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Plague Pits

The Mount Pond on Clapham Common is supposed to be the site of a plague pit (so I was told as a lad).
 
not to doubt you, but isn't there an underground car park beneath the bowling green?
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Not as far as i know. The green is surrounded by buildings. The car park in slightly further up Moorgate at Finsbury Square.
 
Sorry... I'm getting confused with the bowling green at Finsbury Square (which definately does have an NCP car park underneath!)
 
A bit OT, but in Oxford there's one lining the outside of the city walls in Christchurch meadows.
 
One interesting story that I have heard a few times now comes from people who don't know each other but who all have in common that they have worked on building sites, either for housing or on road building.

It goes along the lines that while using plant machinery to dig up a piece of ground, the workers come across large amounts of ancient human skeletons jumbled up together in old excavations, which are put down to being plague victims buried in a hurry. The ending usually goes that the contractor has been called in and ordered his men to re-bury them all and carry on preparing the ground as normal for a nice bonus.

The variation is that a government official comes along with a priest to bless the site and after the skeletons are re-buried in the same place, the work continues as normal, again with a nice bonus thrown in for the men to keep quiet. After about the fifth time of hearing this, I now presume that it is a UL.

Any other similar stories?
 
No way! This is true - was talking to my dad about it a few months ago, he's a Site Manager for a large building firm and (I can't remember exactly where, East London somewhere, I'll find out). They were knocking down some building and they came across loads of bodies underneath. Apparently weird things were always seen in this building and the discovery of these bodies sort of proved it to those working there. I'll get the proper details when I next speak to him.
 
This is all fantastic fodder for my next pub argument, thanks all! HighAndMighty's Channel 4 link in particular was exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for. I'm dying to find out the rest of Essex Spook's story as well.
Just remembered another one along similar lines - I was told that in the early nineties, on Upper Street at Angel in North London, bodies were unearthed during building work. The story goes that the area had to be sealed off and tested for "disease" as they thought they'd found a plague pit. Eventually it was discovered that they were actually building on the site of a graveyard which dated back only to the mid 19th century. If that one's true, it's astonishing that we could have so thoroughly forgotten about something so relatively recent.
 
cherryhinton said:
I'm sure I'm posting this in the wrong section (please be gentle with me), but many stories about plague pits have a strong, er, whiff of UL to me. It's the way that, depending on who you ask, you'll be told that virtually any open space in Greater London has a plague pit beneath. For example, I've heard this about Trafalgar Square
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When they were excavating Trafalgar Square they did fmaously find a lot of bones but they elephant and hippo bones from the Last Interglacial deposists that underlie a lot of the Thames area.

There have been numerous palaeonotoligical finds across London (from periods half a million years ago to the previous warm period 100-120 thousand years ago as well as more recent finds of course) including:

It's hard to imagine today, but 400,000 years ago woolly mammoths, wild cats, bears, wolves, lions, horses and elephants roamed freely throughout London - all perfectly adapted to life in the Ice Age. The fossil evidence found so far includes:

* Hippopotamus and elephant remains beneath Trafalgar Square
* Woolly mammoth fossils down The Strand
* Reindeer fossils at South Kensington station
* Woolly rhinoceros remains under Battersea Power Station
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Source
 
Just remembered another one along similar lines - I was told that in the early nineties, on Upper Street at Angel in North London, bodies were unearthed during building work.
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That is certainly true. i was living in that area at the time and I remember it well, though IIRC the bodies were found on a street leading from Upper Street to Essex Road... I think it might have been Gaskin Street, or the next street toward Highbury corner.

When the shell of St Luke's church (designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor of Christ Church Spitalfields/Jack The Ripper fame) was converted for the London Symphony Orchestra about 5 years ago, it first had to be cleared of bodies in the crypt. The contractors could only use workers over a certain age, because they were the only people still around that had been innoculated against smallpox whike at school.
 
My nan grew up in London during the 1920s (South London, I can't remember exactly where) and she says that she remembers seeing open spaces which were old plague pits and still weren't being built on as they were frightened of infection.

I'll ask my mum where my nan grew up and whether I have remembered this story correctly or not
 
This seems to be quite similar to the "Ancient Indian Burial Grounds" over here in the States. Whenever you see a spot of land not being used for construction or farmland someone inevitably says that it is an ancient Indian burial ground. This also is the case for any building where there are reported supernatural occurences. It has become more of a joke nowadays.
 
