The majority of people are aware of humanity’s less-than-hygienic history. Between fabricating eyebrows from the skin of a mouse, a British monarch’s belief that a bath would be detrimental to his health, the Romans’ use of lye (An ash and urine mixture) to wash clothes and taking more than 300,000 years to invent toilet paper, we’ve had far from a sterile track record.

What most people are not aware of, are the smells involved with such methods of ‘Hygiene’. The following list is a collection of delightful aromas from a period that coincided with the Romantic Era, but they are not nearly as charming. Brace yourself—It’s Georgian England.

10 Times Nature Smelled Like Something Totally Unexpected

The majority of people are aware of humanity’s less-than-hygienic history. Between fabricating eyebrows from the skin of a mouse, a British monarch’s belief that a bath would be detrimental to his health, the Romans’ use of lye (An ash and urine mixture) to wash clothes and taking more than 300,000 years to invent toilet paper, we’ve had far from a sterile track record.

What most people are not aware of, are the smells involved with such methods of ‘Hygiene’. The following list is a collection of delightful aromas from a period that coincided with the Romantic Era, but they are not nearly as charming. Brace yourself—It’s Georgian England.

The word ‘Perfume’ comes from the Latin for ‘To scent by smoking’. The first perfumes were used to protect against the plague, as it was believed that disease could be prevented by ‘Purifying the air and warding off bad odours’. By the second half of 18th century, Otto of Rose had become the most popular perfume. It was concocted by heating rose petals and water in a copper still, and then extracting the oil from the mixture.

Because of its popularity, there was great paranoia amongst the Georgian English about counterfeit perfume. According to an 1831 guide for servants, to check for fake perfume; “Drop a very little otto on a clean piece of writing paper and hold it to the fire. If the article be genuine, it will evaporate without leaving a mark on the paper; if otherwise, a grease-spot will detect the imposition.”

The Otto of Rose’s popularity was largely owed to the horror of prior perfumes. Civet was a perfume extracted from a gland near the anus of the civet cat. Seemingly Georgians began to feel that the wearing of substances removed from a cat’s bum was rather ungentlemanly.

9 Tobacco

During Georgian England, there was an utter explosion of social life. In the 17th century, men often congregated to smoke their pipes in coffee houses, but by the 1700s tobacco had earned itself an unsavoury connotation. The Georgians believed that women could not tolerate tobacco smoke which led to allegations of women leaving their husbands if they refused to part with their pipes. Puffing a pipe in public was also regarded as being impolite.

As a replacement, Georgians began to snuff; the snorting of finely ground tobacco up one’s nostril. While this was fashionable, some believed it to be abhorrent. There were a number of unpleasant side-effects that went along with it; coughing, grunting and spitting. The main benefit was that it didn’t invade other people’s personal space, as a wafting cloud of tobacco smoke would. That said, people gathered at church were reported as being disgruntled by the noises produced by those snuffing during mass!

8 Fish

Marketplaces in Georgian England were very different to the supermarkets of today. There were no food safety standards, packaging or use-by dates, so ‘Caveat Emptor’ (‘Let the buyer beware’) applied. Purchasing gone-off food could cause disease and could offend your house guests. To prevent this, household manuscripts were printed to inform Georgians how to test their food. Meat and fish were tested by sniffing; if they had a ‘slimy’ smell, they should be avoided.

Pheasants were examined around the neck to check that they didn’t have a ‘tainted’ smell. Butter also needed to be checked before purchase, but buyers were warned to bring their own knife to test, as a merchant could simply offer the best piece of the stick.

Billingsgate women, who sold fish, were notorious for being sweaty and angry at their customers. For some, testing their goods appeared insulting. It suggested that they were seen as not trustworthy. Because of this, some Georgians wouldn’t be cod dead participating in such practices.

7 Paint

Although this smell may indeed seem like a rather strange proposal, the smell of paint is one that is regularly referenced in Georgian diaries. Because redecorating was not a common occurrence, this smell was a memorable one. Georgian paints were concocted from a mixture of linseed oil and turpentine, and as a result they had a particularly noticeable and pungent odor.

Bernardino Ramazzini was an Italian physician who first suggested that the ingredients used in paint production often led to producers losing their sense of smell. In fact, he was so engrossed in smells that he believed that someone should write, ‘A natural and physical history of odors’!

