Episode 12: The Tower of London (part 1)

Episode

8 Apr

Margaret pole, Arbella Stuart, and Jane Grey

Lady Jane Grey, dressed in white and wearing a blindfold, kneels for her execution. A man in a fur cape leans over her, and the executioner stands nearby with his axe. Behind her, two women cry in despair. The atmosphere is dark. — *The execution of Lady Jane Grey in the Tower of London in the year 1554*
Paul Delaroche, 1833

Tonight, we’re throwing our Paranormal Pajama Party in the iconic Tower of London, one of the world’s most haunted locations.

Sitting on the River Thames in central London, the Tower of London has a long and dark history, serving as a prison, Royal Mint, home of the Crown Jewels, and even a royal menagerie. But what brings shivers down most people’s spines are the tales of its ghostly inhabitants, many of whom are – or were, rather – women.

Among the Tower’s many spectres, the female phantoms associated with the Tudor reign stand out. These spirits are linked to the dungeons, gallows, and the executioner’s axe, representing a specific brand of horror that captures the imagination of visitors and paranormal enthusiasts alike.

Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy. When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.
This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as graphic depictions of executions, brief mentions of torture, child death, and the implication of violence against animals. Please be advised.
Tonight we’ll be talking a lot about how a few men’s big feelings resulted in the deaths of thousands of people and shaped the world’s largest religion.
If you’re having big feelings of your own, – and they’re about this podcast, and also they’re only positive – please give Paranormal Pajama Party a five-star rating and review on your favourite podcast app. It will grant you my queenly favour, and also helps other people find the show.
As dawn broke on May 27, Margaret felt something. It was in the air or in her bones, but something had shifted.
She’d spent enough years in the Royal Court to become attuned to these subtle changes in the atmosphere – little glances among ladies in waiting, the weight of the king’s step outside a closed door. Margaret Pole noticed these things. Noticing is what had kept her alive.
And as the last Plantagenet, the only survivor of a house that had once boasted kings and queens that had shaped the world as it now was, she, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, knew about survival.
“Former Countess,” she corrected herself, trying to ignore the twinge that always shot through her heart when she remembered what had been taken from her.
And what had been taken from her was everything, really. First her mother, then her father. Her poor brother had been carted off to this same terrible prison and kept here so long before they finally beheaded the man that he couldn’t tell the chicken from a goose.
God took her husband, but the state took their lands and their money. The church had taken her son and he’d taken… well. She couldn’t blame him for being angry with her. He’d felt abandoned when she sent him away. But what choice did she have?
She’d won it all back, thanks to that survival instinct. But then Henry took Katherine away, too. And then Princess Mary. And finally, at the twilight of her life, she’d lost it all again.
Footsteps pounded down the stone floors of the corridor outside her room. The sun was beginning to peek through the window, and Margaret knew what had changed before the first guard who entered managed to look her in the eye.
“You die within the hour,” he said, and his glance fell away.
“And what is my crime?” Margaret asked him, imperiously drawing herself as tall as she could at age 67. She’d outlived everyone else. Maybe 67 years were enough.
“King’s orders,” was all he said.
Margaret sniffed and turned away.
The guard felt ashamed. Suddenly, she didn’t seem frightened, just disappointed. It felt like he’d let down his own mother.
The sun was creeping down the wall and illuminated a few words carved near the old woman’s bed:
For traitors on the block should die;
I am no traitor, no, not I!
My faithfulness stands fast and so,
Towards the block I shall not go!
Nor make one step, as you shall see;
Christ in Thy Mercy, save Thou me!
He glanced at the former Countess, who stood regally her long face turned towards the window. He hoped it would be quick, for everyone’s sake. This one was a fighter.
[MUSIC]
Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.
I’ve gotta say, it was pretty cool of the Beefeaters to let us stay in the Tower of London tonight for our pajama party. I felt a little weird about it at first, but it was the only way I could get all these guests to agree to come.
And what a turnout! Sir Walter Raleigh is here, Guy Fawkes, both the Princes in the Tower – first slumber party, you guys? Aww, good for you! Little rascals.
You’ve noticed the giant bear, of course. And over in that corner is some kind of… glowing… tube. I heard it normally stays in the jewel room, so it’s just exciting that it’s come out to join us on the Tower Green.
Oh, that monument in the middle area there? That’s where some guards told Queen Victoria that the old scaffold was. But if you want to know for sure, you’ll have to ask our guests of honour. Actually, there are most of them now. And they brought their heads, which is nice because it’s always so awkward trying to figure out where to look when they leave them behind.
