The Hammersmith Ghost Of Georgian London
Public DomainA 19th-century drawing of the Hammersmith Ghost attacking a woman.
Beginning in November 1803, several Londoners claimed to have witnessed a terrifying ghost clad in all white prowling the Hammersmith neighborhood.
Known as the Hammersmith Ghost, the figure was said to be the restless spirit of a man who had recently died by suicide. This story sent locals into a terrified frenzy, and some began to report that they had been physically attacked by the ghost.
It was said that two women who encountered the spirit, one elderly and the other pregnant, were so overcome by what they witnessed that they died of fright a few days after they allegedly saw it. And one servant later testified that he had seen the apparition rising from a local graveyard — and that the ghost then grabbed him by the throat.
“I was going through the church yard between eight and nine o’clock, with my jacket under my arm, and my hands in my pocket,” the man claimed, “when some person came from behind a tomb-stone, which there are four square in the yard, behind me, and caught me fast by the throat with both hands.”
Then, he testified, the spirit vanished.
Some locals, suspecting that the “ghost” was actually just some miscreant dressing in white and scaring people, began to patrol the streets with pistols in hopes of catching the culprit. When these watches proved unsuccessful, a man named Francis Smith took matters into his own hands.
On Jan. 3, 1804, Smith set out to hunt down the ghost and put an end to its reign of terror. That night, he spotted a figure clad in white moving down Black Lion Lane. Smith called out to the figure twice. When it didn’t reply, Smith, terrified, shot it in the face.
But as it turned out, the figure was not the Hammersmith Ghost, but an innocent bricklayer named Thomas Millwood.
Public DomainFrancis Smith accidentally shoots and kills bricklayer Thomas Millwood.
At his trial, Smith pleaded not guilty, insisting that he had only killed Millwood in self defense, believing him to be the ghost. His friends and family attested to Smith’s good character. However, the jury found him guilty of murder and sentenced him to death. His punishment was later commuted to one year of hard labor.
The case took one more bizarre turn when a shoemaker named John Graham eventually came forward and confessed that he was responsible for some of the ghost sightings. He claimed he had dressed in a white sheet to frighten his apprentices, who had been scaring his children with ghost stories.
However, some locals still believed that the Hammersmith Ghost was a paranormal phenomenon — one that ultimately ended in tragedy.