6 Ammonia

The smell of ammonia is one that is particularly difficult to mistake. The substance itself is composed of a combination of hydrogen and nitrogen, most commonly found in fermenting urine.

This smell provokes our trigeminal nerve—A type of nerve associated with facial expressions. The Georgians became obsessed with nerves. A person with sensitive nerves was held to a higher regard in society. Women were believed to be particularly disposed to anxiety. Ammonia was used to ‘Revive the senses’. Georgian novels and dramas even depicted heroines sniffing corked bottles of ammonia! Georgians later believed that smelling salts could be used to revive people who had been drowned or asphyxiated.

However ammonia was not the only maddening technique that was tested—One method even involved pumping a tobacco smoke emena up one’s rear end—Indeed an unpleasant wake-up call.

10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Smell

5 Marzipan

The Industrial Revolution occurred at the same time as Georgian England. At this time, there was massive urbanization. There was an opening opportunity for townspeople to purchase exotic ingredients and to create more sophisticated sweets. Marzipan became a particular favorite. Crafted from almonds, sugar and rose water, they were easily made and not unaffordable. Marzipan sweets were generally eaten at the end of a meal, and they had a distinct almond-like smell.

While they were delicious treats, marzipan was also used in sculpture—Including making people, animals and castle—A decidedly fashionable model. The creations were then left at the centre of the dining table, and became a hallmark of Georgian decoration.

4 Wigs

The Georgians may have used marzipan in sculpture, but the real artwork occurred with Georgian wigs. Hair was piled on top of pads and wire structures to create intricate masterpieces for the drawing room. For most, simply using their own hair was not enough and so it was infused with horse hair. 1760s styles including an egg-shape, but this later elongated into a classic pouf.

The Duchess of Devonshire became famous for her extravagant bouffant when she built a three-foot tower of hair including stuffed birds, waxed fruit and even model ships. These styles were incredibly expensive to make, and so they were worn for weeks on end without cleaning. Inevitably, creepy crawlies came to nest and Georgian women developed a scratching rod to ward off the pitter-patter of their miniature tenants.

3 Body Odor

The situations that Georgians inhabited did not easily coincide with cleanliness. Despite their glamorous aura, people were utterly filthy. Hands and faces received a daily dousing, but an entire immersive washing was regarded as bad for health. The dresses worn by women caused particular issues.

Because of their heavy material, they caused the wearer to sweat excessively. Deodorants were non-existent, and the resulting stink was horrendous. On top of this, clothes themselves were washed only washed once each month. Under garments were washed and changed more often. But they were cleansed using lye—The same ash and urine mixture used by the Romans. Classy.

2 Bad Breath

Furthermore, the Georgians were prone to carrying around a waft of rotting teeth. Cleansing-tooth powders had begun to be used, but these contained sulfuric-acid, which stripped enamel from teeth. The best methods of warding off even more stench was to use herbs or parsley. When a tooth became a lost cause, it was pulled from the gums with a plier. No anesthetics, of course.

To prevent them from ending up with a gummy smile, they sought porcelain replacements. Where possible though, they preferred to purchase live dentures. The poor often sold their teeth to support the market— A viable business proposal, for those so-inclined.

1 Bodily Fluids

The unsolved mystery of sanitary hygiene in Georgian women is one that has puzzled countless historians. With no knickers to attach any sort of protection, they were forced to rely on Mother Nature, or so it seems. What is more proven, is their toilet habits.

Ladies at the royal court relied upon a porcelain jug to carry out their business, a device called a bourdaloue. It was clenched between one’s thighs, beneath their skirt. It was not unheard of for a woman to continue conversing with those around her while she urinated!

These ten distinct scents are indeed revolting. Unfortunately however, some of them have prevailed through history. While scented wigs are usually less common nowadays, body odors are still unequivocally existent, as is bad breath. The difference is that today, there is in many countries widespread availability of showers and deodorants. That these smells can still be smelled goes to show just how disgusting we really are.

Top 10 Incredible Smells That Will blow Your Mind

If you ever find yourself trapped in history, you might want to bring a nose plug. Everyday life, before modern sewage and sanitation, could get pretty gross. We’ve covered some examples of this before.

