London Urban Legends (17 page)

The best and most popular place to share an urban legend is some point during an idle chat. During a quiet moment, a work colleague mentioned a story her friend had told her about the London Underground. Someone, a friend of a friend or someone a bit further removed, had been travelling on the Underground late at night – she didn’t know which line – in an empty carriage when three people got on and sat opposite her. Two men sat either side of a pale, limp woman. The half-remembered story, as it came across the desks at work, had the traveller being warned away from the two men and their pale companion and for good reason: the woman was dead.

Other versions of the same story can be found on the internet. Web forums are like chatting in the pub or during a tea break at work, but one can converse with like-minded people across the internet. The Unexplained Mysteries forum created a thread in 2007 called ‘The Girl on the London Underground’, which began with a friend of a friend (an art student) travelling back to her campus from central London late one night. She was alone, except for one other person in the carriage, a man who looked to be in his thirties. Then, three new people board: two men and a woman. The art student decided that the trio looked like drug addicts and avoided making eye-contact with them. Then, the thirty-something man started acting strangely. He walked over to the student and behaved as if he knew her, asking, ‘Hi, how are you? I’ve not spoken to you in a long time,’ before leaning into her and whispering, ‘Get off at the next stop.’

The student was wary of this, but did not wish to be left alone on the train with what she thought were three drug addicts, so she followed the man off the train and onto the platform. Once they were off the train, the man revealed to the student that the girl in the trio was dead; he had seen the two men drag her onto the train with a pair of scissors embedded in the back of her skull.

A similar story was collected via an anonymous email in 2003 by the Urban Legend Reference Pages, better known as ‘Snopes’. This tale came from a work colleague of the sender, whose boyfriend knew or had heard about a girl who got on the tube and, not wanting to sit on her own, sat opposite the three other people in the carriage. Again, this was a woman flanked by two men. The girl started to read, but whenever she looked up the woman was staring directly at her. The girl ignored the stares and at the next station a man boarded the train, looked about the carriage and sat down next to her. This new man then whispered to the girl, ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get off at the next station with me.’ Despite feeling threatened by this, the girl presumed there would be other people at the next station and got off. At this point the man revealed himself to be a doctor, who could tell that the staring woman was dead and the two men either side of her were propping her up.

A Mystery on the Underground

Another version of the previous tale takes place on an intercity train. Two women travellers are stared at intensely by a girl who they find out later had been murdered by her two female companions. Could this be the same story, warped by whispered repetition, as the story Rodney Dale records in his book
It’s True … It Happened to a Friend
(1984)? This version has a girl getting onto a quiet subway carriage and doing her crossword. A man gets on, whom she ignores, and then at the next stop two more men board and sit either side of the first man. As the train stops again, the two men get off, leaving the first man in his seat, although not for long. As the train jolts out of the station the man falls out of his seat with a knife in his back. This time the corpse on the tube becomes one right in front of our unfortunate commuter. The story takes place on the subway rather than the tube, so where could it have happened? I asked Rodney Dale if he could remember his source or the location for this version but sadly, it is a very small section in the book and he could not.

One possible origin for the corpse on the tube legend is a fictional story serial called ‘A Mystery on the Underground’ by John Oxenham, which appeared in
To-Day
magazine in 1897. Presented as fake newspaper clippings rather than a conventional narrative, the story begins with men turning up dead while travelling on the District line. Early on in the story, finding the body is like finding the corpse in one version of the urban legend in this book: a lone woman on the tube discovers a man is dead when his body falls off the seat as the train wobbles.

A story about this stroy claims the tube companies were concerned that people would mistake each episode for actual news clippings. There was a mocked-up cartoon, supposedly from
Punch
, showing shocked people on a crowded stagecoach when they hear a man is still taking the tube. The tube contacted the editor of
To-Day
, the famed writer Jerome K. Jerome, to complain. Jerome considered pulling the story but, having one more episode to go, which took place on a ship rather than the London Underground, Jerome let it run. There is no mention of any 1897 tube panics in
The Times
index for that year, and in his autobiography, Jerome does not discuss
To-Day
any further than his regrets when he had to sell it.

After the initial similarity to the corpse on the tube legend early on in the story, there is no further resemblance to it in ‘A Mystery on the Underground’. The murders always take place on a Tuesday and the victims are shot dead in the carriage by an anonymous killer and not led on to the train by shifty characters. If a cause of death is mentioned in the urban legend, it is a stabbing.

Death on the Tracks

The story of the corpse on the tube is clearly an urban legend, but was it ever more than just a horror story about travelling with strangers in confined spaces? People do die on London’s public transport; the TUBEprune, the Tube Professionals’ Rumour Network, is a website full of gossip and stories, purportedly from London Underground staff. One section describes two instances when bodies have been found on the tube, though they do both have the air of a story rather than the retelling of an event. The first was when a train arrived at East Finchley station at the end of the morning peak time. The crew inspected the train and found a man slumped in a seat, who they tried to wake. They discovered that the man was dead, and had been for so long that rigor mortis had set in and he was rigid in his seat. The body had to be removed by being laid sideways on a stretcher to prevent it rolling off.

While rigor mortis begins three to four hours after death – so is possible after the morning peak – maximum stiffness does not set in until around twelve hours. It is possible the body was left overnight on the tube, but hopefully not.

Another find was on the eastbound Piccadilly Line at Northfields. A passenger raised the alarm when a man on the packed train seemed ‘a bit poorly’. The guard did not wish to delay the train so he persuaded a couple of passengers to help him drag the corpse off the train and left it sitting upright on a bench. The police were called and complained about the disrespectful treatment of a body. The guard then responded with, ‘What else could I do, I couldn’t delay the train, could I?’

Whether this is a true story or not, or a joke about the far edges of job-worthiness told by Tf L staff, or even a blending of the two, I shall leave up to you to decide. A problem that occurs when one spends a lot of time researching, writing and thinking about urban legends is that you end up doubting every story you hear unless the teller can show you photographs, official documents or the scars. And even then you still doubt.

One person who was almost certainly found dead on the tube was German naval lieutenant-commander and suspected Nazi spy, Franz Rintelen von Kleist. The former Isle of Man internee was found dead on a train at South Kensington tube station in May 1949.

That was the way with Man; it had always been that way.
He had carried terror with him. And the thing he was afraid of had always been himself.

Clifford D. Simak
Way Station

 

A
DEADLY STRANGER LURKING
in the back of a woman's car has not been the only warning to circle around the internet, purportedly coming from the Metropolitan Police. A fake message warning people not to travel on the London Underground emerged on 24 July 2005. The email claimed that controlled explosions had taken place around 15 July, at Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square stations. They had not. Much like the fake warning of the stranger hiding on the back seat (
See
Criminal Lore) persons unknown were inventing police warnings.

The fear of the enemy amongst us, either terrorists or infiltrators, has haunted people for a long time and a particular sort of urban legend has accompanied these fears. In the twenty-first century, urban myths or rumours of the ‘Helpful Terrorist' or ‘Strangers Warning', have been spread quickly by email and internet forums. Our century has seen terrorist attacks across the world and these have left fear and folklore in their wake. Over the winter of 2001, an email warning of the possibility of an attack started popping into people's inboxes. Below is a typical version taken from the website Snopes.com. It arrived via the girlfriend of a friend of a relative of a friend – even farther removed than the standard ‘friend of a friend':