HGB Ep. 633 - Chistlehurst Caves

This Month in History - The Black Monday of 1360

In the month of April, on the 13th, in 1360, a Black Monday occurred. Although historically better known to describe stock market crashes, this Black Monday was different. This particular Black Monday took place on Easter Monday during the Hundred Years' War between England and France. King Edward III had led his army of 10,000 men to the gates of Paris on April 5th where he was unsuccessful in engaging the French who refused battle. The English were unable to breach the French's defenses, so over the next week, the English moved on to the gates of Chartres (SHAR-truh). The French defenders at this location again refused battle and took shelter behind the Chartres walls. On the night of April 13th, 1360, the English soldiers made camp outside the walls of Chartres and an unexpected storm materialized. Lightning struck killing many soldiers, the temperatures dropped and huge hailstones and freezing rain fell down upon the English. Two English leaders were killed, and hysteria set in amongst the remaining soldiers. Approximately 1,000 English soldiers and 6,000 horses were killed during the storm. The freak storm had produced more casualties than any previous battles of the Hundred Years' War. The sudden intense storm ultimately forced King Edward III to stop his siege of Chartres and led to peace negotiations. The culmination of the negotiations became the Treaty of Bretigny (BREE-teen-yee) which ended the first phase of the Hundred Years' War.

Chistlehurst Caves (Suggested by: Alana Ashby)

The name Chistlehurst Caves is a bit deceiving because this system of tunnels and caverns near London is not natural. These are man-made. They started off as chalk and flint mines and later were used for ammunition storage and then as a bomb shelter and this was even a music venue for a time, hosting the likes of Hendrix and Bowie. An entire underground city was once here. There are legends connected to the caves that include tales of Druid ceremonies and there are claims of ghosts. Join us for the history and hauntings of Chistlehurst Caves.

Chistlehurst Caves is a 22-mile labyrinth of dark and mysterious passageways. The caves claim to have a history stretching back 8,00 years to the Neolithic period, meaning that these were first dug out by an ancient people. The town of Chistlehurst has a long history too, being mentioned for the first time in a charter from 973. The name is Saxon with cisel meaning "gravel" and hyrst meaning "wooded hill," so this is a wooded hill on stony ground. That ground wasn't suitable to agriculture. This became a royal manor starting in medieval times and was held by the Walsingham family, which included in its members Queen Elizabeth I's spymaster, Francis Walsingham. Francis attended Cambridge University and became a lawyer, eventually working his way up to overseeing foreign, domestic and religious policy during the Elizabethan era. He began his life in espionage around 1580 and as a Protestant, did much of his work against Catholics, torturing priests. He managed to find out about a conspiracy among the Catholic powers to invade England and place Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne. He was behind the beheading of Mary. Walsingham had intercepted a letter that indicated that Mary was encouraging in a plot to kill Elizabeth. Walsingham was at her trial and she broke down and said, "All of this is the work of Monsieur de Walsingham for my destruction", to which he replied, "God is my witness that as a private person I have done nothing unworthy of an honest man, and as Secretary of State, nothing unbefitting my duty." Walsingham pressured Queen Elizabeth to sign the warrant of execution, but she hesitated for awhile, but eventually signed it.

Londoners liked Chistlehurst because it was out of the city and they would buy property out in the country here. In 1870, the exiled Emperor Napoleon came to Camden Place here. The Victorian era would bring its greatest development and many of the homes here still date to this time. 

No one is sure when the caves were first mined for chalk and flint, but the earliest record dates to a 9th-century Saxon charter. The next mention came in 1232 AD. Mining continued in the caves until the 1840s and the production of lime took place between 1830 and the 1860s. Lime was used in brick making and flint was for firing guns and lighting tinder boxes. While the British Archaeological Association's Vice President in 1903, William Nichols, claimed that the caves were first dug out by Druids, Romans and Saxons, there is no verification for that claim. Tours of the caves claim that there are Druid altars and some Roman elements. These claims are hard to validate because the Druids were a very secretive order. They trained for up to 20 years and shared their knowledge exclusively through oral, memorized verses to keep their lore hidden. They only shared their secrets within the group. But it makes the lore here juicy, so we would be willing to believe it. The general public started visiting the caves starting in 1900.