Ladies! Hey, over here! Oh, my God. Wow. Wow. I would like you to meet the Countess of Salisbury, Margaret Pole. That’s Lady, Arbella Stuart over there, dressed as a man. This is the Nine-Day Queen, Lady Jane Grey, and… Oh, I don’t – I don’t see her yet, but we’ve also invited maybe the most famous ghost in the world. Yeah. Pretty big night at the Paranormal Pajama Party.
You’ve heard of the Tower of London, of course. Right next to the River Thames in central London, it has a fearsome reputation as one of the world’s most haunted locations. And of all the prisoners kept here over the centuries, and all the people that were tortured or executed in the castle itself or in public on Tower Hill, a lot of the ghosts at the Tower – certainly the best known of them – are women.
Sure, there are the little princes who were imprisoned here until they were almost certainly murdered by their uncle, King Richard III, in his quest for the throne.
And there’s Guy Fawkes, who was tortured in the Tower until he confessed to wanting to blow up the House of Lords. He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, but his neck broke during the hanging part and he’s since enjoyed a problematic afterlife on 4Chan.
The ghost bear supposedly startled a guard so badly in 1816 that he later died of fright. It’s not that random – for a long time, the Tower was home to the Royal Menagerie, whose zookeepers deserve to have been drawn and quartered based on what I read.
The glowing tube… yeah, I can’t explain that one.
But the ghosts people come to see – and a lot of people come to see them every year – are the ghosts associated with the Tudor reign and its very specific brand of horror. Think dungeons, gallows, the executioner’s axe, and a lot of violence against noblewomen, specifically.
I’ve never been to London and I had this pop culture-inspired image in my head of the Tower of London with lots of bars and manacles and rats trying to eat your crust of bread. Turns out that’s not the case at all.
Turns out that’s not the case at all. The Tower of London was built by William the Conqueror around the end of the first century as a stronghold for the Norman conquerors. Essentially, it was a fancy-for-its-time castle that was hard to siege. At certain points in British history, it’s also been the Royal Mint, a treasury, an armoury, that menagerie I mentioned and, these days, home of the Crown Jewels.
Its most famous use is as a prison, but I think I’m still wrong when I imagine leaky dungeons and piles of old hay and stuff. If you had to go to prison in Old Timey England, the Tower was not a bad place to be sent.
The first Tower prisoner we know of was a naughty Norman bishop who was allowed to have all kinds of creature comforts. He was also the first prisoner to escape, and he made his getaway during a banquet that he threw for his captors using a rope hidden in a giant barrel of wine he ordered. The guards were so surprised by this feat, managed by a man with access to deliveries and servants and banquet supplies, that the popular belief at the time was that he probably dabbled in witchcraft.
Even by the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Tudor dynasty was sending people to the Tower the moment they displeased them, most of those nobles had nice quarters, servants and access to the gardens. Being sent to the Tower was a much more pleasant alternative to the disease-ridden, nasty prisons for the poors.
That’s not to say there wasn’t torture. Oh boy, was there torture. And there were executions, but they were rare inside the Tower itself. Only seven people are known to have been executed inside the privacy of the Tower of London before the start of the First World War because that was an option for elites only. Most people sent to the Tower and sentenced to death were executed next door on Tower Hill, in front of huge crowds. Even then, there were only 112 executions there over 400 years.
And if you remember Episode 3 of Paranormal Pajama Party, about Bloody Mary, you’ll remember that Henry VIII was responsible for a conservative 57,000 executions – maybe closer to 72,000; his daughter, Bloody Mary herself, was behind more than 300 executions, and I didn’t even mention the deaths attributed to Henry VII, Edward VI, or Queen Elizabeth I. The Tudors were a bloodthirsty bunch, but the heads that rolled at the Tower of London were only a teeny, tiny fraction of the total.
I think the Tower gets all the attention for two reasons, though: it’s glamorous because it imprisoned the glamorous – the rich, powerful, and often beautiful; and it was the scene of some historical injustices that we still wrestle with, long after everyone involved died beneath the executioner’s blade or of poor health and festering ulcers. But we’ll get into that in a moment.
The highly successful dark PR campaign for the Tower of London started with the Victorians. Gothic novels – mostly written for female audiences, by the way – blew up in the late 18th century, but by the 19th century their popularity waned a bit and historical novels – also for ladies – became all the rage.
