If you have ever caught the Circle, Metropolitan or Hammersmith and City lines tube from Farringdon station you might have been unlucky to have heard ghostly screams coming from the tunnels, especially if you are on your way home late from the pub.
Many people have reported these screams so you wouldn’t be the first, but are they caused by wind rushing through the tunnels, or perhaps just one to many lagers but it is possible that there might be some truth in it.
It seems that way back in 1758 a 13 year old apprentice hat maker called Anne Naylor was murdered in the Farringdon area by her employer Mrs Sarah Metyard and her daughter Sally and and legend has it her body dismembered and dumped in an open sewer in the exact spot where the station now sits. She has been heard so often that it has earned her the nickname of the Screaming Spectre.
Her death was pretty grisly even by the standards of the time, she was first beaten with a broomstick before being tied to an attic door where she was forced to stand for three days without food and water. Unfortunately the poor girls body couldn’t take this punishment and sometime during the fourth day they realised she was dead. In an attempt to cover up their heinous crime they dismembered her body and tried to burn the pieces in a fireplace but the smell of burning flesh was causing people to notice. Instead they dumped the remains in an open sewer in Chick Lane and told people she had run away as it wasn’t the first time she had done this.
Initially they got away with the crime as the watchman who found the body and the coroner assumed that it was the remains of a corpse that had been dissected by surgeons and an inquest into the crime never took place. However four years after the crime the mother and daughter argued, and when Sally moved out she told her lover that the ghost of Chick Lane was because they had murdered young Anne. He informed the authorities and tried to downplay the role his lover had in the crime naively thinking she would not be accused.
Both women were tried at the Old Bailey in 1768 and sentenced to death. In an ironic twist their bodies were given to surgeons to dissect after their execution. In a further twist the mother collapsed as she was being taken to the gallows and could not be revived and was hung while she was still unconscious.
Countless people have heard young Anne’s screams as they stand on the platform as the last train leaves.