Drawing on 25 years of insider knowledge at Kew Gardens, Jonathan S. Farley has gathered chilling firsthand accounts of ghostly goings on from staff, visitors and the archive collection, to write his book Ghosts, Myths and Oddities of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Here, we share five spine-chilling tales.
Kew Gardens. Or should that be Boo! Gardens. Image: a.canvas.of.light via creative commons
The Runaway Carriage
In the mid-1800s, an unsettling haunting was a frequent occurrence at Kew, captivating locals and staff alike. A phantom carriage was seen and heard on several occasions, a spectral replay of a long-ago tragedy. The vehicle was a 'High Flyer Phaeton', a notoriously unstable and lightweight carriage popular during the Regency era. Witnesses described the terrifying scene with consistent detail. The ghostly vehicle would appear, thundering down the path with a terrifying speed, seemingly out of control. The horse appeared to have bolted, its spectral form galloping furiously, while the driver desperately struggled to regain command. A female passenger could be heard screaming for assistance, her cries of panic echoing across the grounds. At a certain point, near the area of what is now the Wilderness, the entire scene would simply vanish, and the sound of the carriage, the horse's hooves and the woman’s desperate screams would fade away into silence.The haunting came to an abrupt end in the late 19th century. According to local folklore, during the laying out of the Royal Mid-Surrey Golf Course in the 1890s, a team of workers reportedly discovered a broken carriage wheel buried in the ground. Since that time, the phantom carriage has never been seen or heard again. It is believed that the discovery of the lost wheel allowed the trapped spirits of the driver and passenger to finally find peace, ending their perpetual reenactment of the fatal accident.
