton Cemetery, London, England

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Tardis, Nutkin & The Chelsea Football Club | Brompton Cemetery, London, England · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:13
Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristen.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering Brompton Cemetery, located in London, England.
0:24
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
0:27
Kristin: The gates stand open, so grab your favorite mug and cozy up.
0:31
Kristin: It's not a descend into the hauntings of history.
0:34
Kristin: I count myself fortunate to have lived in London for four years.
0:38
Kristin: Its burrows and winding roads are part of me now, memories stitched together from long walks through centuries of history.
0:45
Kristin: For a brief time, Kensington was home.
0:47
Kristin: Its parks, its gardens, and its quiet beauty never once disappointed me.
0:52
Kristin: But every bright place has a shadow, and in London, as everywhere, there's death.
0:57
Kristin: Tucked between the grand homes of Kensington and the streets of Chelsea, there's a gate.
1:02
Kristin: Stepping through it, the noise of the city falls away almost at once.
1:06
Kristin: Ahead of you, a long avenue stretches out, lined with lime trees, leaning headstones and stone angels gone green with age.
1:14
Kristin: At the very end, a dome chapel waits, wrapped in curving colonnades like a cathedral whose only roof is a sky.
1:21
Kristin: This is Brompton Cemetery, nearly 40 acres with more than 205,000 souls, with roughly 35,000 monuments.
1:30
Kristin: But Brompton wasn't born from beauty, it was born from desperation, and a city that had simply run out of room for its dead.
1:38
Kristin: To understand Brompton, we have to start with a problem.
1:41
Kristin: In 1800, around 1 million people lived in London.
1:45
Kristin: By 1850, that number had more than doubled, and every one of those people would someday need a grave.
1:51
Kristin: For centuries, Londoners had been buried in small parish churchyards.
1:55
Kristin: But by the 1800s, those churchyards were full, far past full.
2:00
Kristin: New craves were dug where bodies had already been laid, rats burrowed through the soil.
2:04
Kristin: In some places, by many accounts, the ground had risen above the streets around it, swollen with the dead.
2:10
Kristin: And some of what happened in those burial grounds is the stuff of nightmares.
2:14
Kristin: Just off the strand stood a small building called Aeon Chapel.
2:18
Kristin: Beneath its floors was a vault.
2:20
Kristin: In 1840, a committee of the House of Lords heard a claim that nearly 10 or 12,000 bodies had been crammed into that space.
2:28
Kristin: Sit with that for a moment.
2:30
Kristin: The chapel upstairs was rented out for dances, and old Bill advertised it plainly.
2:35
Kristin: Aeon Chapel, Dancing on the Dead, admission threepence.
2:38
Kristin: There was even a dress code.
2:40
Kristin: No one was admitted unless wearing shoes and stockings.
2:43
Kristin: Some people at the time thought the number was exaggerated, but in 1847, a surgeon bought the chapel and paid to clear the vault himself.
2:52
Kristin: Whatever the true count, the dead had been piled far too deep, and it wasn't only the overcrowding that frightened people, bodies were stolen.
3:00
Kristin: London's medical schools needed corpses to teach anatomy, and the law had given them very few.
3:06
Kristin: Men called resurrectionists dug up fresh graves by night and sold what they found.
3:10
Kristin: Then in 1831, two men in East London stopped waiting for people to die.
3:15
Kristin: They murdered their victims and tried to sell their bodies.
3:19
Kristin: The case horrified the country, and within a year, Parliament changed the law, giving surgeons legal access to the unclaimed dead.
3:26
Kristin: Then came the plague no one understood, cholera.
3:30
Kristin: Over three waves it killed more than 30,000 Londoners.
3:33
Kristin: Most people blamed bad air, ophthalmiasma rising from filth and rotting graves.
3:38
Kristin: Something though had to change.
3:40
Kristin: Parliament began encouraging private companies to build big new cemeteries at the edge of the city.
3:45
Kristin: Seven of them rose in a ring around London.
