Keep Out!: Top Secret Places Governments Don't Want You to Know About

England’s famous London underground railway system serves Greater London and parts of the surrounding counties of Essex, Hertfordshire, and Buckinghamshire. It’s also the world’s oldest underground network of its type: services began on January 10, 1863 on the Metropolitan Railway. Whereas the overall Underground itself is not, of course, a secret location, it certainly has concealed more than its fair share of off-limits sections throughout the course of its long and literally winding existence. Nor is it exactly a stranger to matters of official government secrecy.

At the height of the Second World War, when the Nazis were engaged in widespread bombing missions on London, the deep tunnels of the Underground were used as safe havens for the populace of England’s bomb-scarred capital. Also, during this same time frame, a part of the Central Line was clandestinely converted into an aircraft factory, while the Brompton Road Station was massively reconditioned to become a secret anti-aircraft control center. And, for a while, none other than the British Prime Minister of the day, Sir Winston Churchill, used the defunct Down Street Station as a secret haven from which to carefully plot retaliation against the swarming forces of Adolf Hitler. Today, the London Underground has no less than 268 stations and approximately 250 miles of track, making it the longest subsurface railway in the entire world. In addition, by 2007, more than 1 billion passengers were recorded as having used the Underground since its creation.

According to some, however, the London Underground is home to much more than just trains, tracks, and countless commuters; deep within this subsurface maze of dark and old tunnels, strange and terrible things are said to lurk. And the British government, not exactly in control of the darkness that is spreading uncontrollably beneath the ancient capital city, is determined to keep the truth of these terrifying underground secrets steadfastly away from the eyes and ears of the public and the media.

Tales of strange creatures, ghosts, and monsters roaming the sinister depths of the London Underground have proliferated for years. In fictional format, they were most famously portrayed in the 1981 movie An American Werewolf in London, in which the hairy wolfman of the movie’s title preyed on an unfortunate late-night traveler. And in Reign of Fire, a 2002 movie starring Matthew McConaughey and Christian Bale, fire-breathing dragons surfaced from the old tunnels and subsequently laid waste to first the British Isles and ultimately the rest of the planet.

‘Death Line’

Some of the older stories of monstrous entities prowling the dark tunnels under Britain’s capital city were incorporated into a 1972 movie called Death Line, starring horror-movie regulars Christopher Lee (Dracula) and Donald Pleasance (Halloween). The entertaining movie tells the story of a collapse, in the latter part of the 19th century, at a new station that is being constructed at Russell Square. Unfortunately, when the accident happens, a number of Irish workers are presumed killed. The company behind the work goes bankrupt, and no one can afford to dig out the bodies of the dead.

As you might have already deduced, the laborers don’t actually starve to death or end up crushed beneath mountains of rock and rubble. Instead, they manage to survive, and they breed deep below the ground. Then, 80 years later, the last few surviving offspring — who dwell deep within the heart of the myriad underground tunnels — do their utmost to replenish their food supply from the platform at Russell Square. “Food supply,” of course, equates to passengers. As the publicity blurb that accompanied Death Line (or Raw Meat, as it was released in the United States) went, “Beneath modern London buried alive in its plague-ridden tunnels lives a tribe of once humans. Neither men nor women, they were less than animals — they are the raw meat of the human race.”

Underground Killings

In reality, not everyone is so certain that the reports of cannibalistic sub-humans rampaging around the old tunnels of the London Underground are merely the stuff of fantasy. In fact, one person said he absolutely knew such stories are more than fiction. His story is as unbelievable as it is morbidly engaging. Before his 2007 death, Frank Wiley, who served in the British Police Force, had an astounding story to tell about his investigations of a number of weird killings in the London Underground, always late at night, in a clearly delineated period of time that covered 1967 to 1969. The killings, Wiley said, occurred in at least three stations, and were hushed up by the police, who claimed the attacks were merely late-night muggings.

On the contrary, Wiley explained, the “muggings” were nothing of the sort. The attacks were far more horrific in nature. There were, he recalled, seven deaths during the time he was assigned to the investigations. He said the modus operandi of the killer was always exactly the same: The bodies of the victims — a couple of whom were commuters, whereas the rest of them were hobos looking for shelter on cold nights — were found, always after at least 10 p.m., a significant distance into the tunnels, with arms and/or legs viciously removed…possibly gnawed off. Stomachs were ripped open, innards were torn out, and throats were violently slashed. It was clear that a man-eater — or, worse still, a whole group of man-eaters — was seemingly prowling around the most shadowy corners of London’s dark underworld after sunset. It, or they, had only one goal: to seek out fresh flesh with which to nourish their ever-hungry bellies.

