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Page One
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Behind The Scenes
Ghosts, Murders, Highwaymen and Treasure
stories from the locations
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Page Three
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Church Row
As the first rays of daylight break through the clouds eerie shuffling footsteps herald the appearance of a red haired woman, she glances furtively from side to side as she hurries to the church.
Kelly (Tiffany Mulheron) is filmed at the bottom of Church Row opposite Hampstead Parish Church wistfully looking at the gravestones as her dreams of stardom, and her family relationships, lie broken and scattered.
The Holly Bush Inn
Many a guest has endured a long wait after giving their order for food and drinks to the waitress. The polite, obliging waitress, explain owners Peter and Hazel Dures, is a ghost. Like most English pubs customers order at the bar, there is no table service.
Kelly undergoes a metamorphosis as a result of the pressures of nightmares, demons and her life spinning out of control.
Kelly realises she is dealing with forces far greater than ordinary everyday events and she resolves to tackle her tormentors on their own terms.
The Magdala Tavern
still has bullet holes in the outside wall, a reminder of the last woman to be hanged in Britain.
Kelly picks up a copy of the local paper on the street, in the background is the Magdala Tavern.
In April 1955, on Easter Sunday, after a long and turbulent relationship, Soho hostess Ruth Ellis fired four bullets into her lover, racing driver David Blakely, in front of witnesses. In July she was hanged.
* * * *
Spaniards Inn
is said to be haunted to this day by the ghost of the notrious jailbreaking celebrity, Jack Sheppard
Hampstead's Spaniards Inn
Jack Sheppard
escaped ever more secure imprisonment four times before being hanged, at the age of twenty two, before a crowd of some two hundred thousand spectators on 16 November 1724 in Tyburn, a village close to what is now Marble Arch.
His fame at the time was such that his portrait had already been drawn while in prison.
engraving by George White
after the portrait by James Thornhill
(Wm. Hogarth's father-in-law)
Jack Sheppard features in numerous ballads, plays biographies and musicals, most notably
The Beggar's Opera.
* * * *
Dick Turpin
In the dead of night muffled hooves gallop across the Spaniard's Inn car park. Legend has it that it is Black Bess the famous (if fictional) horse reputed to have carried the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin to York in a single night.
Richard Turpin was born on the 21 September 1705 seven miles from Saffron Walden, Essex, in the village of Hampstead where his father kept an alehouse, then called the Bell Inn but now the Rose and Crown.
After vicious robberies with the Essex Gang, he narrowly escaped capture only to be caught later in York.
He was executed on 7th April 1739. Inside the Spaniards Inn a phantom figure wearing a cloak appears, it is believed to that of Dick Turpin.
Description:
"Richard Turpin, a butcher by trade, is a tall fresh coloured man, very much marked with the small pox, about 26 years of age, about five feet nine inches tall, wears a blue grey coat and a natural wig".
About a hundred years after his death Alfred Noyes (1880-1959) penned a hundred and fourteen lines, "The Ballad of Dick Turpin".
click on the image to read the poem by Alfred Noyes
Much of Dark Journey was filmed on Hampstead Heath. Dick Turpin rode his horse Black Bess to make his escape after escaping his bounty hunters.
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