In 1840, William Henry Ainsworth published the novel, The Tower of London, a historical romance about the short and tragic reign of Lady Jane Grey that begins with her entering the Tower for the first time. He painted a picture of the Tower as a grim prison and included a lot of detail about various torture devices. (By the way, I also learned that a lot of those torture devices are named, like, “So-and-So’s Daughter”, which is horrifying. “The Iron Maiden”. I might have to talk about that one of these days.)
Edgar Allen Poe reviewed the novel and didn’t care for it, but that didn’t stop people from reading it and Ainsworth’s depiction of the tower from taking off in the public imagination.
Ainsworth followed the first novel with another, Windsor Castle, a story about Henry VIII’s relationship with Anne Boleyn that also included some fun Gothic tropes – like ghosts! Victorians loved ghosts, maybe as much as I do. The only thing they loved more than ghost stories was talking to ghosts. And right around the same time that Windsor Castle came out, across the pond in a rural New York farmhouse, two sisters were starting to become famous for their ability to let people do just that.
The whole story of the Fox sisters and the Spirituality movement is incredible. I highly recommend Jamie Loftus’ limited series podcast, Ghost Church, for a deep dive into the sisters’ lives, careers, and the current state of Spiritualism. It’s fascinating.
The Cliff’s Notes are: In 1848, 10-year-old Kate Fox and her 14-year-old sister, Maggie, began to hear mysterious rapping noises around their Hydesville, New York, farmhouse. Their shocked family members and neighbours began to hear the rapping sounds, too. More surprising still, the disembodied noises could intelligently respond to questions people put to them. Their favourites were knock-knock jokes.
Just kidding.
[KNOCK, KNOCK]
Steph: Anyway, before long, Kate and Maggie were tuning into all kinds of spirits who communicated via raps and taps and took their show on the road for an amazed public. Their seances kicked off a passionate interest in communicating with the dead and helped kickstart the entire social-religious Spiritualist movement.
So at the same time that seances were spreading across the globe, interest in Tudor horror – sensationalism surrounding dungeons and torture and beheadings, all based at the Tower of London – was peaking.
Victorians became very interested in the idea of talking to a few ghosts in particular. People who’d died in strange or unbelievable circumstances. People whose contributions in life had been practically obliterated after death by the men responsible for those deaths. Specifically, Victorians wanted to hear from the queens and noblewomen beheaded on the Tower Green inside the walls of the Tower of London.
This means that now that we’re on page six of this script, I can finally start talking about lady ghosts. Just a heads up – there are a lot of names ahead of us. You don’t really have to keep track of them.
Also, sorry I said “heads up”, ladies. Yikes.
First up is Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, beheaded on Tower Green in 1541.
Margaret was born into a powerful family, and in line for the throne. But – as Queen Cersei taught us all back when the show was still good – when you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die. Unfortunately for Margaret’s family, the Plantagenets, they were pretty much all about to die.
The Plantagenets had held the English throne for a long time, but by the time Margaret showed up, things had started to fall apart. I’m not kidding when I say it was very Game of Thrones – George R. R. Martin based a lot of Westeros’ intrigue on the Wars of the Roses, the civil wars that ultimately resulted in the Tudors taking the crown.
When Maggie was three, her mother died. Nowadays we think it was probably consumption, or a birth- or miscarriage-related infection – never forget, being a woman is terrifying – but her husband suspected that her lady-in-waiting had poisoned her, so he had her and another servant killed. Not content with one bad life choice, he also joined a plot against the king, which ended exactly as you might expect in this story: with him executed for treason and his children out of the running for the throne.
Once the Wars of the Roses had ended with Richard III – Maggie’s uncle – dead and Henry Tudor crowned Henry VII, things could’ve gone pretty bad for Mags. If you were a man with a ghost of a claim – pardon the pun – for the throne, you were probably going to be imprisoned for years and eventually executed. That’s exactly what happened to her poor brother, Edward.
Women were usually given a different life sentence – marriage to a stranger to improve political alliances between houses. Luckily for Margaret, she was a first cousin of the new queen, and so was given by the King to his cousin, Richard Pole. He held some fancy-pants positions in court, and Margaret became a lady-in-waiting to the young Catherine of Aragon, who had just married the King’s oldest son and heir, Arthur. Shortly after their wedding, both Catherine and Arthur got very sick. He died, but Catherine lived. I have to assume this was a huge relief for Margaret, who’d seen what being a lady-in-waiting for a very sick woman would get you.