It didn’t get much grosser than medieval England, though. In the days of Chaucer, to walk through the streets of London was to see and experience some of the most disgusting sights and smells you can imagine. Fantasy epics tend to gloss over the following aspects of medieval life for obvious reasons.

10 People Piled Garbage And Feces In Front Of Their Homes

When a British family had filled their chamber pots and stuffed their house with waste and rotting food, they were expected to clean it out. Officially, they were supposed to gather up their whole mess and carry it outside the city limits. It was one of those ideas that sounded great on paper—but in practice, nobody was about to waste their time doing that when there was a perfectly good street to dump things right outside their front door.

Trash piled up in front of people’s homes, ranging from old chicken bones to emptied-out chamber pots. Legend has it that people dumped their chamber pots out their windows so often that chivalrous men were expected to let women walk on the inside of the sidewalk so that any raining feces would fall on the man’s head instead.

Nobody even tried to stop people from dumping things on the streets until the 14th century, when King Edward II introduced England’s first law against dumping poop on the road. Even then, though, his expectations were pretty low. “All filth deposited before houses [must] be removed within a week,” the law ordered, and “pigs [must] be kept from wandering in the streets.”^[1]

It didn’t have much of an effect. The trash kept piling up, and people just adjusted. Wealthy people would carry perfumed cloths against their nose whenever they stepped outside to keep from throwing up, and the king started hiring professionals to clear the filth off the road.

9 The Sewers Flooded When It Rained

As awful as the roads smelled on an average day, they were infinitely worse after it rained. The streets of medieval England were made of dirt and cobblestone, designed to slope into a rainwater ditch in the middle of the road to prevent flooding. This would’ve been a fine design if people would’ve just stopped jamming their trash everywhere they could.

The people of medieval England would cram everything they threw out into the rainwater ditches. They’d stuff these things so full that, by the time it rained, they were totally useless. Instead of stopping floods, the clogged ditches would overflow. Then they’d dislodge the months of trash that had built up inside them, drenching it and spilling it all over the streets.

When the sky cleared up, the roads would be covered in wet trash and feces slowly drying in the sun—and stinking up the entire town.^[2]

8 Doctors Would Pee On Your Wounds

If a medieval soldier was wounded in battle, he didn’t have to worry. They had doctors on hand who were ready to sterilize the wound. They didn’t even need to pack anything to do it. As soon as someone got cut, a doctor—following the recommendations of the king’s personal surgeon—would whip out his tool and pee on your wound.^[3]

They didn’t stop at cuts, either. Fresh urine was used to treat sores, burns, bites, and pretty well anything you could think of. It was gross, but it actually worked. The ammonia in the urine would help keep cuts from getting infected, and in life-or-death situations, the indignity was worth it.

It wasn’t just British doctors peeing on open wounds, either. One of the craziest stories comes from an Italian physician, Leonardo Fioravanti, who used his urine to save a soldier’s life after his nose was cut off in a fight. Fioravanti, thinking quickly, picked the man’s severed nose up off the ground, dusted off some sand, and peed on it.

The doctor, incredibly, was able to sew and reattach the urine-soaked nose back onto the man’s face. And for the rest of his life, the man could smell through that nose—whether he wanted to or not.

7 People Thought Bathing Made Them Sick

For most of the medieval era, the people were actually pretty good about bathing. They went to public baths regularly and did a fairly good job at cleaning themselves—for a while, anyway.

All that changed, though, after the Black Plague hit. In the chaos of seeing two-thirds of the world die from disease, the people of Europe started panicking. They wanted to find anything they could to blame this on, and they picked bathing.

The plague had spread, some doctors declared, because people were washing too often. They told people that water weakened their bodies and widened their pores, leaving them susceptible to plagues and diseases, and started ordering people to stop all forms of bathing immediately.^[4] “By no means,” one doctor warned his patients, “should you wash your face.”

6 Male Fashion Showed Off The Bulge

Leaving something to the imagination fell out of fashion sometime around the 14th century. The men of England started getting into a new type of clothing—and it wasn’t much different from going out with nothing on at all.

The hot new look for the 1300s was a doublet called a courtpiece, a tiny little piece of cloth that only drooped down two inches below the belt.^[5] From the waist down, they’d be wearing nothing but their undergarments, which, in those times, meant wearing the tightest, thinnest leggings physically possible, customized to make the bulge between your legs as visible as possible.