Could it have been the case that the killings were the work of a rampaging animal, possibly one that had escaped from a local zoo or a private menagerie and was now on the loose far below the capital city? Or might the deaths have been due to desperate, suicidal people who threw themselves under the speeding trains, after which their remains were violently dragged into the tunnels and under the steel wheels of the racing carriages? Wiley strongly believed these scenarios not to be the case.

There was another very good reason why the deaths were not ascribed to wild beasts or suicides: the presence of a terrifying character seen at some point in 1968 by two workmen who were repairing a particular stretch of track on the Bakerloo Line (a 14-mile section of the London Underground that was constructed in 1906). The terrifying character, stated Wiley, was a bearded, wild-haired man, dressed in tattered and filthy clothing. When one of the workers challenged the mysterious figure with a large ratchet, the man came closer, in a weird, faltering, stumbling manner. To the horror of the pair, he held his arms out in front of him, bared a mouth of decayed teeth in their direction, and uttered a low, guttural growl. The strange figure then slowly backed away, eventually turning, and then suddenly running deeper into the tunnel, until he was finally, and forever, lost from view. Unsurprisingly, the workmen elected not to give chase, but instead raced to the nearest station and summoned the police, who questioned the petrified men vigorously. Wiley further added that secret orders quickly came down to the police investigators on the case — from the British Government’s Home Office, which focuses on a host of issues relative to national security — to wrap everything up, and quickly.

Wiley maintained that a secret liaison with Home Office personnel revealed that there were unverified rumors of deeper, very ancient, crudely built tunnels — that reportedly dated back centuries; long, long before the advent of trains and railways — existing far below even the Underground. There was even speculation they may have been constructed as far back as the Roman invasion of Britain that began in 43 AD. Precisely who had constructed the older tunnels, and who it was that might have emerged from them to wreak havoc on the Underground in the 1960s, was never revealed to Wiley’s small team of personnel. He said, “Probably no one really knew, anyway. Only that someone, like the character seen by the workmen, was coming up from somewhere, killing, taking parts of the bodies, and then they were always gone again.”[19] Wiley added, “It all got pushed under the rug when the Home Office said so. And when the last killing I was involved in [occurred], in 1969, I didn’t hear much after that; just rumors there might have been more deaths in the 70s upward. I don’t know.”[20]

Wiley’s final words on the grisly affair, in 2004, were, “There’s more to the [Death Line] film than people know. My thought then, and which it still is today, is someone making the film heard the stories, [and] the deaths we investigated. They had to have: The film was too close to what happened. And I think we didn’t have control of the tunnels, and someone up in the government knew. Perhaps it’s still going on. That would be a thought.”[21]

Indeed, it would be a thought. A very sobering and disturbing thought.

A Dangerous Patient

Perhaps of relevance to the sensational story of Frank Wiley is the equally strange tale of Jonathan Downes, the director of the British-based Center for Fortean Zoology, which is dedicated to the investigation of mysterious animals, such as Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, the Chupacabra, and the Loch Ness Monster. Between 1982 and 1985, Downes worked as a nurse at the Royal Counties Hospital, near the English city of Exeter, Devonshire. While employed at the hospital, Downes heard stories of how, at some point in the 1940s — and possibly even on more than one occasion — disturbing things were afoot at the hospital that had a direct link with the tales of strange goings-on beneath the London Underground.

According to one particular doctor with whom Downes had the opportunity to speak in the early 1980s, the events all began with a series of late-night telephone calls to the hospital from the Lord Lieutenant of the County, from the Earl of Devon, and from elements of the Devonshire Police Force — all secretly informing senior personnel at the hospital that a highly dangerous patient was to be brought to the hospital within the hour, who would require special care and handling in an isolated, locked room. The doctor told Downes that around 45 minutes later, a police vehicle arrived at Starcross Hospital, reversed with a screech up to a side door, and then several police officers tumbled out of the back, while simultaneously trying to hang on to what the doctor said resembled a dirt-encrusted and hair-covered caveman.

