The Angel of Highgate

The Cremorne Pleasure Gardens in Chelsea witnessed one of the most heinous crimes in London history on Wednesday night. As the evening balloon ascent began, one of the passengers, a tall man in a white top hat produced a knife, seized a young lady, and threatened to cut her throat.

When the balloon pilot, Charles Green Spencer of Battersea, attempted to apprehend the man, he was brutally murdered by having his throat slashed. His body was then thrown from the balloon in full sight of the horrified crowd. Fearing for their lives, screaming passengers leaped from the basket, whereupon the lightened balloon quickly ascended, bearing aloft the helpless woman along with a gentleman who observers say claimed to be the lady’s fiancé.

Witnesses on the ground reported seeing a tremendous struggle between the two men in the basket as the balloon drifted over Cremorne, narrowly avoiding being struck and destroyed by an aerial bombardment during the nightly fireworks display.

It is unclear what happened next in the balloon, which was seen to ascend to great altitude above the city of London in the midst of a violent thunderstorm. It appears that the madman was either struck by lightning or fell from the balloon’s basket. His badly burned body was found impaled on railings in front of a private residence in Kensington. The condition of the corpse indicated that the body fell from a great height. The madman in question has been preliminarily identified by the Metropolitan Police as one Doctor Silas Garrette, although this identity is now in question following the discovery of a gruesome murder committed at the said physician’s office in Hogarth Road. Here detectives discovered the grossly mutilated body of Augustus Skinner, a literary critic who wrote for Blackwell’s Gazette. Police now speculate that the true identity of the man is Doctor Jonas Hooke, an army surgeon who served with the 34th Regiment of Foot in Crimea. The police are not revealing the specifics of what they discovered in the doctor’s office, although one officer described it as “a scene of horror,” and as “the lair of a truly diabolical mind.”

The remains of the Cremorne balloon, the Sylph, crashed to earth in a farmer’s field some one hundred and twenty miles away. The survival of the young lady and her male companion is currently in doubt. It is believed they perished when the balloon entered a thundercloud, although no bodies have been reported discovered along the presumed flight path of the balloon.