3:47
Kristin: Today we call them the Magnificent Seven, and Brompton is one of them.
3:51
Kristin: Brompton's story began in 1837 with an act of Parliament and a company with quite a mouthful of a name, the West of London and Westminster Cemetery Company.
4:01
Kristin: The company held a competition to design the cemetery, and the winner was an architect named Benjamin Bod, who had worked on Windsor Castle.
4:09
Kristin: Paud looked at the flat patch of Old Market Gardens and saw something grand.
4:14
Kristin: He modeled it on St.
4:15
Kristin: Peter's Square in Rome, imagining the Long Avenue as the nave of a great open air cathedral, with colonnades reaching out to embrace the domed chapel at the end.
4:24
Kristin: Pine trees were even brought in from Poland, so that one day they'd shade the graves.
4:29
Kristin: In June of 1840, Brompton was consecrated and on June 18th it received its very first burial.
4:35
Kristin: A young woman about 24 years old named Emma Shaw, she died during or soon after giving birth, and sadly no one knows what became of her baby.
4:44
Kristin: Her family could only afford a plain simple stone, and it's still here today, if you look closely, easy to miss among the grand monuments they came after.
4:54
Kristin: Bromden's first grave doesn't belong to anyone famous.
4:57
Kristin: It belongs to a young mother and a child who slipped out of the record.
5:01
Kristin: From the very start, Bromden struggled.
5:03
Kristin: Bod's dream was beautiful but very expensive.
5:06
Kristin: Burials came slowly.
5:07
Kristin: Shareholders saw almost nothing back.
5:10
Kristin: Then in 1843, defects appeared in the catacombs along the western wall.
5:14
Kristin: The builder blamed the architect, and Bod was dismissed.
5:18
Kristin: He had planned three chapels, one each for Anglicans, Catholics, and dissenters.
5:23
Kristin: However, the money ran out just after one.
5:25
Kristin: Then the government stepped in.
5:27
Kristin: A new law in 1850 let the state buy up London's private cemeteries.
5:32
Kristin: In the end, it only bought one, Brompton.
5:34
Kristin: The company asked for about£167,000 and got less than half.
5:39
Kristin: After a year of losses, the shareholders were glad to take it.
5:43
Kristin: Not everyone approved, though.
5:45
Kristin: One Victorian Building Journal sneered that the deal earned the Board of Health a new name, the Board of Death.
5:51
Kristin: In 1852, Brompton passed onto the hands of the Crown.
5:55
Kristin: It's still the only London cemetery the Crown owns, and today it's cared for by the Royal Parks.
6:00
Kristin: There's more to Brompton than meets the eye.
6:03
Kristin: Its reach grows far deeper.
6:04
Kristin: Beneath those great colonnades lie the catacombs built in 1842.
6:09
Kristin: To reach them, you pass through heavy cast iron gates, look closely, and you'll see serpents coiled around upside-down torches.
6:16
Kristin: The torch turned downward is an old symbol of a life put out.
6:20
Kristin: The serpent stands for life, and when it swells its own tail for eternity.
6:25
Kristin: The catacombs were meant to be a fashionable bargain.
6:28
Kristin: Rather than buying an expensive plot along the avenue, a family could rest their loved one's coffin on the shelf below ground and visit whenever they liked.
6:36
Kristin: There was room for thousands of people, but only around 500 places were sold.
6:42
Kristin: Part of the problem was competition and cremation was beginning to catch on, but part of it was something much grimmer.
6:48
Kristin: Warnings spread that the heavy lead coffins used in the catacombs could actually explode as the gases of decay built up within.
6:56
Kristin: And their fear wasn't foolish.
6:57
Kristin: Sealed lead coffins could really swell and burst, and gravediggers sometimes had to tap them to let the gas escape.
7:04
Kristin: Across London at Highgate, one of Brompton's sister cemeteries featured on the Grim, a council of coffins and catacombs that burnt under pressure, and in worst cases exploded.
7:15
Kristin: At first, people blamed the grave robbers.