Margaret’s husband died when she was 32, leaving her destitute and with five children to look after. A Catholic, she was forced to send one of her sons, Reginald, off to the Church. This kicked off an extremely successful career for him – he eventually became the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury – but it also really hurt his feelings. And eventually, Reginald and his hurt feelings would get his entire family killed. …I don’t much care for Reginald.
Margaret and her remaining children were so poor that they were forced to live in an abbey, supported by nuns. This lasted until Henry VIII married his brother Arthur’s widow, Catherine, and became king. Mags was reappointed one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting, and eventually some of her family’s land, and her title – the Countess of Salisbury –was restored to her. By 1538, she was the fifth-richest peer in England and one of only two women to be a peeress in her own right – without a husband in the House of Lords. Damn, Maggie!
A devout Catholic in a Catholic court, Margaret was eventually made governess to Henry and Catherine’s daughter, Princess Mary – better known on this podcast as spooky mirror-witch Bloody Mary. But then some shit went down. Henry fell in love with a new woman – Anne Boleyn – and, in trying to divorce Catherine, kicked off the whole English reformation. When Mary was declared a bastard, Margaret tried to protect her. Henry wasn’t having any of that.
But worst of all, Margaret’s son Reginald showed back up, and as a representative of the Catholic church, he had some opinions about the king’s divorce. Luckily, he realised that creating drama with a volatile and dangerous king would probably put his family members in mortal danger, so he wisely kept those opinions to himself.
Nah, I’m just kidding. He was a dick about it.
Long story short, as revenge for Reginald stirring up shit, including urging other European princes to depose Henry, which his mother specifically asked him not to do, Henry arrested Margaret, two of her sons and another guy on a crazy conspiracy charge and put them on trial. Margaret lost her lands and title, and was sent to the Tower of London, along with her grandson and the other guy’s son. They were sentenced to death, mainly for being Catholic.
After being kept there for two-and-a-half years, on May 27, 1541, guards told the 67-year-old Margaret that she was going to be executed that morning. Still unsure what she was even charged with, she was brought to a wooden block on the Tower Green. There are two versions of what happened next, and they’re both bad, so hold onto your heads.
In one version, Margaret – still insisting that she was innocent and not even accused of a crime – refused to set her neck on the block, telling the executioner that if he wanted her head, he could take it. She either ran from him or twisted on the block, so the axe didn’t fall cleanly. It took more than a few blows to kill her.
In the other version, the royal executioner had been called away to deal with an uprising out of town. A witness wrote that her beheading was instead carried out by “a wretched and blundering youth who hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in the most pitiful manner”. It took 11 strokes to remove her head.
Nearly 500 years later, they say, you can still hear her tortured screams echoing through the Tower of London late at night.
[SCREAMS]
Steph: The next ghost on our tour is Lady Arbella Stuart, who is the only woman on our list who wasn’t sentenced to death at the direction of a Tudor. Instead, Arbella got in trouble with her cousin, King James I, successor to Elizabeth I.
Before Elizabeth’s death, Arbella was second-in-line for the throne, just behind James. This meant she was valuable on the marriage market, and her family ensured that she made a strong betrothal… at age eight. Her husband-to-be was only two. Sadly, he died at age three, and Arbella had to wait several until she was basically an old maid at 17 for her next betrothal. Then he also died.
By the time Arbella was 27, she’d had it up to here with marriage machinations, and decided to take matters into her own hands by – and this is disgusting – trying to arrange her own marriage. She set her eye on a man named Edward Seymour and tried to communicate with him by sending a servant to him with secret letters. When the servant was caught, Elizabeth’s righthand man tried to get Arbella to confess to plotting against the queen by trying to arrange her own marriage. Arbella refused, but eventually signed a confession written for her and was sentenced to house arrest. Two years later, she tried to elope with someone again, and was caught, again. James I, now king, temporarily banished her from court.
But our Arbella, she was a romantic. In 1610, at age 35, she decided to try once more – this time pursuing Edward Seymour’s younger brother, the 22-year-old William. They secretly married in June, and when the king found out, he was furious. The union strengthened the ties between branches of the Tudor family – a threat to the first non-Tudor king in a while – so he threw William into the Tower and sent Arbella to another prison.
Briefly allowed to write to each other (until the king found out, anyway), the lovebirds hatched an escape plan. Arbella disguised herself as a man and made it to their getaway ship bound for France. But William was delayed in getting out of the tower, and the ship – with Arbella aboard – left without him.
