21 Jan 2023
Right, well, where to start. Honestly I'm kind of thrown by the whole experience. To get the boring stuff out of the way first, the directions were occasionally out of date and hard to follow. But more importantly this isn't really a ghost tour. It's more like an "Imagine If There Were Ghosts Here" tour, with must-see sites like Handel's house (where, OK, he did die) where you can imagine his arch-nemesis Dr Greene coming at you out of a wall, before promptly getting dragged back in by some disembodied hands. Right after that you can go see Jimmy Hendrix's appartment... he didn't die there, but he is dead! And what better way to end the tour than by stopping in front of a statue of Queen Alexandra of Denmark and being told about Queen Mary, Charles 1st's wife. Actually scratch that it was her "Court Dwarf" Jeffrey Hudson. He was imprisoned for being Catholic apparently. And you what, that wasnt the only weird Christian thing that happened. Did you know that the sculptures on the the front (sorry, facade) of the house four doors down of what was once the opera gallery, are not really sculptures. In fact, they are people placed there by the devil. The devil also comes up as a potential resisdent of 50 Berkeley Place. But not to worry, we're going to pass at least two churches, the first has the super hard question of "Who is worshipped here?" (hint: the answer is God). The other one promises to heal with the power of faith (no hauntings here). So after having gone through all this, once my friend had read the story about Jeffrey aloud to me, some crazy guy came up to us and started complaining that Catholics aren't in fact being imprisoned and that the BBC are full of policemen and some other not very nice things that I'm not going to mention. So think back the content of the tour thus far and consider the fact that this was the final stop (quite an anticlimactic one). This man was so thematically appropriate that we found it quite hard to convince ourselves that he wasn't part of the tour. To cap it all off we bumped into an anti-vaxer rally, which to be fair isn't this tour's fault, just though it would bear mentioning.