Wasn't The Amityville Horror house supposedly built on an Ancient Indian Burial Ground?
 
Yup and the house in Poltergeist and the hotel in The Shining too . . . and endless straight to vid. flicks ever since. :roll:
 
can't someone find an Ancient Indian Burial ground, build a house (or bury some dead animals etc) and see what happens...

Although, count me out of the sleepover.
 
It happened in South Park too. Someone built a pet shop over an old Indian burial ground.

Went something like this -

'What did you do with the bodies?'

'Dug'em up, pissed on'em, buried'em all again face down! Why?'

:lol:
 
H_James said:
A bit OT, but in Oxford there's one lining the outside of the city walls in Christchurch meadows.
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Really? Did the Black Death of the middle ages at one time strike Oxford? First time I've heard of that - so do you know exactly whereabouts the pit is in the meadows?
 
Sorry, totally forgot about this thread, but spoke to my dad today and....He knows of two accounts, both of which his firm were involved in and one which he was directly involved with:

A place called Tooley Street in South London-the builders here found loads of skulls in a pit. Apparently archaeologists were called to the scene, and after they investigated every skull had to be counted and ensured that they were reburied. This was quite a few years ago, but my Dad knows the site manager who was in charge of it.

He also said that a place called Backchurch Lane in East London was a bit weird. There is a building there which straddles a plague pit (and it has a large arching entrance that illustrates this). Electricity would stop for no reason, fires broke out and there were a lot of accidents too. Also he said that the security guards refused to work at nights after a while, after strange things happening. He worked there like a few years ago. Strange, eh. And this is builders we're talking about too, not people who really believe in the supernatural.

Hope that helps! Suppose it shows that some urban myths do have sound bases!
 
It'd be unusual for human skulls, once unearthed just to be measured and lobbed back in.

Normally, the county (or local) coroner has to be notified and a pathologist on hand - after all, not all of the skulls might be old! The remains (skulls, bones etc.) are preserved and, even after a lip-service inquest, reburied ... in an Anglican ceremony in the nearest Anglican graveyard.

If the remains can be identified as being of a particular religion (such as digging up a Catholic burial site) then the coroner must contact and arrange with the local representative of that religious group to have a "re-burial" ... but never on the original site.

These rules usually apply in the UK, so we don't get many Native American Burial Grounds which are so darned useful to horror films.

I say all this with experience (not necessarily with the legal/religious aspect) since I worked as an archaeologist in Canterbury and, we were given two burial grounds to excavate (one an RC moritarium and one a plague pit) so we wondered if it would seriously piss off a Roman pagan if he were to be dug up then buried again as an Anglican! I'd certainly be most upset!
 
Stormkhan said:
It'd be unusual for human skulls, once unearthed just to be measured and lobbed back in.

Normally, the county (or local) coroner has to be notified and a pathologist on hand - after all, not all of the skulls might be old! The remains (skulls, bones etc.) are preserved and, even after a lip-service inquest, reburied ... in an Anglican ceremony in the nearest Anglican graveyard.

If the remains can be identified as being of a particular religion (such as digging up a Catholic burial site) then the coroner must contact and arrange with the local representative of that religious group to have a "re-burial" ... but never on the original site.
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This happened in York, where a Jewish burial site, some 1000 bodies, was discovered outside the walls and the bodies were taken to Manchester for reburial.
 
I believe I've posted these points before somewhere on here, but here goes-

Berry Street in Conwy, n. Wales, is believed locally to be really called 'Burial Street' as it was at some time dug up and used as a makeshift plague pit.

I sometimes catch a Discovery Channel prog about a London firm of undertakers who specialise in emptying crypts, plague pits etc and who employ many Eastern European workers because, like older British ones (mentioned a few posts back) they have smallpox inoculations.

Some bodies in plague pits (or mass graves) may be still infectious and some not, depending on what illnesses are involved.

So, what we think of as 'plague', the bubonic plague (rats, hooded doctors, bring out your dead etc) is not dangerous after the death of the patient, whereas certain other diseases may be, especially anthrax and smallpox.

:shock:
 
escargot1 said:
So, what we think of as 'plague', the bubonic plague (rats, hooded doctors, bring out your dead etc) is not dangerous after the death of the patient, whereas certain other diseases may be, especially anthrax and smallpox.

:shock:
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And that's if the 'plague' was indeed the bubonic plague. A lot of current research is suggesting differently. I read a great book on this a few months ago called The Return of the Black Death.
 