As time went on, the fashion just got weirder. Instead of merely showing off what God gave them, men started wearing codpieces with padded crotch areas, designed to make them look as big as possible.

Knights, by the 16th century, were even wearing them into battle. A suit of armor would come equipped with a massive, exaggerated metal codpiece that jammed out from between their legs. More often than not, they were even custom-designed to be pointing out. They didn’t serve any actual military purpose except, perhaps, to let the enemy know: You can knock me down, but I’ll still be erect.

5 Families Slept On Filthy Dirt Floors

Unless you were wealthy, most homes in medieval England didn’t actually have floors. Beneath most people’s feet was nothing more than compacted earth covered in rushes, herbs, and grass.

Covering the dirt with plants helped to keep the house warm, but it came with a pretty heavy cost. Food would fall into the rushes and get buried there, luring rats and insects into people’s homes. And people rarely cleaned them. Usually, they’d clear out the top layer and put on something new, but the bottom layer of rushes, where all the disgusting things were, would stay untouched, often for decades.

One Dutch visitor complained that English homes were “harboring expectoration, vomiting, the leakage of dogs and men, ale dropping, scraps of fish and other abominations not fit to be mentioned.”^[6]

Those are pretty disgusting things to have under your feet—but it gets worse. They didn’t have beds, either, so they slept on the floor, which means that every night, their faces were right there, pressed against a 20-year-old layer of crusted vomit, droppings, and rotten food.

4 Doctors Spread Dung On Expecting Mothers

Childbirth has never been fun, but as terrible as it is today, it used to be a lot worse. In the medieval times, doctors didn’t really have a lot of ideas on how to keep an expecting mother from dying. Pretty well the only thing they knew how to do was to rely on divine intervention—so that’s exactly what they did.

Monks and midwives would sit by a pregnant woman and pray, calling on the child to come out “without dying, and without the death of your mother.” Or else they would rely on magic. Sometimes, they’d feed a woman vinegar and sugar and cover her in eagle’s dung, kind of just hoping that eagle poop might be something that keeps women alive.^[7]

When magic failed, they just prayed for a miracle. An abbey in Yorkshire kept a holy, sacred girdle on hand at all times, convinced that it had magical powers that would keep a woman alive through a pregnancy. They weren’t the only ones who believed in it, either. When Henry III’s wife became pregnant, he ordered the monks to bring him the sacred girdle.

None of it seems to have worked particularly well. An estimated one in three children died before they turned five, and about 20 percent of all mothers died from the childbirth. To be fair, though, we don’t have any data on mothers who covered themselves with eagle dung and clutched onto the sacred girdle.

3 Aborted Fetuses Were Used As A Contraceptive

Before Planned Parenthood, there were other ways to get contraceptives. Women who needed contraceptives or an abortion could visit women who called themselves sorceresses—but these women didn’t exactly sell condoms and birth control pills.

The contraceptives these women sold were incredibly disturbing. They made magical amulets that were supposed to keep a woman from getting pregnant. Inside each one was a pair of weasel’s testicles, a child’s tooth, and a severed finger cut from an aborted fetus.^[8]

They sold love potions, too, which were pretty much the same thing. Their love potions contained extracts of the purest essences of—you guessed it—aborted babies. Apparently, their customers would drink these.

It was all pretty messed up. Still, when it comes to the contraceptives, you’ve got to admit: Any woman wearing an amulet full of weasel testicles, baby teeth, and fetus parts probably isn’t going to be getting pregnant anytime soon.

2 Everyone Was Infested With Lice

It might not be too surprising, after all of this, to find out that the people of the Middle Ages had a little bit of a problem with lice. Pretty well everyone in medieval England struggled with lice and fleas, from the rich to the poor.

It was a regular part of some people’s days to gather around with their friends and family to pick lice off each other’s bodies. That was especially true for people who had to travel. Some crusaders left letters behind praising the laundry women who’d come with them, saying that not only would they wash their clothes, but they were as “good as apes for picking fleas.”^[9]

The problem got worse the poorer you were, though, and it wasn’t restricted to England. When an English pilgrim named Margery Kempe traveled into a town of German peasants, she wrote home with disgust that the poor people of Germany would spend their evenings stripped naked, sitting in a circle and picking vermin off one another.