Unfortunately, the king’s men overtook her before she ever got to France. Back in England, James now sent her to the Tower. In the meantime, William managed to reach safety in Belgium. They never saw each other again.
Arbella thought she’d be released by 1613, but no such luck – the king wasn’t the forgiving type. She eventually went mad, stopped eating, fell ill and died in the Tower of London in 1615, and that was the end of that.
Except it wasn’t, obviously, or I wouldn’t be talking about her tonight on the podcast. Arbella’s ghost is said to still haunt, the building in which she was imprisoned, known as the Queen’s House, which is also the home of the Resident Governor and Keeper of the Jewells.
According to one of my sources, “Major General Geoffrey Field, who was Resident Governor of the Tower from 1994-2006, once said that: ‘Soon after we arrived in 1994, my wife Janice was making up the bed in the Lennox room when she felt a violent push in her back which propelled her right out of the room! No one had warned us that the house was haunted – but we then discovered that every resident has experienced something strange in that room! …Several women who slept there since have reported waking in terror in the middle of the night feeling they were being strangled, so just in case we made it a house rule not to give unaccompanied women guests the Lennox room.’”
I like Arbella’s story and her daring escape attempt, but she’s clearly not a woman who supports women.
We’re time-travelling backwards a bit to meet our next heroine, England’s shortest-serving monarch or… what remains of her on Earth, anyway.
Like Margaret Pole, Lady Jane Grey was born around 1537 into a powerful family – Henry VIII was her great-uncle. And in another Game of Thrones-style manoeuvre, at age 10, she was sent to live in the household of Thomas Seymour as a way to strengthen both families’ political connections.
Thomas’ sister, also named Jane, married Henry and became queen after… well, after the uncomfortable little thing that happened to his second wife. (And in fact, after the king’s death, Thomas would go on to marry his widow, Katherine Parr, after the same uncomfortable little thing happened to Henry’s fifth wife.)
Katherine was good to Jane Grey, and encouraged her to become a Protestant and study hard, and she did – little Jane was known as one of the most highly-educated women of her day, preferring reading to parties and cementing her place in my heart as a sweet little introverted nerd.
Jane Seymour was lucky enough to have Henry’s only surviving son – although not that lucky because she died of postnatal complications less than two weeks after baby Edward’s birth. (Have I mentioned that being a woman is terrifying?)
That meant Thomas was also uncle to Henry’s male heir. Unfortunately for him, his older brother was in the same position. This brother, also named Edward for no other reason than to make future podcasts about this stuff maximally confusing, was a favourite of the king. And guys love it when another dude – especially their brother – has more power or advantages than they do. They’re very chill about it. You can probably see where this is heading. (Or, in this case, beheading.)
When I was nine, I pretended to fall off the top of a playground tunnel as a joke and wound up actually falling off the tunnel, breaking my arm and briefly getting pea gravel stuck up my nose. I mention this only to point out that nine-year-olds do not make good choices. For this reason, when nine-year-old Edward VI was crowned king of England upon his father’s death, his uncle Edward Seymour stepped in as Lord Protector of the kingdom.
Thomas was not happy about this. Desperate to get close to the new baby king, he tried to break into Edward VI’s apartments one night. He was caught, sent to the Tower, and beheaded in 1549. Not to be outdone, three years later, his brother Edward was also sent to the Tower and beheaded. A man named John Dudley became the King’s Protector at that point.
And then in 1553, Edward VI, now 15, got sick and stayed that way. Now that the Tudor court was Extremely Protestant, he wanted to ensure that his successor would also be a Protestant. And would also be a man, because they’d proven so successful at ruling the kingdom up until this point.
So he passed over his older half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, and instead decreed that his crown would pass to any male heirs of his Protestant cousin, Lady Frances Grey, or of her daughters, including Jane. But when it became clear that he was not going to recover from his illness, he changed his succession plan again like some kind of baby Logan Roy and named Jane alone as his heir.
Jane apparently had no idea any of this was happening. She was busy reading Plato, navigating puberty, and getting married because the new King’s Protector, John Dudley, had cunningly arranged her marriage to his own son, Guildford. What are the chances?! Happily, Jane seemed to be ok with this. She married Guildford, then around 18, when she was about 16.