The man-beast was reportedly young-looking, perhaps in its early 20s, was around 6 feet in height, was completely naked, and had a heavy brow, wide nose, and very muscular arms and legs. For three days, the creature was securely held at the hospital, Downes was advised, before it was transferred to an unspecified, government-run location amid the twists and turns of the London Underground. Its fate remains unknown. That is, unless it escaped from its subterranean confines to live wild amid the mass of tunnels, and survived by dining upon certain unfortunate souls traveling the London Underground by night who just tragically happened to be on the wrong platform at the wrong hour. Maybe one of Frank Wiley’s cannibals was actually Jonathan Downes’ wild-man.

Ghostly Attack

In some respects, this story eerily parallels that of a man named Colin Campbell, who maintains that while traveling home on the London Underground in the mid-1960s, he had a nightmarish encounter with a very similar beast. According to Campbell, it was late at night, and he was the only person to get off the train at its scheduled stop on the Northern Line. As the train pulled away from the unusually deserted platform, and as Campbell made his way towards the exit, he claims to have heard a strange growl coming from behind him. He quickly spun around and was shocked to see a large, hairy, ape-like animal lumbering across the platform towards the track.

Most bizarre of all, however, was the fact that the beast was seemingly spectral in nature, rather than flesh and blood. Indeed, around three-quarters of its body was above the platform, while its legs were curiously transparent, and, incredibly, passed right through the platform. Campbell further asserts that as he stood in awe, too shocked to move, the beast continued to walk through the concrete, right onto the tracks, and then straight through the wall directly behind the tunnel. Was it, perhaps, the ghostly form of the hairy wild-man taken from Starcross Hospital all those years earlier? Or was it the spectral version of another such creature, similarly captured years before? Today, decades on, we may never know. But sightings of weird creatures on the London Underground are not solely limited to rampaging man-beasts.

Big Cats

For the last 40 years or so, tales have abounded — to the point that they are now at almost ridiculous epidemic levels — of sightings of so-called big cats on the loose throughout pretty much the entire British countryside. Precisely what they are, where they come from, and why no one seems to be able to successfully capture or kill one is a matter of both heated argument and ongoing debate. Long before the present-day controversy began, however, these elusive beasts may very well have called the London Underground their home.

One witness, Maureen Abbott, a woman in her late 20s, saw what she describes as a large black panther racing along the track as she stood, alone, awaiting a train on the Bakerloo Line late one winter evening in either 1954 or 1955. Describing the animal as running very fast, she said that as it passed her, it quickly looked in her direction, with a menacing frown on its visage, before vanishing into the darkness of the tunnels. Although Abbott did not see the creature again, she has never forgotten her brief, terrifying encounter with the unknown, deep beneath the city of London.

Two days later, Abbott was visited at her home by a government official who advised her in relaxed tones, while they sat and drank cups of tea, not to talk about the experience. Of course, this aspect of Abbott’s story inevitably conjures up Men in Black imagery. If true, it suggests that elements of the British government may wish to keep quiet the fact that wild animals are on the loose in the heart of London’s old tunnels.

British Museum Station

Physical creatures aside, encounters of a distinctly spectral nature have also been reported in the London Underground for decades — on countless occasions and in numerous tunnels. They have also been the subjects of official secrecy sanctions.

For many years prior to British Museum Station’s closure on September 25, 1933, a local myth circulated to the effect that the ghost of an ancient Egyptian haunted the station. Dressed in a loincloth and headdress, the figure would emerge late at night into the labyrinth of old tunnels. In fact, the rumor grew so strong that a London newspaper even offered a significant monetary reward to anyone who was willing to spend the night there. Somewhat surprisingly, not a single, solitary soul took the newspaper up on its generous offer.

The story took a far stranger turn after the station was shut down, however. The comedy-thriller movie, Bulldog Jack, which was released in 1935, included in its story a secret tunnel that ran from British Museum Station to the Egyptian Room at the British Museum. The station in the film is a wholly fictional one dubbed Bloomsbury, but the scenario presented in the film was based upon the enduring legend of the ghost of British Museum Station.