After World War I started, Britain saw value in keeping their ammunition in the caves. Before this, mushroom cultivation was begun. Mushrooms need darkness and a constant humidity and temperature in order to thrive. Underground urban farms are perfect for this. An old parking garage in Paris has become a mushroom farm. And the Chistelhurst Caves were also perfect. The cultivation here started in 1900 and lasted until the 1950s.

As we learned with out haunted Air Force Bases a few weeks ago, aerial fighting started to get its feet during World War I, but during World War II, it would really come into its own. Major cities in Europe faced bombardment. The aerial bombardment of London began in September 1940 and the caves made the perfect spot for an air-raid shelter. As the war continued on, an underground city was built in the caves and it hosted up to 15,000 people. They each paid a penny to enter. To make this a city, it needed utilities and so the tunnels were fitted with electric lighting and running water for toilets and showers. There was even a hospital and a chapel. And a cross from that chapel still exists today and even though most of the things made from wood that date to that time no longer exist or have fallen apart, the cross appears to be almost new and untouched by time. 

A little fun fact, there was one baby born in the shelter during the war and she was baptised in the chapel. At that christening, she was given the name Cavena Wakeman. When she hit 18, she decided she didn't care for that and so she changed her name legally to Rosa. She did keep Cavena as her middle name. 

The shelter was closed shortly after VE Day and pretty much focused on the mushrooms until the 1950s. And then music came to the space and some really big names played concerts here. This became a popular skiffle and rock music venue. British rockers Lonnie Donegan, Adam Faith, and Marty Wilde all played there in the 1960s. American rockers Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran also played here during the early 1960s. And there were many bigger names like The Animals, The Yardbirds, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and David Bowie played in the caves twice. 

Apparently in regards to Led Zeppelin, they threw a party on Halloween in 1974 to celebrate the launching of their own label called Swan Song Records. Stories claim that Groucho Marx attended the party at the age of 86 and that there was a huge food fight and entertainment by stripping nuns. 

Radio Caroline, a British pirate radio station, broadcast performances on Saturday nights with DJs. Young people would come to the caves for concerts and dancing. Performances in the caves continued into the 2000s and there are still some even today. There had once been a challenge at the caves. Anyone who could spend the entire night, alone, next to the pool, would win five pounds as a prize. No one ever won the prize. And that's because these caves are rumored to be incredibly haunted. Supernatural activity in the caves has been reported for decades and paranormal investigators have been coming for years. Everything from Romans to Victorians to Shamans have been seen and chalk has been thrown at people. Stories claim that the mischievous spirits throwing things belong to children who were killed during a partial cave collapse in 1939. Many people have said they have seen the ghost of a young girl. A tour guide once saw the apparition of a man in full cavalier uniform standing in the caves. There is a White Lady here and the story behind here is that her husband murdered her. The bones of a woman were found in the 1940s. Her ghost rises from a pool and floats down the tunnels.TV shows and movies have been filmed in the caves. One of these movies was Insemenoid from 1981 that starred Robert Pugh, Victoria Tennant,  Stephanie Beacham and Judy Geeson. Yeah, it's exactly what you think it is based on the title. A really bad Science Fiction movie about a member of an Interplanetary archaeologist crew getting impregnated by an alien creature in a cave. She turns homicidal. What we are interested in is that actress Judy Geeson claimed that she saw an apparition by the Roman Well when filming in the caves. The show Most Haunted featured the caves in a two episode series during Season 10 in 2008. 

A tour guide was once taking a group through and came to the former hospital area. He was using his flashlight to point out certain points of interest and all of a sudden someone in his group asked, "Who is that man." The guide managed to get his beam on this man who was bald, wearing a sweater and what appeared to be jeans. He assumed that this is someone who wandered off from a previous tour group, so he started walking over to him to "invite" him to join his tour so he could get him out of the caves. He looked down for a moment to watch his step and heard his tour group gasp. He soon figured out that they had gasped because the man had disappeared. Around 15 people had all witnessed this. Workers believe this was a man who built the brick walls were he was seen. He has been seen since by other tour groups.