1 The River Thames Was Full Of Rotting Meat

Few places stank worse than the River Thames. During the Middle Ages, it was considered normal practice for butchers to gather up all their unused, rotten meat, bundle it up, drag it out to the bridge, and dump it in the river.

Dumping rotten animal parts into the river was so common that one bridge had earned itself the nickname “Butcher’s Bridge,” and it was the most disgusting place in the whole country. The bridge was famous for being covered in dried blood and pieces of animal entrails that had spilled out of the butchers’ carts.^[10]

It took until 1369 before anyone made a law against it, but it didn’t do much good. Even after dumping meat into the Thames became a crime, people kept writing letters complaining about it. “No one, by reason of such corruption of filth” one local protested, “could hardly venture to abide his house there.”

It was pretty disgusting—but it didn’t really stop there. It took nearly 500 years before anyone managed to stop people from dumping every piece of waste they had into the River Thames. It took until the 19th century before anyone put an end to the River Thames’s stench. But for 500 years, London’s great river was one of the smelliest places on Earth.

England is next up in the series where we take a look at some of the most intriguing mysteries from a country’s dark and bewildering history. Aliens, ghost ships, unsolved murders, poltergeists, unexplained disappearances, they can all be found right here.

10. The Balham Mystery

The death of Charles Bravo became preserved in London lore as Murder at the Priory, or sometimes the Balham Mystery. In April 1876, a well-to-do lawyer died after several days of suffering, following what multiple physicians concluded was a clear case of antimony poisoning. So then, naturally, the new question became “Who killed him? And why?”

At the time, Bravo had only recently married a woman named Florence Campbell. Before her marriage, she had had a scandalous affair with an older, married doctor. Her reputation in Victorian society wasn’t exactly spotless so, in the eyes of many, she became the obvious suspect. But then again, she was the rich one in the marriage so, if money was the motive, then it was Bravo who should have been trying to poison her. And that is actually what some people believed – they thought that he intended to kill Florence and ingested some poison by mistake, thinking it was genuine medicine. 

Other popular suspects included the doctor who used to have an affair with Florence Campbell, a disgruntled coachman that Bravo had recently fired, and Mrs. Jane Cox, Florence’s companion whom Bravo had also threatened with dismissal. All were plausible, but the true identity of the poisoner remains unknown to this day.

9. The Enfield Poltergeist

One night in August 1977, Peggy Hodgson called the police to her home in Enfield to report hearing strange noises and objects being knocked over. She didn’t know at the time that she was about to launch one of the biggest paranormal sensations in English history.

Her haunting became known as the Enfield poltergeist and it seemed to center around two of her daughters, 12-year-old Margaret and 11-year-old Janet. Dozens of people unrelated to the Hodgsons ended up reporting various strange happenings such as hearing sudden noises and disembodied voices, seeing drawers and doors open by themselves, while tables and chairs moved on their own across the floor.

So was it genuine? Well, most paranormal investigators thought so, which isn’t really surprising. Also not surprising was that plenty of skeptics dismissed the whole case as nothing but the antics of two clever and bored girls, which were then sensationalized by newspapers looking for a good story. Decades after the fact, Janet admitted to faking some of the alleged phenomena with her sister, although she insisted that most of it had still been genuine.

Like with most of these cases, the paranormal activity stopped suddenly in 1979, but the legend of the Enfield poltergeist still lived on long after that.

8. The Vanishing of Mary Flanagan

The disappearance of Mary Flanagan has the ignoble distinction of being Scotland Yard’s oldest missing persons case. On New Year’s Eve, 1959, the London teenager left her home in West Ham to attend a party at her workplace. When her parents realized that she did not return home the following day, they went to the refinery where the 16-year-old worked and were dismayed to discover that she never showed up to the party that night. Mary Flanagan had last been seen heading for the metro station before she vanished, never to be heard from again.

An investigation revealed that Mary had called in sick and not showed up for work for the last two weeks. This actually gave her family hope that her disappearance had been planned, and that instead of something sinister happening to Mary, she ran away with her boyfriend. Her family knew a bit about him – his first name was Tom, he was an Irish immigrant and he may have worked as a stoker for the merchant navy. His last name could have been McGinty, except that there was no Tom McGinty employed by the navy.