7:17
Kristin: The fix, as the story goes, was to drill small holes, fill them with pipes, and burn off the gases with a match.
7:24
Kristin: The risk, though, hasn't gone away either in time.
7:26
Kristin: When a vault holding Archbishop's coffins was found under Lambeth Palace in 2017, it was left sealed, partly because the sealed lead coffins can burst violently when the seal is broken.
7:37
Kristin: Today the catacombs open just a few times a year.
7:40
Kristin: Down in the cold and quiet, coffins still rest on their shelves.
7:44
Kristin: And here and there the original Victorian funeral flowers have survived, laid by mourners more than half a century ago.
7:51
Kristin: The Western catacombs, the faulty ones that cost bought his job, never had much luck.
7:56
Kristin: In the Second World War, bombs fell on a railway station next door, and large sections had to be removed.
8:02
Kristin: Their surviving entrance was restored in 2017, and above ground, not everyone got a shelf or stone.
8:09
Kristin: Alongside the grand family tombs, Brompton holds common graves, where coffins were stacked deep into the earth, one on top one another, for those who couldn't afford a place of their own.
8:19
Kristin: Among those resting at Brompton is the man, though, that proved London wrong about cholera.
8:23
Kristin: His name was John Snow.
8:25
Kristin: He was a doctor and pioneer of anesthesia, trusted enough to give chloroform to Queen Victoria herself when she gave birth.
8:32
Kristin: But Snow had a theory few people believed.
8:34
Kristin: He thought cholera didn't travel through the air at all.
8:37
Kristin: He thought it traveled through the water.
8:39
Kristin: In the late summer of 1854, cholera tore through Soho.
8:43
Kristin: Within three days, 127 people on or near Broad Street were dead.
8:48
Kristin: Snow went door to door.
8:50
Kristin: He marked every death on a map, and the deaths clustered around a single public water pump.
8:55
Kristin: He took his findings to the local authorities.
8:57
Kristin: On September 8th, in 1854, they removed the pump's handle, and the outbreak began to fade.
9:03
Kristin: Four years later, Snow suffered a stroke while working.
9:06
Kristin: He died six days after.
9:08
Kristin: He was just 45.
9:10
Kristin: There's a quiet poetry in where he ended up.
9:12
Kristin: Brompton was built out of London's fear of the disease, and it became the resting place of the man who had showed how that disease really spread.
9:20
Kristin: Even his grave couldn't escape the century ahead.
9:23
Kristin: In 1941, his monument was destroyed by wartime bombing.
9:27
Kristin: The one you'll find today is a replica put up in 1951.
9:31
Kristin: Walking through the old North Gate on Old Brompton Road, take the first path on your left and look for a white monument topped with a draped urn.
9:39
Kristin: That's him.
9:40
Kristin: Heading back to the north entrance, and just to the left of the central path stands a tall Celtic cross of red sandstone.
9:46
Kristin: Read the inscription, and it's almost startling in how little it says.
9:50
Kristin: In loving memory of Emmeline Pankhurst, wife of R.M.
9:53
Kristin: Pankhurst LLD, at rest June 14, 1928.
9:58
Kristin: That's all.
9:59
Kristin: Nothing about the movement she led, nothing about the prisons or the cause that shaped her whole life.
10:04
Kristin: Here lies the most famous suffragette in Britain, remembered in stone as a wife.
10:09
Kristin: Emiline was born in Manchester in 1858.
10:12
Kristin: Her parents supported the women's suffrage, but they didn't expect much of their daughters beyond marriage.
10:18
Kristin: One night, pretending to be asleep, young Emmeline heard her father pause by her bed and say quietly to himself, What a pity she wasn't born a lad.
10:27
Kristin: She never forgot it.
10:28
Kristin: She married a radical lawyer named Richard Pankhurst, who believed in the cause as fiercely as she did.
10:34
Kristin: They had five children, but grief came early.
10:37
Kristin: Their little boy Frank died of dephrina at four.
10:40
Kristin: Years later, Richard died suddenly, and Emiline learned of it from a newspaper on the train home.