AlmostButNotQuote wrote on Reddit, "I want to talk about what happened to me and literally no one else noticed. We walked through a few rooms and I walked through the threshold into the next one and it was like a sheath of mist went across the top of my face/eyes just for a split second like I walked through a smoke machine that just puffed. That’s what I thought it was so I reacted and waved my hands in front of my face but no one else had any reaction and I looked into the electric lights above and there was no mist/smoke in the air. Yes, it could have been a reaction to a drop in air temperature or change in humidity but I’m just interested as no one else seemed to experience this, even my partner who was literally holding my hand as we walked through the archway. Despite that we had an amazing time £7 an adult, the tour guide Darren was amazing and informative, it was the right mix of spooky and interesting and if you’re nearby I HIGHLY recommend you go!"

Vansan871 shared on Reddit, "There was a radio show that dared two listeners to spend the night in a cave, I don't know if it was this particular cave. It was supposed to be haunted. When it became time to bed down they had to sleep in different areas. One slept a bit closer to the pool. Later that night the other man was awakened by his friend screaming. He ran towards the pool and found his friend laying on the ground, unconscious with injuries about his head and face and a dislocated arm. After regaining consciousness in hospital he could not remember anything about his attack." 

ktowl wrote on Reddit, "My family and I visited Chislehurst Caves, maybe about 10 years ago or so. Me (15y/o at the time) and my younger brother (10y/o at the time) were very creeped out by the caves, especially as the guides had warned us not to stray from the party as people had got lost in there before due to how dark it is. My parents are really into the paranormal, (but not so much that they’ll believe anything, they’re pretty reasonable and realistic when it comes to paranormal activity) and decided to hang right at the back of the tour party, which again, was starting to freak my brother and I out. We keep looking behind us towards my parents, asking them to hurry it up, and then my parents just stop dead in their tracks and look each other. My mum looks at my dad and says “Did you hear that?” Dad replies “that whistle?” Something had literally whistled in between my mum and dad. Not loud enough for my brother and I to hear, and we were probably about 6 feet away from them when it happened. Understandably, my parents waited until after we left the caves to tell us about the whistle seeing as they didn’t want to freak my brother and I out any more than we already were." 

Someone who did a lot of research for many years on the caves and gathered paranormal experiences was James Wilkinson. He wrote "Ghosts of Chistlehurst Caves" in 2011. James touched on a couple of unusuals things about two areas of the caves. In all areas of the caves, there is an echo, but in the chapel area and where the haunted pool is located, there is no acoustical echo.

Derek Hopkins was a manager at the caves for years and he only stopped working there in 1987 because he died. He told people he didn't think the caves were haunted, but he himself had heard some strange things he couldn't explain and saw some stuff that he was resistant to sharing. He loved a good cup of tea and always drank from a mug that never seemed to be cleaned. James shared the following in his book, "Bob Baxter told us that Derek had a theory that his tea always tasted better in his cup if it wasn't washed. 'We joked that he had an inch of tanning around the edge with a hole in the middle for his tea. Just after he died, his mug turned up several times on tours just sitting in the middle of a passageway.' The guides would casually pick it up and return it to its place in the hut with the rest of Derek's gear, but it would reappear shortly after on another guide's tour. This has happened about four times." 

Michelle Baxter was an employee who also saw the spirit of a man dressed as a cavalier. She told James, "Late in 1990, along the cavalier’s passageway, I saw a man standing with his arms folded watching the party leave the area. It was probably the clearest thing I have seen in the caves and again I thought I was imagining it. After looking away and looking back twice I knew I was not. I must have been twenty feet away from the apparition and I could see it clearly standing there for about 1 minute. It was not a rock formation. I always feel a little worried when I walk away from the cavalier’s passageway as I get the feeling somebody is following me." 