I got my first job when I was about 16. One night at work when I was trying to fill a steam cleaner with water, I turned the handle of the tap in the broom closet the wrong way and it came off in my hand, and water started shooting up into the ceiling and I accidentally partially flooded a grocery store Starbucks. I mention this because Lady Jane Grey also got her first job around that age, but hers was the queen of England.
This was a total surprise to her, and when her scheming father-in-law told her, she kind of freaked out. I mean, put yourself in her shoes. You’re a shy 16-year-old. You just got arranged-married, which is probably taking some getting used to. You’re brought into a room by yourself in front of your new in-laws and a bunch of government types, and they tell you that the king’s dead. But also, the king was your cousin who you liked. Also, by the way, you’re in charge now, which is why everyone’s bowing to you.
And suddenly you’re remembering that everyone you’ve ever known at court keeps dying or getting executed, and isn’t there something pretty tense going on between the Catholics and the Protestants? And then you remember that your cousin had two half-sisters who both really want this new job of yours and who both arguably have stronger CVs. And you’re probably like, “I… might not have even reached my adult height yet. Can I… call my parents and boy-husband?”
Meanwhile, Henry VIII’s oldest daughter, Mary, was sitting in a different part of England, stewing. Her parents basically invented divorce. Because of that, her father had her declared illegitimate, banished her mother, and sent Mary to live with her new half-sister, who had taken her title of princess. She was mad at her dad, sick all the time, and not allowed to visit her mother even as she was dying. Then Henry had her governess, Margaret Pole, executed, and it was notoriously grisly and cruel, even for the Tudors. She remained loyally Catholic, and because of it, her younger brother – sitting on a throne that was once promised to her, wrote her out of his line of succession. And then – then! – she was invited to London to see him on his deathbed only to learn it was a trap intended to capture her and safely remove her as a threat.
So yeah, she was mad. Mad enough to burn hundreds of people at the stake. Mad enough to turn into a scary ghost and scratch kids’ eyes out at slumber parties for the rest of eternity. And unfortunately for Lady Jane Grey, mad enough to make some important allies.
Upon learning of Edward VI’s death, Mary wrote to the all-male Privy Council and demanded to be made queen. They wrote her a joint reply backing Jane, and telling Mary to be “quiet and obedient.”
I think any woman anywhere can tell you that this was the wrong move.
Mary had a tonne of support among the Catholics, and that included the continental European powers. Just nine days after Lady Jane was named queen, her father-in-law’s forces crumbled under the military threat of Mary’s supporters. Jane’s own father abandoned her to swear fealty to Mary, and Jane and her husband, who had been staying in the Tower of London for her coronation, were stuck there – but now it was their prison, not their palace.
She was held in fairly comfortable accommodations and may have been allowed to have some contact with her husband, Guildford. Mary wasn’t actually mad at Jane – after all, she’d been a pawn in other people’s games her whole life. Although she and Guildford were tried for high treason, Mary granted them a reprieve and offered to spare their lives if they converted to Catholicism.
But for the seven months Jane was held in the Tower, she’d been reading the Bible. Already a believer, she was now passionate in her devotion. She and Guildford both refused to convert. Reluctantly, Mary took her council’s advice and ordered their execution in case Protestant plotters wanted to put Jane back on the throne.
Jane refused Guildford’s request to see her one last time because she believed they’d meet again soon in heaven. On 12 February 1554, Guildford was beheaded. Jane saw the wagon bring his corpse back to the Tower of London from the scaffold on Tower Hill. An hour later, she was beheaded on Tower Green.
Since then, Tower guards and visitors have claimed to see a faceless woman in white near the castle’s Salt Tower. Another figure, this one evidently more obviously Lady Jane Grey herself, haunts the battlements to this day.
[MUSIC]
Steph: Well, I did it again, Pajama People. I read too much stuff and have too much to say about it. I wanted to get into the last ghost on our terrifying Tower tour tonight, but, whew boy, do I have a lot to say about her and a few more thoughts on all the ghosts we’ve talked about this evening, so we’ve got another two-parter on our hands.
…In retrospect, I maybe shouldn’t use the phrase “two-parter” to talk about episodes in which heads are separated from bodies. Sorry.
Anyway, I’ll be back next week with the second pa… the crowning… a body of… with more stuff about the Tower of London and the world’s most famous ghost: Queen Anne Boleyn.
To learn more about the fascinating women we talked about today, the terrifying tube haunting the Jewel House, and the six ravens upon which the entire British Kingdom depends, check out my sources in the show notes.
Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.
I’ll see you next week for more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.

Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury

One of the most tragic figures haunting the Tower is Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury. Born into the powerful Plantagenet family, Margaret’s life was marked by political intrigue, fortunes won and lost, and ultimately, a gruesome execution.

Despite her noble lineage and position at court, Margaret faced numerous challenges and tragedies, including the early death of her mother, the execution of family members and years of poverty. Her unwavering loyalty to her Catholic faith and her efforts to protect Princess Mary (AKA Bloody Mary) eventually led to her imprisonment in the Tower and her eventual beheading on Tower Green in 1541.

Legend has it that nearly 500 years later, Margaret’s tortured screams can still be heard echoing through the Tower of London late at night, a haunting reminder of her tragic fate.

Lady Arbella Stuart

Lady Arbella Stuart is still in the Tower, too, and is one of its more dangerous ghosts.

Despite her close ties to the English throne, Arbella’s attempts to assert her independence and arrange her own marriage – three times – led to her downfall. After a clever escape attempt, she was finally imprisoned in the Tower by her cousin, King James I. Arbella’s mental health deteriorated, and she eventually stopped eating and died of starvation in 1615.

Today, staff members living on the Tower grounds have reported strange occurrences in the Queen’s House, where Arbella was imprisoned, including violent pushes and feelings of strangulation.

Lady Jane Grey

The tragic tale of Lady Jane Grey, England’s first queen and shortest-reigning monarch, is another haunting story associated with the Tower of London. A highly educated and devout Protestant, Jane was thrust into the political turmoil of the Tudor court at a young age.

After being manipulated into a politically advantageous marriage and unexpectedly crowned queen, Jane’s reign was short-lived – as in, just over a week long. Overthrown by Mary I’s supporters and imprisoned in the Tower, Jane remained steadfast in her beliefs until Mary reluctantly had her executed in 1554 to remove her as a threat.

Since her death, visitors to the Tower have reported sightings of a woman in white near the Salt Tower and an apparition believed to be Jane herself haunting the battlements.

Spectral justice

The Tower of London isn’t just a fancy castle with shiny jewels – it’s maybe the world’s most haunted location, complete with a cast of spectral leading ladies. As we peel back the layers of its dark history, it’s hard not to wonder if these female phantoms are seeking justice in the only way left to them. At any rate, they’ve certainly made their mark, leaving behind a legacy of intrigue, betrayal, and some seriously spooky vibes.

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