Oysters of the Occult:Riding the 63 into the Twilight Zone.

Last night's London Fortean Society talk, Fortean Travels in London, was not just one of the LFS's best ever events. It was also, so far, the most personally relevant to me. Chris Roberts, author of Bus Travels in South London, was there to tell a story of headless commuters, feral albino swine, and the Peckham Terminator and if that wasn't promising (or local) enough for me he'd decided to set it in the form of a journey.

A journey on the 63 bus. My bus! Or, at least, the bus I take the most often. The bus that takes me into 'town'. The bus whose route starts a few hundred yards from my flat in Honor Oak Park and finishes about an hour, or seven and a half miles, later outside King's Cross station. The only shame about the evening is that there were fewer people in attendance than you'll usually find on that very bus.

With King's Cross being a hub for trains, tubes, buses, and the canals, Chris had prepared a highly apt destination but as with so much else this was much more about the journey than the end point. A journey that begins outside Camberwell Old Cemetery by the pub now called Watson's General Telegraph but which Chris referred to by its old name The Forest Hill Tavern.

Something I put him right on during a very pleasant exchange later. Chris began by reciting a Lord's Prayer (The Bus Driver's Prayer) of South London in which various London place names had been amusingly inserted into the verse. Most noticeably, to anyone like me who used to make a regular habit of crashing out on the bus, the line "lead us not into Penge station".

It was far from Chris's only digression on a route that proved to be as circuitous as it was enjoyable. Near Camberwell Old Cemetery and Watson's General Telegraph stands One Tree Hill. I buried an ex-girlfriend's pet rat, Chester, there once and, some years later, I slept on a bench there after I'd lost my keys. I awoke to a fantastic view of the London skyline (and a terrible hangover, of course). A skyline much changed since the times Dick Turpin used the vantage point to survey the city from above while identifying his next victim.

One Tree Hill boasts considerably more than one tree but the one it's named after is the one that Elizabeth I is believed to have taken repast under. It's surrounded by an iron railing now and it's a sight I pass by on a regular, almost daily, basis. It's so wild in there it's a handy spot if you're caught short on the walk home.

It's not something I feel guilty about. Despite its royal associations, One Tree Hill has a rebellious spirit at heart. It may be the only place in London that was once home to an anti-golf riot. It wasn't that the citizens of SE23 took a particular dislike to Tony Jacklin or Nick Faldo so much as they weren't happy with plans to convert the forested area into a golf course. Quite rightly so.

Sadly, I can't claim to have ever had a romantic experience on One Tree Hill but many years ago a courting couple were atop the hill spooning when suddenly their passions were extinguished by the sight of a small girl floating in mid air. Chris suggested it was a case of ghostus interruptus.

The 63 rolls down the hill from the cemetery, hill, and pub to the edge of Peckham Rye (where William Blake claims to have seen "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars"), passing what Chris referred to as "the mighty Peck" (in truth, barely a brook and in most places completely covered) and the remains of the Peckham lido. Now just a barely discernible fountain but rumours abound of it reopening and I live in hope.

We soon arrive at the Nigel Road bus stop. The sight of an incident that must have been unpleasant at the time but soon become a viral Internet phenomenon. The Peckham Terminator didn't look much like Arnold Schwarzenegger. In fact he was a fairly weedy looking, slightly camp, young white guy who, some years ago, had a complete meltdown on the bus at the Nigel Road stop.

Like almost everything else that ever happens, it was filmed on a mobile phone. The young man first offered to fight every single other person on the bus in a tirade of expletives and gesticulating. When nobody took him up on his kind offer he redoubled his efforts. When these proved, also, unsuccessful he ended the whole incident with the somewhat dramatic final coda of exiting the bus by walking straight through the closed glass doors of the bus and stomping off down the road. Much to the amusement of observers.

It's all on YouTube should you wish to see it. There's even a grime remix of events! I once saw a man casually punch another man in the face only a few hundred yards away from the incident but, mostly, the 63 bus journey continues in peace. Often stopping to change drivers before passing the architecturally pleasing Peckham Library and carrying on just to the east of the old Surrey Canal.

The Canal is no more and has been turned into a foot and bike path but the bridges are still there and you can still see the marks of the ropes ingrained into the brickwork. Just before the bus reaches the edge of Burgess Park you cross the former canal and there lies, at least in urban legend, the former home of the Peckham Toy Maker.

It is believed that after the destruction of the Toy Maker's house that local children would still gather to play in the ruins but, one day, they found something in the chimney. It was clearly something horrific (or perhaps unmemorable) as Chris neglected to tell us what it actually was they found. Which certainly qualifies the story as a mystery but, unlike many other tales Chris told - often under the heading 'flash fiction' - the story of the Peckham Toy Maker did not send a chill down my back.