Dave Duker was a guide in the caves during the 1970s and he told James about an experience he had while guiding a group fo schoolchildren one day, "During the weekdays the caves were used by a lot of school parties usually from the age of seven and upwards, and the party sizes ranged from ten to twenty. I was taking a party of about eleven eight-year old schoolchildren and their teacher around the caves and we were approaching the 'Roman Well' area, I was walking backwards as we approached the well so that I could talk to them. As I spoke, I saw one of them run off from the back of the party. I did not think for one minute that anything untoward was happening as the figure was most definitely solid, not blurred or an outline, it was a definite solid shape. I know it was not a shadow caused by the lanterns, absolutely not. I felt a bit annoyed with the teacher for letting the child run off and asked her not to let the kids run about in the caves as it was dangerous, and remember feeling a bit annoyed that one of them had run off not just because there was an eight-year old child alone in the caves but because whoever it was, had walked off while I was talking. I went around the corner to retrieve the child and return him/her to the rest of the pupils but found that the child had run into a dead-end area and that their was no-one there. There was nowhere for anyone to hide and it dawned on me that what I had seen was not human. The teacher looked worried when I returned alone and after counting the children and finding they were all there she looked even more worried, I finished that tour a lot quicker than I would normally have done." 

Desmond Tyler told James, "The last thing we do at night, when the last guide is doing the four-oclock tour, you wait until about four thirty and then you go down there and you put all the lanterns out so that you are opposite the map room and you line them up with the filler caps forward so the first guide in the morning can come along and fill them easily. It had been a quiet day and there hadn’t been a four-o-clock tour and I had just gone down there to sort the lamps out about and I saw somebody come out of the church and I said “Oh Hello” and they went into the map room. So I followed them, I must have only been five seconds behind them and I walked into the map room and there was no-one there and the gate at the back of the room was shut which was weird. Apart from the fact that I know it was a man, it happened so quickly I didn’t really take in any other details and when I went upstairs Chris was in the office and Paul was out the front having a cigarette. They were the only other two people there at the time. “That was the first time I realized there was something unusual about the caves.”  The next time, I was coming round past the fan near the end of a tour and near the modern church where you feel you should turn left but the path is to the right, I was standing there and as I moved my torch around in the dark I saw a man crouching down against the wall. He had very ragged hair and his hand up like he was protecting himself he looked very scared. I only saw him for a second and by the time my torch passed over that spot again to look, he’d gone. This was all in a second. It was very weird. This happened to me about three times over a period of two or three months I saw the same person. It was by the isolation ward. I know the story of the priest now, but the first time I saw him, I was completely unaware, nobody had told me that story." Other guides have also seen this and the claim is that some priest came down here to do penance back in the 1950s and was scared to death. Some stories claim that he had clothes on, while others say he was naked. His nails were ragged like he had tried to dig himself out by hand. 

Several of the employees shared stories of hearing what sounded like a woman speaking and the voices of several children with her. One person detailed that it sounded like a child was reciting something and getting correction from a woman. Could this be something going back to the war and it got locked into the stone of this space? Or had something happened to a woman and children here? We didn't find any stories to corroborate that. 

Pete Lovett had what seemed to be a residual experience. He was working with another employee to replace the locks on a door. He told James, "We were on one side of the rock wall that had been put up about five or six years ago. I was standing about ten feet away from this wall when a figure just walked out in front of me. It was a man. There was nothing unusual or mystical about him at all because he was wearing a black pair of trousers and a shirt. He walked straight in front of us about ten feet away and my first reaction was 'What the hell's a tourist doing down here on a Monday morning?' The trouble was that he walked through a brick wall going towards the cinema. Then I remember thinking 'Why would a tourist do that?' These thoughts were going through my head in a millisecond and then I just collapsed. I was a total mess as my brain tried to come to terms with what I had just seen. It really screwed me up. He literally crossed our passageway. Originally, you would have been able to walk through the passageway the way he had gone, but like I said, the passage was bricked up five or six years ago and it is impossible to get to the cinema that way now. The apparition looked middle aged and wore clothes that could have been worn anytime from the 1940s to today." 

During the war, a group of gypsies moved in and they were pushed back into a more isolated part of the caves that dated back to the Roman times and they nicknamed the area the pug-end area. Nobody knows why they gave their space that nickname, but pug means small demon or imp. Did they see something there? 

Chistlehurst Caves have served multiple uses, the most important being a place of protection. But even with that history of protection, this location has proven to be a very creepy place. There seems to be several spirits here. Is Chistlehurst Caves haunted? That is for you to decide!