Exploring the myths of the Charterhouse Plague Pit

Watching the progress of the Crossrail construction project was fascinating in terms of what was unearthed. The Charterhouse Plague Pit was one such buried secret, first uncovered in March 2013.

Charterhouse lies between Clerkenwell and Smithfield, just north of the City of London. The area is allegedly rife with plague pits, although if you believe London lore, most of the city is. Research revealed that the Charterhouse skeletons dated back to the 1348 outbreak of plague; an outbreak that decimated London’s fledgeling population.

Yet the plague pit gave rise to schoolyard rumours in the nearby Charterhouse School, with the dead seemingly still screaming in their grave. Ghost sightings give the tranquil square a slightly different kind of appeal.

So what is the Charterhouse Plague Pit and why does this square seem so haunted? Let’s find out! Keep reading or hit ‘play’ to hear the podcast episode version of this blog post.

London Plague Pits

This part of London lay outside the walls of the original medieval city, along with a whole range of other plague pits. Another lies in Bunhill Fields, now beloved as a favourite lunch spot by local City workers.

But you tend to get legends of plague pits around the London Underground. According to urban legend, the Piccadilly line follows a strange bend at the edge of Green Park to skirt the edge of one such plague pit. The construction of the Victoria line apparently encountered another pit.

That said, Scott Wood notes that there are no archival references to the digging of the Victoria line disturbing dead bodies (2013). In fact, developers know exactly where mass graves are since they appeared on maps.

Over by the City of London, Bank, Liverpool Street and Aldgate Stations were all supposed to have been built on plague pits.

In the case of Liverpool Street Station, it’s not far from the truth. Crossrail work near Liverpool Street station unearthed a mass grave in 2015. The thirty skeletons were believed to have been victims of the Great Plague outbreak of 1665 (Dempsey 2015).

Though elsewhere, it’s likely that the legend is just that – a legend. Many empty patches of ground in London get called plague pits regardless of the truth (Roud 2008: 121).

Furthermore, before the 1665 outbreak, people buried plague victims either in churchyards or in the grounds of the nearest pest house. These pest houses were hospitals specifically to isolate plague victims from the rest of the community. The truth is…there just aren’t as many plague pits as people assume there are.

But we do know the Charterhouse plague pit exists.

The area probably became a plague pit due to its location half a mile north of the city walls. Some say the authorities interred around 50,000 people in the mass grave during the 1349 plague epidemic. The Bishop of London donated the land for the graveyard and its attached chapel. The square was, for a time, called Pardon Churchyard (St Pancras Gazette 1929: 6).

In 1381, Sir Walter de Manny established one of England’s nine Carthusian monasteries on the north side of the square. It fell to the monks to pray for the souls of those buried in the plague pit.

During the Tudor era, this was a wealthy part of the city, popular precisely because it was away from the dirt and disease of the City. Katherine Parr, the wife that survived Henry VIII, lived in the square with her second husband. Both the ambassadors from France and Venice also had houses in the square (Tudor Travel Guide 2023). Yet despite the luxury, there was a stone cross at the centre of the square. It marked the burial place of Black Death victims in 1349 (Tudor Travel Guide 2023).

A former soldier named Thomas Sutton ended up with the Charterhouse, having made his fortune in the coalfields of the north east. In 1611, he founded the Charterhouse as a hospital to care for men who had served the King. A school also opened, which will become important when we get to the folklore, but it moved to Godalming in 1872.

There’s a fantastic post here on the Charterhouse as it is today.

I visited the Charterhouse by accident back in March, when I was in the area and wandered in. It’s a compact but tranquil spot, and the staff are happy to give you any more information as you’re going around the small museum. The Cloister feels like something from a Tudor TV show, and the chapel is also worth a quick visit. I didn’t see any ghosts, though I did see one of the plague skeletons in the museum.

But did the dead of the Charterhouse plague pit stay quiet?

That’s what you’re really here for, isn’t it? With all this history going on, what happened to the plague pit? It lay there, largely undisturbed, until Crossrail came along. They found that the pits take the form of narrow trenches. The bodies lay in rows and scholars remarked on the level of order in the burials.

This in itself is surprising. You might expect a plague outbreak to be a time of chaos and widespread fear. Rumours grew about the poor being thrown into the pits while still alive. So you would also expect the pits to be likewise chaotic spaces. But apparently not—even here, the gravediggers tried to maintain some level of dignity.

But you can’t have a plague pit in a major city and not have ghost stories grow up about it. So while the pit itself lay largely undisturbed until 2013, the stories certainly tried to bring its inhabitants to life. One ghost story claims those who walk past the site of the Charterhouse plague pit can hear the cries of those buried alive among the bloated corpses.