10:45
Kristin: He left her with four children and heavy debts.
10:48
Kristin: To make ends meet, she became a register of births and deaths in one of Manchester's poorest districts.
10:53
Kristin: Women sat across the desk from her and told her their stories.
10:56
Kristin: And she came to believe nothing would change for them until they had the right to vote.
11:01
Kristin: In 1903, she founded the Women's Social and Political Union.
11:04
Kristin: Its model was deeds, not words.
11:07
Kristin: A newspaper coined a mocking name for these women, suffragettes.
11:11
Kristin: They took to it and wore it proudly, though.
11:13
Kristin: What followed was years of struggle.
11:15
Kristin: She was arrested again and again.
11:17
Kristin: Suffragettes smashed windows and later set fires.
11:20
Kristin: In prison, they went on a hunger strike, and the authorities answered by force-feeding them through tubes.
11:26
Kristin: When officials came to Emiline's cell at Holloway prison, she raised a clay jug over her head and warned them she'd defend herself if they took a single step within.
11:35
Kristin: They never force fed her.
11:36
Kristin: The cause cost her dearly.
11:38
Kristin: A second son died young.
11:40
Kristin: Her sister died two days after a prison sentence, and the movement split her own family apart.
11:45
Kristin: She broke with two of her daughters, and one of them she never saw again.
11:49
Kristin: In 1918, some women finally won the vote, only those over 30, not everyone.
11:55
Kristin: By 1928, the years of hunger strikes and prison cells had finally worn down her body.
12:00
Kristin: On June 14, Emiline Pankhurst died.
12:03
Kristin: She was 69.
12:04
Kristin: Eighteen days later, the law changed, and every woman in Britain, over the age of 21, won the right to vote, but she didn't live to see it.
12:12
Kristin: Her funeral at the time was called a spectacle.
12:14
Kristin: Women who marched beside her, been jailed, and been force fed, came out one last time in their old sashes and ribbons.
12:21
Kristin: Her coffin was carried by nine former suffragettes.
12:24
Kristin: Every one of them had been to prison.
12:26
Kristin: And among them was the women who had started the hunger strikes 19 years before.
12:31
Kristin: They followed her here to Brompton where an enormous crowd waited at an open grave.
12:36
Kristin: And here she still lies, under a cross that calls her only a wife.
12:40
Kristin: Nothing on that stone tells a passerby who she was.
12:44
Kristin: You already have to know.
12:45
Kristin: Walk a little further toward the Great Circle, and you'll find a young pilot named Reginald Warrenford.
12:50
Kristin: On a June 9 in 1915, during the First World War, Warrenford spotted a German Zeppelin over Belgium.
12:57
Kristin: He climbed above it and dropped his bombs from overhead.
13:00
Kristin: The airship burst into flames.
13:02
Kristin: He became the first pilot ever to bring one down.
13:05
Kristin: The blast swept his plane and killed his engine, forcing him to land behind enemy lines.
13:10
Kristin: He fixed it on the spot, and before taking off again, he reportedly shouted, Give my regards to the Kaiser.
13:17
Kristin: There's a grim footnote, though, to that victory.
13:19
Kristin: The burning airship fell in a convent school, killing two nuns.
13:23
Kristin: Warneford was awarded the Victoria Cross, and just 10 days after his triumph, he took a new plane up for a test flight near Paris.
13:31
Kristin: As he climbed, the wings collapsed.
13:33
Kristin: He died on the way to the hospital.
13:35
Kristin: He was just 23.
13:37
Kristin: Some 50,000 people reportedly turned out for his funeral here at Brompton.
13:41
Kristin: His monument still shows the airship he brought down.
13:45
Kristin: Not far away lies another young man who loves speed.
13:48
Kristin: Percy Lambert was the first person to ever drive a hundred miles in a single hour.
13:52
Kristin: He promised his fiancee he'd give up racing once they were married.
13:56
Kristin: He went out one last time to reclaim his record, and a rear tire tore apart.
