Wiley’s final words on the grisly affair, in 2004, were, “There’s more to the [Death Line] film than people know. My thought then, and which it still is today, is someone making the film heard the stories, [and] the deaths we investigated. They had to have: The film was too close to what happened. And I think we didn’t have control of the tunnels, and someone up in the government knew. Perhaps it’s still going on. That would be a thought.”[21]
Indeed, it would be a thought. A very sobering and disturbing thought.
A Dangerous Patient
Perhaps of relevance to the sensational story of Frank Wiley is the equally strange tale of Jonathan Downes, the director of the British-based Center for Fortean Zoology, which is dedicated to the investigation of mysterious animals, such as Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, the Chupacabra, and the Loch Ness Monster. Between 1982 and 1985, Downes worked as a nurse at the Royal Counties Hospital, near the English city of Exeter, Devonshire. While employed at the hospital, Downes heard stories of how, at some point in the 1940s — and possibly even on more than one occasion — disturbing things were afoot at the hospital that had a direct link with the tales of strange goings-on beneath the London Underground.
According to one particular doctor with whom Downes had the opportunity to speak in the early 1980s, the events all began with a series of late-night telephone calls to the hospital from the Lord Lieutenant of the County, from the Earl of Devon, and from elements of the Devonshire Police Force — all secretly informing senior personnel at the hospital that a highly dangerous patient was to be brought to the hospital within the hour, who would require special care and handling in an isolated, locked room. The doctor told Downes that around 45 minutes later, a police vehicle arrived at Starcross Hospital, reversed with a screech up to a side door, and then several police officers tumbled out of the back, while simultaneously trying to hang on to what the doctor said resembled a dirt-encrusted and hair-covered caveman.
The man-beast was reportedly young-looking, perhaps in its early 20s, was around 6 feet in height, was completely naked, and had a heavy brow, wide nose, and very muscular arms and legs. For three days, the creature was securely held at the hospital, Downes was advised, before it was transferred to an unspecified, government-run location amid the twists and turns of the London Underground. Its fate remains unknown. That is, unless it escaped from its subterranean confines to live wild amid the mass of tunnels, and survived by dining upon certain unfortunate souls traveling the London Underground by night who just tragically happened to be on the wrong platform at the wrong hour. Maybe one of Frank Wiley’s cannibals was actually Jonathan Downes’ wild-man.
Ghostly Attack
In some respects, this story eerily parallels that of a man named Colin Campbell, who maintains that while traveling home on the London Underground in the mid-1960s, he had a nightmarish encounter with a very similar beast. According to Campbell, it was late at night, and he was the only person to get off the train at its scheduled stop on the Northern Line. As the train pulled away from the unusually deserted platform, and as Campbell made his way towards the exit, he claims to have heard a strange growl coming from behind him. He quickly spun around and was shocked to see a large, hairy, ape-like animal lumbering across the platform towards the track.
Most bizarre of all, however, was the fact that the beast was seemingly spectral in nature, rather than flesh and blood. Indeed, around three-quarters of its body was above the platform, while its legs were curiously transparent, and, incredibly, passed right through the platform. Campbell further asserts that as he stood in awe, too shocked to move, the beast continued to walk through the concrete, right onto the tracks, and then straight through the wall directly behind the tunnel. Was it, perhaps, the ghostly form of the hairy wild-man taken from Starcross Hospital all those years earlier? Or was it the spectral version of another such creature, similarly captured years before? Today, decades on, we may never know. But sightings of weird creatures on the London Underground are not solely limited to rampaging man-beasts.
Big Cats
For the last 40 years or so, tales have abounded — to the point that they are now at almost ridiculous epidemic levels — of sightings of so-called big cats on the loose throughout pretty much the entire British countryside. Precisely what they are, where they come from, and why no one seems to be able to successfully capture or kill one is a matter of both heated argument and ongoing debate. Long before the present-day controversy began, however, these elusive beasts may very well have called the London Underground their home.
One witness, Maureen Abbott, a woman in her late 20s, saw what she describes as a large black panther racing along the track as she stood, alone, awaiting a train on the Bakerloo Line late one winter evening in either 1954 or 1955. Describing the animal as running very fast, she said that as it passed her, it quickly looked in her direction, with a menacing frown on its visage, before vanishing into the darkness of the tunnels. Although Abbott did not see the creature again, she has never forgotten her brief, terrifying encounter with the unknown, deep beneath the city of London.
Two days later, Abbott was visited at her home by a government official who advised her in relaxed tones, while they sat and drank cups of tea, not to talk about the experience. Of course, this aspect of Abbott’s story inevitably conjures up Men in Black imagery. If true, it suggests that elements of the British government may wish to keep quiet the fact that wild animals are on the loose in the heart of London’s old tunnels.
British Museum Station
Physical creatures aside, encounters of a distinctly spectral nature have also been reported in the London Underground for decades — on countless occasions and in numerous tunnels. They have also been the subjects of official secrecy sanctions.
For many years prior to British Museum Station’s closure on September 25, 1933, a local myth circulated to the effect that the ghost of an ancient Egyptian haunted the station. Dressed in a loincloth and headdress, the figure would emerge late at night into the labyrinth of old tunnels. In fact, the rumor grew so strong that a London newspaper even offered a significant monetary reward to anyone who was willing to spend the night there. Somewhat surprisingly, not a single, solitary soul took the newspaper up on its generous offer.
The story took a far stranger turn after the station was shut down, however. The comedy-thriller movie, Bulldog Jack, which was released in 1935, included in its story a secret tunnel that ran from British Museum Station to the Egyptian Room at the British Museum. The station in the film is a wholly fictional one dubbed Bloomsbury, but the scenario presented in the film was based upon the enduring legend of the ghost of British Museum Station.
Oddly enough, on the exact same night that the movie was released in British cinemas, two women disappeared from the platform at Holborn — the next station along the line from the British Museum. Strange marks were later found on the walls of the closed station at the British Museum, and more sightings of the ghost were reported, along with weird moaning noises heard coming from behind the walls of the tunnels. Not surprisingly, tales began to quickly circulate that the police had uncovered some dark and terrible secret about a paranormal killer on the tracks that had to be kept hidden from the populace at all costs. In other words, this was a strange, yet eerily similar precursor to the 1960s recollections of Frank Wiley.