Meanwhile, when the School was still on the site, legend has it that older boys used to tell tales about what lay beneath the cobbles of the schoolyard.

Apparently, if you pressed your ear against the stones, you’d hear the screams of the plague victims below. According to Scott Wood, the boys even dared each other “to crawl across the square at midnight, when the groans and cries of the dead below could be heard” (2013).

Back in 2011, this tale of the Charterhouse plague pit inspired me to write my own story, The Charterhouse Bullies. You can find it in my short story collection, Black Dog & Other Gothic Tales.

When I visited the museum at the Charterhouse, an information panel explained that human skeletons were often unearthed on the site. Ghost stories written by the boys appeared in the school magazine, suggesting a long history of stories associated with such osteological finds within the school.

That’s not all you’ll find in Charterhouse Square.

After the monastery opened, the monks prayed for the plague victims buried outside the gates beneath the square. But their own tragedy erupted during the Reformation.

The monks refused to accept King Henry VIII as the new head of the church. The Prior, John Houghton, was hung, drawn, and quartered in an attempt to ‘break’ the monks. His arm was placed over the Charterhouse’s main gate as a reminder of the king’s might. (St. Pancras Gazette 1929: 6).

The other friars reported nightly visits by their dead leader and continued to refuse Henry’s demands. Even the execution of 16 of their number didn’t diminish their resolve, though their heads were added to London Bridge.

According to legend, the shadowy ghost of a monk still haunts the area after dark. He’s sometimes described as a “dark monk”, but for some reason, many monk ghosts seem to be described in unflattering terms.

According to one legend, if you went to one of the alleys around the Charterhouse at dusk and whistled three times, a ghost would appear at the other end of the alley. According to Grace Jackson who lived in the square between 1880 and 1892, she tried it and it actually worked, with the ghost pursuing her and her brother through the gardens (Spitalfields Life 2019). Was this one of the ghosts, or an annoyed warden?

The Dissolution of the Monasteries saw the monastery converted into a mansion house. Sir Edward North, who once hosted Queen Elizabeth I in the building, sold it to the man who would become perhaps the most notorious inhabitant of the Charterhouse. This man was the infamous Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, who became embroiled in the plot to depose Elizabeth I and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. Howard was executed as a traitor, and according to legend, his headless ghost still appears in the Charterhouse. He favours the main staircase, striding down with his head under his arm.

The stories claim some 35,000 spectres lurk in the square. I’m sure there would be more reports if they were seen at the same time!

What do we make of Charterhouse Square?

To visit the place now, it’s a tranquil oasis of calm just a stone’s throw from the bustle of Smithfield Market. The Charterhouse is a quiet gem off the main tourist trail. Yet the atmosphere is still a slightly odd one, even on a bright Wednesday afternoon in March.

It’s hardly surprising that schoolboys would tell each other ghost stories, given the school’s proximity to the graveyard. This makes the stories a form of children’s folklore. Whether they were based on earlier legends, or were the result of a fine imagination, remains lost to time. But the addition of newer tales, in which ghostly monks and the spectral Duke of Norfolk stalk the corridors, certainly conjures up more phantoms than the plague pit seems to.

Perhaps the plague pit finally lies at peace, since the Black Death lies so much further back in time. Who knows? Perhaps the monks and the Duke will eventually one day find peace too.

Would you press your ear to the ground in Charterhouse Square? Let me know in the comments!

References

Dempsey, Andrew (2015), ‘Suspected 1665 Great Plague Pit Unearthed at Crossrail Liverpool Street Site’, Crossrail, https://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/articles/suspected-1665-great-plague-pit-unearthed-at-crossrail-liverpool-street-site.

Roud, Steve (2008), London Lore: The legends and traditions of the world’s most vibrant city, London: Random House (aff link).

Spitalfields Life (2019), ‘A Childhood In Charterhouse Square’, Spitalfields Life, https://spitalfieldslife.com/2019/10/17/a-childhood-in-charterhouse-square/.

St. Pancras Gazette (1929), ‘The Charterhouse’, St. Pancras Gazette, January 4, p. 6.

The Echo (1886), ‘What shall be done with The Charterhouse?’, The Echo, 25 September, p. 1.

Tudor Travel Guide (2023), ‘The Charterhouse: Piety, Power and Treason in the City’, Tudor Travel Guide, https://thetudortravelguide.com/the-charterhouse-piety-power-and-treason-in-the-city/.

Wood, Scott (2013), London Urban Legends: The Corpse On The Tube & Other Stories, Stroud: The History Press (aff link).