14:01
Kristin: His wedding was just two weeks away.
14:03
Kristin: His monument carries a wheel and a broken column, the old symbol of a life cut short.
14:09
Kristin: Then there's a tomb that stops people in their tracks.
14:12
Kristin: A chest of palestone under a copper roof, covered in flowering copperwork.
14:16
Kristin: It was designed by the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Byrne Jones, and it's the only tomb he ever designed.
14:22
Kristin: It belongs to Frederick Leyland, a Liverpool shipping magnet who poured his fortune into art.
14:28
Kristin: Leyland is best remembered for a feud.
14:30
Kristin: He asked the painter James McNeil Whistler to make a few small changes to his London dining room.
14:35
Kristin: Then he left town.
14:37
Kristin: While he was gone, Whistler took over.
14:39
Kristin: He painted the walls blue and green, covered the shutters in golden peacocks, and even invited the press in to see it in Leyland's own house.
14:48
Kristin: Leyland came home to a room he didn't ask for and an enormous bill.
14:52
Kristin: He agreed to pay half, and then he added insult.
14:55
Kristin: He paid in pounds instead of guineas.
14:57
Kristin: Artists and gentlemen were paid in guineas.
15:00
Kristin: Tradesmen were paid in pounds.
15:02
Kristin: So Whistler took his revenge on the wall itself.
15:05
Kristin: He painted two peacocks locked into a fight, a scruffy one with a white tuff of feathers, like the white streak in Whistler's own hair, and a puffed up rich one with feathers made of coins.
15:16
Kristin: Yet Leyland never painted over it.
15:18
Kristin: He kept those peacocks fighting on his wall for the rest of his life.
15:22
Kristin: Today the whole room stands in a museum in Washington, D.C.
15:26
Kristin: Leyland died in 1892, gasping for air on the London Underground.
15:31
Kristin: He was buried here the very next morning, forever known for his peacock feud.
15:35
Kristin: But obulence was another residency great as acid buried within.
15:39
Kristin: The Marchessa Louisa Casati was once the most extravagant woman in Europe.
15:44
Kristin: Amused of Picasso and Menring, famous for her flaming red hair, her pale powdered skin, and as the stories go, the chief as she walked on with jeweled leashes.
15:54
Kristin: She spent her fortune as boldly as she lived.
15:57
Kristin: By 1930, the money was gone and the debts ran into the millions.
16:01
Kristin: Casati fled to London and spent her final years in a single room.
16:05
Kristin: In 1957, the Marquessor was laid to rest here, dressed in black and leopard skin, wearing false eyelashes, with a beloved Pekanese at her side.
16:14
Kristin: Her gravestone carries a line from Shakespeare.
16:21
Kristin: Kassani chose London for her final years, but not everyone at Brompton came here by choice.
16:27
Kristin: Some were simply far from home when death found them.
16:30
Kristin: On the morning of June 13, 1892, Brompton received a Lakota warrior.
16:35
Kristin: His name was Longwolf.
16:36
Kristin: He was a Lakota warrior from the American Plains, and family legend says he fought at the Battle of Little Bighorn.
16:43
Kristin: In 1892, at 59, he crossed the Atlantic with Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the traveling show that carried cowboys and native performers to crowds across Europe.
16:53
Kristin: He was the oldest performer that season.
16:55
Kristin: In London, though, he fell ill with bronchial ammonia, and on June 11th he died, thousands of miles from home.
17:02
Kristin: Longwith then wanted to be buried on his own land, but not if it meant crossing the sea.
17:08
Kristin: Three of his people had died on the voyage over and had been buried in the ocean, and he believed the spirit lost at sea would wander forever without rest.
17:16
Kristin: His wife feared the same, and so Buffalo Bill bought a grave at Brompton, and Longwith was buried beneath a stone carved with a cross and a hollowing woof, an image he had drawn himself.
17:26
Kristin: Beside him lay a little girl named Starr at just 17 months old, who had fallen from a horse during one of the show's performances in London.
