The Tower of London, nearly a thousand years old and soaked in more blood than perhaps any other building in England, is the most haunted fortress in Britain. Within its ancient walls, kings and queens were imprisoned, tortured, and beheaded. Children disappeared. Conspirators were racked. Traitors were hung, drawn, and quartered on Tower Hill. The sheer concentration of violent death within these walls has produced a catalog of ghost sightings unmatched by any other location in the country.
The Tower's most famous ghost is Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife, who was beheaded on Tower Green on May 19, 1536. Her headless figure has been reported walking near the site of her execution, and a full apparition — carrying her severed head — has been seen in the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula, where her remains are buried beneath the altar. In 1864, a guardsman reportedly challenged the figure and, receiving no response, thrust his bayonet through her — the weapon passed through empty air, and the soldier fainted. He was acquitted at his court-martial after multiple witnesses testified to having seen the same apparition.
Lady Jane Grey, the "Nine Days' Queen" executed in 1554 at the age of sixteen, has been seen as a white figure on the battlements, particularly on the anniversary of her death. The two young princes — Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York — who disappeared in the Tower in 1483, almost certainly murdered on the orders of their uncle Richard III, have been seen as two small figures in white nightgowns, holding hands in the shadows of the Bloody Tower. Sir Walter Raleigh's ghost walks the battlements near the room where he was imprisoned for thirteen years. A spectral bear, associated with the Tower's former menagerie, has been reported in the Martin Tower. The Yeoman Warders who guard the Tower acknowledge its ghosts with professional matter-of-factness — they are, after all, merely the most persistent residents of the oldest royal fortress in Europe.