London Underground officials were, for a significant period of time, forced to dismiss the story, and there has always been an outright denial of the existence of any secret tunnel extending from British Museum Station to the museum’s Egyptian Room. Nevertheless, the story was resurrected in Keith Lowe’s 2001 novel, Tunnel Vision, in which the lead character states, while trying to impress and scare his girlfriend at the same time, “If you listen carefully when you’re standing at the platform at Holborn, sometimes — just sometimes — you can hear the wailing of Egyptian voices floating down the tunnel toward you.”[22]
British Museum Station is also said to be home to a ghostly figure that roams the tunnels dressed in a large coat, tall hat, and gloves. Supposedly, the ghost is that of one William Terriss, an actor who was stabbed to death near the Adelphi Theater in December 1897.
Bank Station
And then there is the ghost of Bank Station: During the construction of Bank Station, workmen are said to have awakened the spirit of a woman named Sarah, better known as the Black Nun, whose brother, Philip, was said to be a bank employee executed for forgery, and who worked close to the station. According to legend, Sarah’s spectral form still roams the platforms and tunnels, looking for her long-gone brother.
Ufo Storage
UFOs play a role in the London Underground controversy too. In fact, the imagery suggests the existence of nothing less than a full-blown Hangar 18–style facility somewhere under London. A persistent story that absolutely refuses to die asserts that in 1944 or 1945 a detachment of the British 8th Army found a semi-intact UFO and its crew on moorland on the English-Scottish border. Knowledgeable and respected sources maintain that details of the case reached key sources within the military infrastructure of the day. To fully ascertain the facts, we need to go back to 1955 and a news report put out at the time by a certain American journalist, Dorothy Kilgallen (who happened to be the last journalist to interview Jack Ruby, the man who shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963): “British scientists and airmen, after examining the wreckage of one mysterious flying ship, are convinced these strange aerial objects are not optical illusions or Soviet inventions, but are flying saucers which originate on another planet. The source of my information is a British official of Cabinet rank who prefers to remain unidentified. ‘We believe on the basis of our inquiry thus far, that the saucers were staffed by small men — probably under four feet tall. It’s frightening, but there is no denying the flying saucers come from another planet.’”[23]
A similar account comes via Stan Beech, whose father served in an office of the Royal Air Force during the latter stages of the Second World War. According to Beech, his father was involved, during 1944 and 1945, in the analysis of aerial photographs taken by Royal Air Force pilots of Nazi airfields, ammunition storage areas, and factories. On one specific occasion, however, while liaising with senior figures in the operation, he was exposed to a number of ground-based photographs displaying the crash of a wedge-shaped object on a hillside somewhere in the north of England during the early 1940s. Beech further elaborated that sprawled around the strange craft were several small bodies with large, bald heads, and dressed in gray, one-piece flying suits.
By Beech’s own admission, his father was never told from where, exactly, the vehicle and its strange crew originated, nor did he know what — if indeed any—conclusions were reached by those tasked with carefully examining the evidence. Beech’s father was informed, however, that the object was considered by British authorities to be a matter of extreme concern, and that all of the material — the bodies, the craft, and the photographs — still existed in a sealed chamber somewhere in a series of secret rooms in the London Underground.
With stories of hairy man-beasts, dead aliens and crashed UFOs, animalistic cannibals, mysterious big cats, and a dizzying assortment of specters prowling around the depths of the London Underground (and not forgetting, of course, all the governmental secrecy and concern about these particularly problematic matters), we might very well legitimately ask: What else lurks within the underground shadows of Britain’s capital city? Perhaps in time, those mysterious tunnels — and the government that has carefully monitored them for so long — will finally elect to give up all their bizarre and disturbing secrets. Until then, however, if, late one night, you ever find yourself all alone in the London Underground, take careful heed: They—in all of their varied and hideous forms — may be watching you, just waiting for the right opportunity to pounce and prey…
C-7
The Doomsday Bunkers of 2012
Most people will recall that when the tragic events of September 11, 2001, occurred, the vice president, Richard “Dick” Cheney, was secretly whisked away to what has famously become known as an undisclosed location. Since that fateful day, the world’s media has spent a significant amount of time and effort trying to identify the secret locale to which Cheney and his posse quickly fled. There is certainly no shortage of notable candidates.
In May 2009, while attending the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington D.C., the vice president, Joe Biden, committed the ultimate cardinal sin — in the eyes of Cheney, Dubya, and Condoleezza, no doubt — when he openly revealed to those present his knowledge of a secret underground bunker housed beneath the old U.S. Naval Observatory, which, today, is the home of the vice president himself. As the story goes, upon getting the gig as V.P., Biden was given a tour of the entire facility by a young naval officer. This tour included the classified, below-ground area, which was protected by a huge steel door. During Biden’s tour the very same officer quietly informed him that after Cheney’s miraculous vanishing act on 9/11, it was from right within the heart of this sub-surface installation that Cheney’s personnel were conducting their damage assessment of the terror attacks.
When this particular story about Biden’s apparent spectacular slip of the tongue surfaced in the mainstream media, White House staffers — or, more correctly, damage-control experts — were quick to deny its validity. Presidential spin-doctors earnestly announced, practically bellowing, to all those willing to listen, that the whole thing was a big mistake. Honestly, it really was! What Biden was actually talking about was not a secret underground world at all, but merely an upstairs room in the building from where the regular, day-to-day work of the vice president is routinely undertaken. The story was a non-story, and those were the final words of the Oval Office. Not everyone, however, was buying the government’s attempts to smooth things over. In fact, unfortunately for Biden and the new Prez, who had quite enough on his plate already, practically no one was buying it.