17:34
Kristin: When Longworth's family returned to America, he stayed behind, and slowly he was forgotten.
17:39
Kristin: The tree that once shaded his grave disappeared.
17:42
Kristin: His name wore away from the stone.
17:44
Kristin: Then nearly a century later, an English woman named Elizabeth Knight brought an old book at a market.
17:57
Kristin: So she went looking for it, and she found it.
17:59
Kristin: She later said it was so sad that she knew she had to do something.
18:03
Kristin: She told the story to anyone who would listen.
18:06
Kristin: And in 1993 in South Dakota, a man named John Blackfeather read about her search in his local newspaper.
18:12
Kristin: He was Longwolf's great-grandson.
18:15
Kristin: His family had always hoped to bring Longwolf home.
18:17
Kristin: They just had no money to make the trip, and no idea how to track him down.
18:22
Kristin: It took years, but in September of 1997, Longwolf's descendants gathered here at Brompton.
18:28
Kristin: His remains and little stars were raised from the earth.
18:31
Kristin: Their casket, draped in the Lakota flag and the stars in stripes, was drawn through the cemetery by two black horses to the slow beat of a funeral drum.
18:40
Kristin: Relatives followed in their feathered bonnets.
18:42
Kristin: A Lakota spiritual leader prayed to the four winds, the winds Longwolf's soul would travel on.
18:48
Kristin: On September 28, 1997, more than 105 years after he died, Longwolf was buried again on a windslip hill in South Dakota with Starr beside him.
18:59
Kristin: At the graveside of his closest living relative, Jesse Blackfeather, 87 years old, said, I'm very glad my grandfather is home.
19:06
Kristin: I feel very good now.
19:07
Kristin: Longwolf's last journey was finally over, and he rested once more in the land he came from.
19:13
Kristin: Longwolf was finally allowed to leave.
19:15
Kristin: Others at Brompton are sealed in for good, though.
19:18
Kristin: Halfway down the cemetery's eastern side, partly hidden by trees, stands the strangest tomb in Brompton.
19:25
Kristin: It rises some 20 feet high, built of granite in the style of ancient Egypt, and topped with a pyramid.
19:31
Kristin: A band of hieroglyphics frames its heavy bronze door.
19:35
Kristin: There is a keyhole, but no key.
19:37
Kristin: It's the largest, most elaborate structure in the entire cemetery, and for decades no one has been inside.
19:43
Kristin: It belongs to a woman named Hannah Kortoy.
19:46
Kristin: Hannah was born around 1784.
19:49
Kristin: As a girl, she fled an abusive father and found work as a housekeeper.
19:53
Kristin: Around 1800, she went to work for a man named John Kortoy, a wealthy moneylender in his 70s.
19:59
Kristin: She then became his housekeeper and soon much more.
20:02
Kristin: She took his name and had three daughters.
20:05
Kristin: She said they were his, but not everyone believed her.
20:08
Kristin: When Kortoy died, he left most of his fortune to Hannah and his family fought the will, claiming he had lost his mind.
20:14
Kristin: The battle dragged on for nearly a decade, but Hannah won.
20:18
Kristin: She died in 1849, and her grand tomb took years to finish.
20:22
Kristin: Two of her daughters, who never married, would later join her within.
20:26
Kristin: In her later years, Hannah had a close friend, an Egyptologist named Joseph Bonomi, who had drawn the ancient monuments of Egypt with remarkable precision.
20:35
Kristin: Many believed it was Bonomi who gave her tomb its Egyptian form.
20:39
Kristin: When he died in 1878, he was buried here too, and a family grave so plain it seems strange for a man of his talent.
20:47
Kristin: But carved on his headstone is Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead, and the jackal appears to be gazing toward the tomb of his old friend, had one more figure, an inventor named Samuel Warner, who tried to sell the British military on fantastic weapons that may have never existed.
21:03
Kristin: He died around the same time as Hannah in mysterious circumstances, and is said to lie somewhere within Brompton in an unmarked grave.
21:11
Kristin: And from these three people, a legend grew.