Oddly enough, on the exact same night that the movie was released in British cinemas, two women disappeared from the platform at Holborn — the next station along the line from the British Museum. Strange marks were later found on the walls of the closed station at the British Museum, and more sightings of the ghost were reported, along with weird moaning noises heard coming from behind the walls of the tunnels. Not surprisingly, tales began to quickly circulate that the police had uncovered some dark and terrible secret about a paranormal killer on the tracks that had to be kept hidden from the populace at all costs. In other words, this was a strange, yet eerily similar precursor to the 1960s recollections of Frank Wiley.

London Underground officials were, for a significant period of time, forced to dismiss the story, and there has always been an outright denial of the existence of any secret tunnel extending from British Museum Station to the museum’s Egyptian Room. Nevertheless, the story was resurrected in Keith Lowe’s 2001 novel, Tunnel Vision, in which the lead character states, while trying to impress and scare his girlfriend at the same time, “If you listen carefully when you’re standing at the platform at Holborn, sometimes — just sometimes — you can hear the wailing of Egyptian voices floating down the tunnel toward you.”[22]

British Museum Station is also said to be home to a ghostly figure that roams the tunnels dressed in a large coat, tall hat, and gloves. Supposedly, the ghost is that of one William Terriss, an actor who was stabbed to death near the Adelphi Theater in December 1897.

Bank Station

And then there is the ghost of Bank Station: During the construction of Bank Station, workmen are said to have awakened the spirit of a woman named Sarah, better known as the Black Nun, whose brother, Philip, was said to be a bank employee executed for forgery, and who worked close to the station. According to legend, Sarah’s spectral form still roams the platforms and tunnels, looking for her long-gone brother.

Ufo Storage

UFOs play a role in the London Underground controversy too. In fact, the imagery suggests the existence of nothing less than a full-blown Hangar 18–style facility somewhere under London. A persistent story that absolutely refuses to die asserts that in 1944 or 1945 a detachment of the British 8th Army found a semi-intact UFO and its crew on moorland on the English-Scottish border. Knowledgeable and respected sources maintain that details of the case reached key sources within the military infrastructure of the day. To fully ascertain the facts, we need to go back to 1955 and a news report put out at the time by a certain American journalist, Dorothy Kilgallen (who happened to be the last journalist to interview Jack Ruby, the man who shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963): “British scientists and airmen, after examining the wreckage of one mysterious flying ship, are convinced these strange aerial objects are not optical illusions or Soviet inventions, but are flying saucers which originate on another planet. The source of my information is a British official of Cabinet rank who prefers to remain unidentified. ‘We believe on the basis of our inquiry thus far, that the saucers were staffed by small men — probably under four feet tall. It’s frightening, but there is no denying the flying saucers come from another planet.’”[23]

A similar account comes via Stan Beech, whose father served in an office of the Royal Air Force during the latter stages of the Second World War. According to Beech, his father was involved, during 1944 and 1945, in the analysis of aerial photographs taken by Royal Air Force pilots of Nazi airfields, ammunition storage areas, and factories. On one specific occasion, however, while liaising with senior figures in the operation, he was exposed to a number of ground-based photographs displaying the crash of a wedge-shaped object on a hillside somewhere in the north of England during the early 1940s. Beech further elaborated that sprawled around the strange craft were several small bodies with large, bald heads, and dressed in gray, one-piece flying suits.

By Beech’s own admission, his father was never told from where, exactly, the vehicle and its strange crew originated, nor did he know what — if indeed any—conclusions were reached by those tasked with carefully examining the evidence. Beech’s father was informed, however, that the object was considered by British authorities to be a matter of extreme concern, and that all of the material — the bodies, the craft, and the photographs — still existed in a sealed chamber somewhere in a series of secret rooms in the London Underground.

With stories of hairy man-beasts, dead aliens and crashed UFOs, animalistic cannibals, mysterious big cats, and a dizzying assortment of specters prowling around the depths of the London Underground (and not forgetting, of course, all the governmental secrecy and concern about these particularly problematic matters), we might very well legitimately ask: What else lurks within the underground shadows of Britain’s capital city? Perhaps in time, those mysterious tunnels — and the government that has carefully monitored them for so long — will finally elect to give up all their bizarre and disturbing secrets. Until then, however, if, late one night, you ever find yourself all alone in the London Underground, take careful heed: They—in all of their varied and hideous forms — may be watching you, just waiting for the right opportunity to pounce and prey…