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 goaclass="underline" 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]