Even if Mary Flanagan ran away with her boyfriend, it still seemed unlikely that she would not reach out to her family in the decades that followed. That is why police were reluctant to dismiss her as simply a “typical teenage runaway,” and why the case was officially reopened in 2013, hoping that modern technologies and policing methods might yield new clues. So far, no luck…

7. Who Shot Robert Pakington?

While we’re talking about dubious honors, we should also mention Robert Pakington, possibly the first handgun murder victim in the history of London, killed almost 500 years ago.

Pakington was a merchant involved with the Worshipful Company of Mercers and a Member of Parliament. He was also a big critic of the clergy which, at the time, placed him at odds with the Catholics and in the favor of the Protestants. Anyway, on the morning of November 13, 1536, Pakington was on his way to church when somebody shot him dead. Although plenty of people heard the booming noise, the identity of the killer was concealed by a heavy mist that had set over London that day. 

Pakington became regarded as somewhat of a martyr, and many people accused the clergy of being behind his murder. Several names have been put forward, but chroniclers of that time could not agree on the identity of the culprit, which will likely remain a mystery forever.

6. The Truths and Falsehoods of Elizabeth Canning

Back in 1753, an 18-year-old maid named Elizabeth Canning made her appearance in a deplorable state, with a shocking story to tell. She had been missing for a month, time during which she said that she had been held prisoner in a brothel, being restrained and denied food unless she agreed to work as a prostitute. Eventually, Canning managed to escape and returned to her mother’s home.

After telling her story to outraged friends, neighbors, and family members, Elizabeth took the police to the house where she had been imprisoned and identified her captors: two women named Susannah Wells and Mary Squires. They were arrested and Canning’s case was taken on by a prominent London magistrate named Henry Fielding. Bizarrely, back then assault was not as serious as theft, which carried with it the possibility of the death penalty, so Mary Squires was actually sentenced to death for stealing Elizabeth’s corset.

Not everyone was convinced by Canning’s story, and among the skeptics was Sir Crisp Gascoyne, the Lord Mayor of London, who decided to open his own investigation. He found witnesses who could testify in favor of Wells and Squires, as well as other witnesses who said they had been bullied into testifying for Canning by an angry mob of her supporters. The case took a dramatic new turn, as Elizabeth Canning now stood accused of perjury.  

This pretty much split the entire city in two camps: the Canning supporters who believed that she had been kidnapped, and the skeptics who thought that she made up the whole thing to conceal something scandalous, such as a secret birth or some kind of criminal plot.

In the end, Mary Squires was exonerated, and Elizabeth Canning was found guilty and sentenced to seven years’ transportation to America. There, she married and never returned to England, and the true story behind her disappearance still remains unknown.

5. The HMS Eurydice

The year 1878 saw one of England’s worst maritime disasters during peacetime when the Royal Navy corvette HMS Eurydice was caught in a snowstorm and sank off the Isle of Wight, during a return voyage from Bermuda, taking 281 men to their cold, watery graves. The wreckage was refloated later that same year, but it had been so badly damaged that, ultimately, it was decided to break it up.

However, that has not stopped sailors from seeing the HMS Eurydice, now as a ghost ship, still sailing the waters of the English Channel, particularly near Sandown Bay on the Isle of Wight. In the 140 years that have passed, there have been numerous sightings of the vessel, including in 1998 when Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, claimed to have spotted the ghost ship along with a film crew while making a documentary. 

And there was an even stranger encounter, reported by Commander Lipscomb during the 1930s. While he was in charge of a submarine around the Isle of Wight, he saw that he was on a collision course with an old-fashioned, full-rigged ship, and ordered immediate evasive maneuvers to avoid striking it. After the danger had passed, the ghost ship was nowhere to be seen.

4. The Ghosts of Hampton Court

It won’t surprise you to discover that England has loads of haunted places, from old castles, to inns and pubs, to roads that were once preyed upon by highwaymen. Today, we will only be looking at one location, but it is said to be one of the most haunted places in England, and it is also one of the biggest. It is Hampton Court Palace in London, the 500-year-old royal palace originally intended for the Archbishop of York, Thomas Wolsey, but used mainly by King Henry VIII.