Yup, I haven't read that book but I have heard that one of the 'plagues' of the past may not have been bubonic plague but anthrax.

This theory is based on accounts not only of the course of the disease itself but also on the way bodies disposed of, as it has been known for many centuries which diseases were still infectious from corpses and which not.

Sounds like a great book indeed. What we know of health and diseases of the past is constantly being reviewed. A very interesting subject.
 
Stormkhan - I appreciate what you're saying (I did Archaeology at University, so I know a little about the processes), yet I'm not convinced that such rigorous methods were applied decades and decades ago (we're talking the late 50s). But maybe I'm wrong.
 
True. As I say, the team are meant to report to the coroner but I suspect many would just pile 'em up in the corner and when finished, lob 'em back in.
 
Skulls though, I bet peeps'd keep them. ;)

Hide'em under their bed. Next thing you know, dashed thing is screaming all night. Happens every time. :lol:
 
I knew someone (no names, no packdrill) who exchanged a skull with a pub landlord to clear his bar tab and a free drink.

I hasten to add it wasn't me. I never get credit in pubs.
 
Cherryhinton - have you managed to check out any of the places I said? I'm not in London until Christmas so can't myself unfortunately.
 
cherryhinton said:
I just can't believe there are as many as local gossip would have it, given the smaller population of London in those days, and the fact that much of what we think of as London now would then have been widely-spaced rural villages.
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London was certainly more compact at the time of the plague but it was very densely populated. According to London Revealed by Julian Shuckburgh areas around Smithfield and Southwark suffered over 3000 deaths per 478 sq yds in the 1665 outbreak and they all had to be buried somewhere. In Underground London Stephen Smith states that "in Stepney alone, they were somehow disposing of six hundred corpses a week in high summer".

Dumping bodies inside pits outside the then city limits put them in open areas which would be covered by later development. I suspect that at least some of the stories which attribute the continuous existence of open areas to the existence of plague pits are folklore. Most developers don't give a flying f**k what they are building on when there's shed-loads of money to be made - Georgian and Victorian speculators and developers were easily as avaricious and hard-nosed as their modern counterparts.

The only specific mass grave site Shuckburgh mentions is Mount Mills, between City road and Old Street.

Stephen Smith mentions two questions often linked apocryphaly to the existence of plague pits - the lack of a tube station in Muswell Hill and the shallow basement which houses Harvey Nichol's mens department.
 
While thinking about the subject of this thread at four in the morning, unable to sleep, I was reminded of a conversation I had several years ago with a friend of my parents. He was a civil engineer who had worked on many major projects in London over the years and in later life had been a consultant to various architects and planning bodies.

In his work for planners he had become fascinated by a peculiarity he had noticed in some of the larger Victorian housing developments. During the Victorian period huge Greenfield, rural or semi-rural areas were swallowed up to become what are now established parts of the London conurbation. Vast areas were built over at a time, sometimes in a piecemeal fashion, but often by a single developer using the same engineers, architects and builders. Remnants of these vast swathes of cheap, terraced housing remain today.

What the man had noticed was that occasionally the neat line of alleyway between the backsides of adjacent streets of back-to-back terraced housing would split and reform, a semicircle of houses on either side bordering the void, creating a circular island in an otherwise straight line. This had fascinated him as, in many cases, he could see no practical reason why it occurred. Not only was it unnecessary but it would also have added expense and extra building costs to the development. Not only that but it also wasted space and the pressure on space in Victorian London was even more, at least in certain areas, than it is now.

These were not like islands in the posher modern developments which tend to be at the front of properties and are created to ease traffic and give a sense of space. They were at the rear and according to the research he had done, tended to lay fallow and unclaimed until more recently when bits of ground were appropriated here and there as gardens.

To cut a long story short he had become convinced that the reason for the existence of these little gaps in development was the presence of plague pits - either actual plague pits or sites where local rumour asserted a plague pit existed. This was not necessarily just a sop to superstition - as I said before the Victorians were just as hard-headed, maybe more so, than their modern counterparts - but also maybe a result of the genuine fear many people had, in a period where medical science was still vague on such matters, of contamination.

Unfortunately over the years I can’t remember any specific sites although I know he mentioned Stoke Newington, Islington and Tottenham. He lived near the Tottenham site and showed it me but, again, I can’t remember the exact spot and nothing jumps out at me from a quick look at the A to Z. He also mentioned that many of these sites had been developed over but could still be seen on old plans of London.
 
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