In the year 1975, following my graduation from the Officer'sTraining School at Leyhill near Bristol, I was posted to HM Prison Wormwood Scubs in London. Probably The most infamous jail in Europe and, at the time, one of the biggest. My duties extended throughout that huge penal establishment and took me into practically every part of the place. In this months column I am going to tell you of the strange and inexplicable incidents I encountered within those grim walls. Incidents that lead me to believe, even then in my pre-Spiritualist days, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
I was on duty as the landing officer in charge of C2 in the main part of The Scrubs which housed adult prisoners who had recently been sentenced by the Inner London courts. Courts such as The Old Bailey, Bow Street Magistrates etc forwarded their criminals to HMP Wormwood Scrubs to begin their terms of imprisonment. It was about 12.30pm, the vast majority of staff were off on their lunch break and I was alone on the landing patrol.
Now C2 was The biggest single landing in Europe, at the time it held approximately 200 inmates, locked into its 80 cells. There was no internal sanitation and inmates were frequently banging on the doors and ringing their cell bells in an attempt to get staff to let them out to the toilet. The standard rule at lunch time was no one gets out. It was far too dangerous as only a limited number of officers were available should an incident occur.
As I walked along C2 I heard, coming from a cell on the opposite side of the wing, a tremendous banging on a door. It echoed and boomed around the wing. There were loud screams from within and shouts of 'Get us out!'. I ran round to see just what was going on, when I looked through the judas hole that let into the cell door, I saw three prisoners pressed hard against the wall, around them the simple cell furniture of lockers, chairs and beds, lay in total ruin.
I could not, on my own, open the cell, so I called for assistance from my counter-part on C3 who came down to help me investigate. When we opened the door two inmates ran out screaming and grabbed hold of the rails that surround the landing. Inside another inmate stood totally still, his eyes wide and staring.
After a few moments the two who had left the cell told me that they had been messing about with a self made form of the ouija board and as they did so the cell furniture had begun to lift off the ground and float about the cell. This had been followed by a wind the force of which had smashed the wooden lockers to bits and strewn the bedding and other bits and pieces all over the 12' X 8' cell unit.
This had so terrified them that they had started screaming for help, obviously when I had heard them. They were extremely frightened but their fear was as nothing compared to the state the other prisoner was in. He was almost catatonic, unable to move.Having located the two mobile prisoners in a new, and far less attractive cell, I sent for further help to move the remaining inmate. He was of West Indian origin and his eyes stared like great white globes in his dark face. When I tried to move him he began to scream, it took three of us to carry him to the Hospital where the Doctors placed him in a protected secure cell for his own safety. All the way there he kept screaming and pleading with us, from his excited babble I gathered that he had seen something horrific inside that cell, something so terrible it had driven him almost instantly insane.
When I submitted my report on this incident the duty Principal Officer threw it back at me declaring that I had been conned by inmates who just wanted a move of location. That may have been the case, but I hardly think anyone would chose to be relocated in a padded cell, which is where one of them ended up.
I personally believe that powerful incidents impregnate the areas in which they happen with their presence. This creates a kind of recording, a recording that, given the right circumstances plays back. Now the actions of those three inmates may just have triggered such a replay. I know what I saw in real life within HMP Wormwood Scrubs, men cut to ribbons drenched in congealed blood, dead by their own hand. Prisoners hanging from cell bars, others seriously injured by fellow inmates, scalded, bludgeoned, razored. Scenes of absolute horror that would turn the mind of the less strong. To meddle with the occult inside such a place, with over a hundred years of memory locked inside its evil walls, was, in my opinion, asking for terrible trouble.
On D Wing, which was the 'Lifers' unit, I talked to a man who occupied the very last cell on D4 landing. It was gone midnight one late October whilst I was the officer in charge of the wing. As I sat on D1, the ground floor landing, I heard a distant bell ringing away up at the top end of D4. It's a long way from D1 to D4 and the night was cold, the prison dark, and I was alone. All I had to send for assistance was a radio. But I had to discover what this call for help was about, that was my duty.
As I walked along the top landing I could see where the tally outside the cell was down and I flipped it back up, turned aside the cover from the judas hole and looked within. A man said, 'Help me Guv' there's been a woman sitting on me' bed'. I knew of course that no such thing was possible. All the doors were locked and bolted shut, the cells were closed and had been since 9pm lock up.
Trying to reassure the inmate as best I could I tried to make a joke of it. The prisoners in the 'Lifers' unit were all held in single cells so he had no one else to comfort him. I did not want to call for assistance to unlock the man as the Senior Staff Officers would have thought me crazy. So for some considerable time we talked. He described the lady he had seen, tightly bobbed hair, stiff black clothes with a baby in her arms. I told him to accept that it was nothing more than a dream and go back to sleep. It couldn't have been a woman, The Scrubs was an all male prison.
The next morning I recounted the story to my relief Officer who was a regular member of D wing staff. He didn't seem so surprised,'Oh' he said 'Didn't they tell you, the place is haunted. In the mid 19th century D wing was a female prison. It seems that a woman inmate threw herself from D4 when the Governor took her child away for adoption. Her cell was right at the end of the landing'.