There are several ghosts which allegedly make their residence at Hampton Court, and two of them used to be married to Henry VIII. The first is Jane Seymour, the king’s third wife, who died at Hampton Court during childbirth. People have reported seeing her on the Silverstick Stairs which led to the room where she passed away. The second apparition belongs to Catherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife who was beheaded for adultery and treason when she was only 19 years old. Her ghost is a lot louder and angrier and can allegedly be heard screaming down the corridor, pleading with the king, the same way she did in life when she was arrested and taken to be executed.

Then there is also the third ghost known as the Grey Lady, believed to be Sybil Penn, a 16th century servant and wetnurse who died of smallpox. She appears to be the busiest of all the Hampton Court ghosts. People have reported seeing her and hearing her working on a spinning wheel numerous times since 1829, after her tomb was disturbed during renovations.

3. The Hoxton Horror

The most notorious mystery from Victorian London has to be the true identity of Jack the Ripper, but he was hardly the only one responsible for gruesome, unsolved murders at that time. Another case from around that era which is almost forgotten nowadays was dubbed by newspapers of the time as the “Hoxton Horror.” 

On July 10, 1872, mother and daughter Sarah and Christiana Squires were found murdered inside the stationery shop that they owned and ran. They both had been bludgeoned with a hammer or an iron bar, and the store was in complete disarray, seemingly the target of a robbery.

The biggest conundrum in the case seemed to be a disagreement over the time of the murders. Multiple witnesses claimed to have seen the mother and daughter between 9 and 11 a.m., and one witness was adamant that they saw Sarah Squires in the door of her shop at 12:30. However, inside the store, investigators found a broken clock which, presumably, had been knocked over during the fight and it had stopped at 12 p.m.

Authorities were never able to figure out this discrepancy. Was the witness simply wrong or did they see someone else by the door, perhaps even the killer? Police only had one solid suspect – Sarah Squires’ son – but he was locked up in an insane asylum at the time, so the Hoxton Horror went on to become another one of London’s unsolved mysteries.

2. The Rendlesham Forest Incident

England has had more than its fair share of UFO sightings, but none are more famous than the Rendlesham Forest Incident, sometimes referred to as “Britain’s Roswell.”

Forty years ago, something strange happened near the Woodbridge Royal Air Force station in Suffolk. At the time, it was being used by the US Air Force, and between the dates of December 26 and December 28, 1980, several members of personnel reported seeing strange, colorful lights moving through the forest, as well as a metallic, glowing object. When they investigated one morning, they found a glade with burn tree marks, broken branches everywhere, and three indentations in the ground in a triangular pattern.

The story gained steam a few years after the event, when the US Government released the memo written by deputy base commander Lt. Col. Charles Halt, which described the incident. Since then, it has become one of the most popular sightings among UFO enthusiasts.

As far as the skeptics were concerned, they put forward alternative explanations such as the lights coming from the Orfordness Lighthouse or from natural phenomena like a meteor or a bright star, but if the eyewitnesses are indeed telling the truth, then nothing accounts so far for all of the strange things they reported seeing.

1. Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?

On April 18, 1943, four young boys entered Hagley Woods in Worcestershire, looking for bird nests. One of them decided to climb a wych elm that looked promising, but he didn’t find any nests. Instead, inside the hollow trunk he saw a human skull.   

One of the boys told his parents who alerted the police. The following day, detectives and forensic experts were on the scene, and they recovered most of the skeleton of a young woman who had been murdered at least 18 months earlier. She appeared to be in her mid 30s and was about five feet tall. The victim had very protuberant teeth, which gave her a distinctive bite and this, in turn, gave authorities hope that she would soon be identified. However, the weeks turned into months, turned into years, and the identity of the woman was still a mystery.

Some of the popular theories said that the victim had been a prostitute, or a spy, and even a sacrifice in a witchcraft ritual.

The case took an unusual turn the following year, when a piece of graffiti appeared in Birmingham, which read “Who put Bella down the Wych Elm – Hagley Wood?” Was this a taunt from the killer and the woman was actually named Bella or simply a prank? Police looked into the new lead but again came up short. Ever since then, the graffiti keeps appearing on occasion, and while we may never find out who put Bella in the wych elm, at least it serves to remind people of one of England’s greatest wartime mysteries.