CHRIST CHURCH GREYFRIARS

Kent, England

Christ Church Greyfriars

Christ Church Greyfriars, also known as Christ Church Newgate, was an Anglican church located on Newgate Street, opposite St Paul's Cathedral in the City of London, today only the spire remains. During Victorian times this Church was known as one of the most haunted buildings in London. Within the burial grounds lie the mortal remains of 'the she-wolf of France', Queen Isabella, wife of the English King Edward II. With her lover, Roger Mortimer, she instigated the deposing of the king and had him imprisoned at Berkeley Castle.

On the night of 11 October 1327 while lying in on a bed the king was suddenly seized and, while a great mattress weighed him down and suffocated him, a plumber's iron, heated intensely hot, was introduced through a tube into his anus so that it burned the inner portions beyond the intestines. His screams could be heard far outside the castle walls, and are still heard at Berkeley Castle on the anniversary of the horrific event.

Following Mortimer's execution by her the king's son, Edward III, in 1330, Isabella retreated into a polite retirement. She died in 1358, her last years having been racked by violent dementia. She was buried here at Greyfriars, with the heart of Edward II placed upon her breast. At twilight, her beautiful, angry ghost flits amongst the trees and bushes, clutching the beating heart of her murdered husband before her.

Lady Alice Hungerford was considered a great beauty of the Tudor age and she too murdered her spouse, in her case with a lethal dose of poison. In 1523 she paid for her crime by being boiled alive. She was laid to rest at Greyfriars, where her beautiful, serene apparition was seen drifting through the cloisters and aisles of the monastery and, following its dissolution, through the burial grounds that sprang up on its site.

And so the two ladies went about their nocturnal rambles, each blissfully unaware of the other's existence, until one night, in Victorian times, they met among the tombs, and a fearsome battle erupted as they fought over their territory. Witnesses could only look on in terror as the spectral fight became more and more vicious. A night watchman, caught up in the midst of the ghostly squabbling, was so frightened by the experience that he fled the scene and never came back to collect his pay.



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