Jerry Abershaw, roaring boy of the Kingston road, laughed on the cart to Kennington and finished in chains on his own hill, where the crowd he had terrified picked his bones clean for pipe-stoppers. The Bones on Jerry's Hill. #TrueCrime #VictorianLondon #PennyDreadful

Thomas Pitt was eight. Sent down a hot chimney flue in a City brewhouse he could not climb back, and told his master as much: “I cannot come up, master, I must die here.” A line in a parliamentary paper, and the reform it helped force. #ChimneySweeps #VictorianLondon

A Tower sentry ran from a white figure in 1864. Two guardsmen swore from the Bloody Tower they saw it pass clean through him. The ghost has a name, and a scaffold. #GhostStory #VictorianLondon https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-white-figure-at-the-queens-house

In April 1818 a murdered girl's brother was offered single combat to avenge her under a law eight centuries old. He declined. Tonight's dispatch: the wager of battle. https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-wager-of-battle #TrueCrime #VictorianLondon

One man, a pole, and the whole dark of the East End. Tonight's dispatch on John Patrick Pullum, the lamplighter of Bethnal Green, who went to work in 1858 and outlived his own trade. https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-man-who-lit-bethnal-green #VictorianLondon #Gaslight #NightSide

A theatre's favourite actor, cut down at his own stage door in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. His ghost still walks the Adelphi - a good omen to the house. William Terriss, 16 December 1897. https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-ghost-in-the-stage-door #VictorianLondon #GhostStory

One code would not break for power or patience: the Rossignol Great Cipher. A desk clerk named Étienne Bazeries broke it, and pointed it at the Man in the Iron Mask. https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-mask-the-cipher-would-not-name #Cryptography #VictorianLondon

She sold dead horse to live cats from a front room on Hanbury Street, and on one September morning the dead lay on her step. The Midnight Dispatch: https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-woman-who-sold-horseflesh-on #VictorianLondon #TrueCrime

The pure-finder carried a handled basket and a black leather glove, and sold what the streets dropped for eightpence a pail at Bermondsey. The night-side of London, from Mayhew. #VictorianLondon

The Hammersmith Ghost, and the patrolman who shot a bricklayer's white apron by mistake — a case that bound English law for two centuries. #VictorianLondon #GhostStory https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-ghost-they-shot-in-black-lion

On 9 May 1726 the executioner's rope burned through too soon, and Catherine Hayes went into the fire alive. The last woman burned at Tyburn for petty treason. https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-last-woman-burned-at-tyburn #TrueCrime #VictorianLondon

Before gaslight, a boy with a torch of pitched tow sold a farthing's light to guide you home. Sometimes he led you into the dark instead. On the link-boys of old London. https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-link-boys-hour #VictorianLondon

The Torso in the Vault: The Whitehall Mystery of 1888 — a severed torso found in the foundations of the new police headquarters. https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-torso-in-the-vault-the-whitehall?r=123&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web #Whitehall #TrueCrime #VictorianLondon

No one in a Holborn inn should ever bear a dead man's face. Tonight's dispatch turns the opening of Reynolds' penny serial, The Mysteries of the Court of London. https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-likeness-at-the-george-and-blue #VictorianLondon #PennyDreadful

Kate Webster killed her mistress at Richmond in 1879, took the body apart with a carving knife and a meat-saw, and spent two weeks wearing the dead woman's clothes. https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-boiled-copper-of-mayfield-cottages #TrueCrime #VictorianLondon

Will they never copy the Devil with a penny? So ran the taunt on Prest's 'Maniac Father' (Lloyd's, c.1842), where a seduced girl's wronged sire turns lunatic and the scaffold darkens the page. A penny bought the shiver. #PennyDreadful #VictorianLondon

The Peckham Ghost of 1872: a white figure at the Alliance Tavern, twelve-year-old Matilda Ayres fleeing the gaslight. The parish cornered the phantom at last - Joseph Munday, a labourer in smock and wig. Hell is empty; the fears of the living are not. #GhostStories #VictorianLondon