21:14
Kristin: The story goes like this.
21:15
Kristin: Bonomi with his knowledge of ancient Egypt and Warner, the brilliant inventor, discovered the secret of time travel.
21:22
Kristin: Hannah paid for the work with her fortune, and the machine they built is still inside her tomb, behind the bronze door with no key.
21:30
Kristin: It's a wonderful story, but here's where it comes from.
21:32
Kristin: As far as anyone can tell, the Time Machine first appeared in print in October of 1998.
21:38
Kristin: In a Halloween newspaper story, years later, a musician spun a new version, claiming it was a teleportation chamber.
21:45
Kristin: He later admitted he had made it up as a background for a short story.
21:50
Kristin: What is true is this around 1980, after a visit from Hannah's relatives, the key to the tomb was lost.
21:57
Kristin: No one has been inside since.
21:59
Kristin: And as the A musician once said, opening it may just deepen the mystery.
22:04
Kristin: If anyone at Bromden might have believed in the impossible, it was Sir William Crooks.
22:09
Kristin: Crooks was one of the most respected scientists of his age.
22:12
Kristin: He discovered the element thalamine.
22:14
Kristin: He invented the Crookes tube, a glass vacuum tube that helped pave the way for the X-ray, and he was knighted for his work.
22:21
Kristin: But in 1867, his young brother Philip died of yellow fever at just 21.
22:26
Kristin: Grieving, Crooks went to his seance, hoping to reach him.
22:29
Kristin: In a way, he never came back from that room.
22:32
Kristin: In the 1870s, he began investigating mediums, people who claimed to speak with the dead.
22:38
Kristin: The most famous was a teenage girl named Florence.
22:41
Kristin: During her seances, a spirit called Katie King was said to appear.
22:45
Kristin: In Cooke's own home, Katie King was said to walk and talk and even hold the family's baby.
22:51
Kristin: In 1874, Crooks declared the phenomenon genuine.
22:55
Kristin: The scientific world was an uproar.
22:57
Kristin: Florence was later caught more than once, and many historians believe Katie King was simply Florence herself.
23:04
Kristin: But Crooks never let it go.
23:06
Kristin: After his wife Ellen died in 1916, he was shown a photograph said to capture her spirit and he believed it, but later was revealed to be fake.
23:14
Kristin: Sir William Crooks died in 1990 at age 86, and he was buried here among the dead he believed he had spoken to.
23:22
Kristin: For nearly a century, Bronkton has belonged to the army.
23:25
Kristin: From 1854 to 1939, it was the official military cemetery from London.
23:30
Kristin: It holds 12 recipients of the Victoria Cross and hundreds of servicemen from both World Wars.
23:36
Kristin: The old soldiers from the Royal Hospital Chelsea, the Chelsea pensioners, have their own plot here, marked by a monument with bronze lion's heads that remembers more than 2,600 of them.
23:46
Kristin: But not every soldier got a stone.
23:49
Kristin: Because the War Office paid reduced fees, many were buried in unmarked common graves, and then the war came to Brompton itself.
23:56
Kristin: During the Second World War, bombs damaged the Western Catacombs and destroyed John Snow's monument.
24:02
Kristin: In 1952, Brompton was closed to most new burials, and in 1996 it reopened.
24:08
Kristin: Today it's a working cemetery once more.
24:11
Kristin: A major restoration finished in 2018 brought the chapel and colonnades back to light.
24:17
Kristin: And during the work, restorers lifted the carpet in the chapel and found something no one had seen in generations.
24:23
Kristin: The original Victorian floor, a pattern of stone radiating out across the room.
24:28
Kristin: When it was done, a Victorian horse-drawn hearse rolled down the central avenue to celebrate.
24:33
Kristin: Today Bromden is full of life.
24:35
Kristin: Foxes slip between headstones, bats hunt over the avenue at dusk.
24:40
Kristin: Woodpeckers and kestrels nest in the trees.
24:43
Kristin: More than 200 kinds of moss and butterflies have been found here.
