From ‘The Green Lady’ of Old Palace, to highwayman Dick Turpin’s connection to a (now closed) Thornton Heath pub, to the nun and pilot who haunt the streets around the old aerodrome, there’s plenty of ghost stories to send a shudder down your back
As the nights close in and there’s a chill in the air, there’s a ghostly presence in and around some of the places of Croydon, though perhaps none quite so much as the Old Palace of the Archbishops of Canterbury, which has its very own ghost – The Green Lady.
Ghosts ancient and modern: Old Palace and the Whitgift Almshouses are among several Croydon locations said to have a ghostly presence
With its history traced back to Medieval England and beyond, it is perhaps unsurprising that Old Palace, currently home to a large girls’ secondary school, should have accumulated its own myths and legends.
Many of OP’s buildings date from the Tudor period, and were part of the palace of the Archbishops of Canterbury, including the eponymous John Whitgift, Elizabeth I’s favourite prelate.
There has been something on the site where Old Palace stands today, nestling alongside Croydon Minster, since the 9th Century, possibly even earlier. It wasn’t until around 1443-1452, during the time of Archbishop Stafford, that a Great Hall was constructed, and apart from some remedial work in 1741 and 20th-century fire damage, that building is still largely intact, and used by the school today.
Queen Elizabeth I stayed at the Croydon palace on numerous occasions, her bedroom having been used as a classroom – known as QER – for generations of Old Palace girls.
A Tudor palace: the Old Palace school library dates back to the 1500s
The palace’s old Banqueting Hall is now the school hall, the palace’s 15th Century guardroom serves as the school library, the Long Gallery is a Sixth Form study area, while the chapel is noted for being the best-preserved Tudor building of its kind outside Hampton Court.
Which brings us to the tale of The Green Lady, which was recounted to Inside Croydon a year ago by a former pupils of the school.
The Green Lady’s grim fate, so the legend goes, was a woman scorned by her husband or lover, and so to resolve her grief, she threw herself and her infant baby down one of the Palace’s Jacobean staircases, to their deaths.
Other versions of the legend have the woman’s ghost wailing around the building, grief-stricken by the loss of her child.
The Green Lady was causing so much concern and made so many appearances that exorcisms were being conducted as recently as 100 years ago, but girls attending the school still learned of a way of summoning up her spirit.
“If you stamp on one of the stones five times… her ghost would appear and fall down the stairs again,” one former pupil told iC.
“Of course, we all tried it and never saw her.”
Perhaps those exorcisms worked?
The palace is not the only place in the town centre, closely associated with Archbishop Whitgift, that now is supposed to have a special “presence”. The Almshouses, built towards the end of the 16th Century, still provide homes for older Croydon residents, as well as the office of the Whitgift Foundation charity which operates them.
And on some dark nights, if you are really unlucky, you might just catch a glimpse of a hunched figure strolling along one of the corridors – legend has it that it is the ghost of a man who fell from the roof of the Almshouse in 1599 and met a horrible end, falling on to his own sword.
There are other ghouls and ghosts hereabouts in Croydon, too, according to the 1989 book, Around Haunted Croydon, by Frances D Stewart.
Pubs are always good places to go on a ghost hunt, and at least half a dozen Croydon boozers have laid claim to have a haunting presence which may, or may not, have drawn in a few extra curious punters. One former landlord of The Ship, on the High Street, was so convinced his pub had a ghost – or that it would be good for trade – that he made a film about it, called The Lock-In.
The ghostly stories attached to the long-closed Wheatsheaf at Thornton Heath are particularly appealling, as one involves probably the most notorious of highwayman, Dick Turpin, and another a maiden found dead in Thornton Heath Pond.
Notorious highwayman: Dick Turpin, who lived between 1705 and 1739, may have done a bit of highway robbery near Thornton Heath
There are lingering tales of Turpin’s association with this part of Surrey, and the route into London, where stagecoaches laden with passengers carrying valuables would prove to be easy targets for the armed bandit and a bit of highway robbery.
Turpin was a poacher, burglar, horse thief and killer, most closely associated with a gang based in Essex, but there are lingering legends that associate him with this part of 18th Century Surrey, as well as grisly tales of highwaymen being hanged from a gibbet at Thornton Heath.
That may be the beginnings of the haunting tale for the Wheatsheaf, which was supposed to have used its cellar for storing the bodies of other executed villains before they could be disposed of more permanently.
Staff at the pub often claimed to hear steps and a knocking sound, only for there to be no one there when they opened the door. And the brutal murder in the 19th Century of the landlord’s daughter, whose body was found in the pond nearby, has also added to the gruesome air of mystery about the place. Oddly, there’s been a lot fewer sightings of ghosts since the pub closed…
The Sandrock, in Shirley, also laid claim to a notorious ghost. According to a book, Paranormal Surrey, the pub landlady was woken one night to see a ghostly preacher standing at the end of her bed. Strange orbs of light were also reported to have been seen in the pub. Sightings of the phantom preacher were common until a new landlord took over the Sandrock and installed a pulpit in the bar area.
Haunted public house: The Sandrock on Upper Shirley Road
With somewhere to preach from, the preacher ghost vanished, never to trouble anyone again.
Until it was demolished in 2008, Rose and Crown in Kenley was haunted by a “large black coach pulled by four black horses”, which vanished before it arrived at the main road. Perhaps the coach was another of Turpin’s victims? The ghost coach has not been seen much, if at all, since the pub was replaced by flats.
If it were still open and operating as a hipster hotel, the Selsdon Park Hotel might be the perfect place for a Halloween weekender – the place even has its own ghost, that of a servant girl who stalks the older corridors of the building carrying a candlestick, the tortured soul of a young woman who committed suicide in the 1930s.
From ancient to modern: even one of the 20th Century’s most famous Croydon institutions, Croydon Aerodrome, has its claim to ghost stories. The Roundshaw estate, just over the borough boundary in Sutton, is supposed to have a haunting nun, the victim of a crash at the world’s first international airport.
Bumpy landings: the former site of Croydon Airport is associated with several ghost stories
Mollison Drive, in Wallington, at the end of one of the aerodrome’s old runways, has had sightings of a faceless motorbike rider – supposed to be the ghost of a pilot who perished.
Croydon Airport’s biggest crash happened in 1936, when, shortly after taking off in fog, a Dutch aircraft careered into a house. All passengers and crew were killed.
A few weeks later, a pilot fo Imperial Airways, the predecessors of British Airways, was plotting his flight course when he heard a voice: “You can’t take off, the weather is just the same as when I did.”
Standing behind him was a pilot wearing Dutch KLM flying kit. The sky was quite clear, but the shaken Imperial pilot cancelled the flight nonetheless. Later that day, a thick fog descended on Croydon…
Spooky, eh?
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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