24:47
Kristin: Filmmakers love it too.
24:48
Kristin: In Sherlock Holmes, it's here that the villain rises from his family vault, seemingly back from the dead.
24:54
Kristin: In Goldeneye, the chapel stood in for a church in St.
24:57
Kristin: Petersburg, and Doctor Who came to film here, reportedly for an episode where the dead rise from their graves.
25:03
Kristin: For a cemetery with so few ghost stories of its own, it's seen a lot of the walking dead.
25:09
Kristin: Listen closely, and just over the cemetery wall, you'll hear something the Victorian founders never imagined.
25:15
Kristin: The roar of a football crowd.
25:17
Kristin: Stamford Bridge, home of the Chelsea Football Club, sits right next door, and the man who created the club lies here, about a goal kick from its gates.
25:25
Kristin: His name was Gus Mears.
25:27
Kristin: He owns Stamford Bridge grounds, and as the story goes, he was ready to give up on the idea of a club.
25:32
Kristin: Until a Scottish terrier bit his friend on the leg.
25:35
Kristin: The friend laughed it off, and Mears took it as a sign that this man was worth listening to.
25:40
Kristin: The tale is well known among Chelsea fans, though it's never been officially documented.
25:45
Kristin: What we do know is that in 1905 the club was founded.
25:49
Kristin: Gus Mears died in 1912, not yet 40, long before Chelsea won anything at all.
25:55
Kristin: He rests beside the main avenue, and on match days, fans cutting through the cemetery to Stanford Bridge walk right past him.
26:02
Kristin: And there may be one more famous name hidden among the stones.
26:06
Kristin: Beatrix Potter grew up just nearby.
26:08
Kristin: In 2001, researchers reported finding names on Brompton's gravestones and in its burial records that sound strangely familiar.
26:17
Kristin: Nutkin, McGregor, Jeremiah Fisher, and even Peter Rabbit.
26:21
Kristin: No one can say for certain whether a young Beatrice wandered these paths and borrowed the names of the dead for her characters, but it's a lovely thought.
26:29
Kristin: One of those names is easy to find.
26:31
Kristin: Between the colonnades stands the family grave of Susannah Nutkins, who lived in 90.
26:36
Kristin: Her grandson Tom, who sadly passed away at 14 just weeks before her, lies beside her.
26:41
Kristin: For a cemetery, this old and this vast, Bronton has surprisingly few recorded ghost stories.
26:47
Kristin: Here the legends live in history itself, in the stone and in the people beneath it.
26:52
Kristin: There's a sealed Egyptian tomb with no key.
26:54
Kristin: There's Sir William Crooks, a man of science who spent half his life reaching for the dead, now lying among them.
27:01
Kristin: There's William Terrace, the matinee idol stabbed to death at a theater stage door in 1897.
27:07
Kristin: His body rests here at Brompton.
27:09
Kristin: But according to the Royal Parks, his ghost still haunts the theater.
27:13
Kristin: And then there's Albert Dredge, a decorated soldier who was buried with his wife Henrietta here in 1907.
27:20
Kristin: Overcome with grief, he became convinced she was calling to him beyond the grave.
27:24
Kristin: The following spring, after her own death, he took his life on her own grave.
27:28
Kristin: And then there's Longwolf, who feared his spirit would wander forever if he was lost far from home.
27:34
Kristin: For more than a hundred years, he waited in the cemetery, and in the end, Brompton let him go.
27:40
Kristin: Every October, during the London's month of the dead, visitors gather at Brompton for walks among the graves after dark, listening to the stories of the people who rest here.
27:50
Kristin: And when you hear these stories, it's easy to understand why.
27:53
Kristin: A young mother and a child who vanished, a pump handle that saved a city, a woman who fought for the vote and died weeks too soon, and a tomb that may hold nothing at all or everything.
28:04
Kristin: For now, the stories of Brompton Cemetery slid back into stone, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
28:11
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil of Brompton Cemetery, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
28:17
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn, yet death keeps no calendar.
28:22
Kristin: And so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.