At the corner of Burgess Park, the 63 turns left down Old Kent Road and if you take a quick glance to your right you'll see the Old Kent Road Fire Station. Before it was a fire station it was a pub and it is believed, by some, that David Bowie recorded there in the seventies.

The East Street (where Charlie Chaplin was born) bus shelter has worked its way into South London legend by dint of a very peculiar event that took place between five and ten years ago. Atop the shelter, and visible only to bus passenger's eyes, there could be found several VHS copies of the film Hellraiser. The number fluctuated over a four/five year period but I can attest, as a regular 63 user, that, during that period, there was never less than one copy and sometimes as many as seven or eight.

Why? We don't know. They've gone now though. The 63 crosses the former route of the Neckinger river (now completely covered) and soon reaches Elephant & Castle. The Northern line between Bank and Elephant & Castle (which, along with the 63 and a fair bit of walking, was my route home from Whitechapel) is the first part of the tube system to go electric.

In fact, because of this, it's the first part of tube to be called 'the tube'. There are lots of ghost stories down in this part of the tube (buses, for the most part, seem to host less ghosts than tubes or trains) and many of them take place in the part known as the Kennington loop where trains on the two different branches of the Northern Line turn round.

One tells of a construction worker carrying out his business underground and bantering with his colleages about the slim chances of Charlton Athletic winning the league. On resurfacing to ground level he found all his real colleagues already there. The people he'd been laughing and joking with just moments earlier were ghosts of those killed underground years before.

Away from the 63 route, there's a tale of a ghost bus. The number 7 passes through Cambridge Gardens in Notting Hill but so does the ghost of a number 7 bus. Sightings have been so vivid that one person has even died swerving to avoid the spectral omnibus.

Along Blackfriars Road, past blue plaques to Marys Shelley and Wollstonecraft, the 63 crosses the Thames on Blackfriars Bridge. Blackfriars Bridge marks the spot where, primarily due to it being where the Fleet used to flow into the Thames, the river changed from freshwater to saltwater. To mark this the bridge is festooned with symbolic sea animals on its eastern side and land animals on its western flank.

A few bridges down river (Blackfriars Rail Bridge, Millennium Footbridge) between Southwark Bridge and the Cannon Street railway bridge is the site where, on 20th August 1989, the Marchioness pleasure cruiser, which was hosting a birthday party, collided twice with the dredger Bowbelle just before 2am in the morning resulting in fifty-two deaths.

There is an old maritime belief that seagulls represent the spirits of the departed and, following the Marchioness disaster, this passed into hack folklore when Fleet Street journalists, enjoying a fag break, observed that whenever they looked out to the river and counted (or, more realistically, tried to count) the seagulls it always seemed there were exactly fifty-two in the space where the disaster had taken place.

Centuries earlier, Edward I of England (reign:1272-1307), commonly known as Edward Longshanks or the Hammer of the Scots, didn't just take against those from north of the border. He was a raging anti-semite too and he planned to rid London of Jews by putting them on a boat near this point and deporting them all to Spain. Which, at the time, had a reputation for admirable religious tolerance.

This was, of course, before the Spanish Inquisition which, you won't need reminding, nobody expected!  London, while having many virtues, has long been home to murder, violence, and cruelty and that's continued through the ages with riots, knife crime, acid attacks, and, within the last twenty years, voodoo sacrifice!

Voodoo sacrifice! In London. In the twenty-first century! Near Blackfriars Bridge, on 21st September 2001, an infant torso was found with his arms, legs, and heads all ritually removed. He was given the name 'Adam' and it is believed he was trafficked from Nigeria expressly so that these body parts could be removed and used for witchcraft. In the years that followed other artefacts used in voodoo rituals have been found along this stretch of river but, as yet, no other bodies.

Hopefully it'll remain that way. I'm far more comfortable with patently untrue, yet still grisly, stories than I am with genuine child murder and mutilation so it was good to get over the bridge (via a quick story about Roberto Calvi which you can read more about here) and reach Blackfriars station where legend tells of a man, slightly sozzled following after work drinks with his colleagues, boarding the 2245 Orpington bound train.

On reaching his stop, Herne Hill, the man observed a ghost hand banging on the outside window of the train. Back in the land of the credible the Unilever Building (we're now north of the river) stands on the former site of Henry VIII's Bridewell Palace where Mr VIII met with officials of the Roman Catholic church to inform them he was going solo. It is, essentially, where the Church of England, was born.

A precursor to Brexit it's been suggested? Hmmm! Not sure about that. Soon the 63 passes beneath Holborn Viaduct and it's near here that urban legend says live a colony of subterranean pigs who somehow floated down the underground route of the Fleet river from Hampstead. It's an urban legend that has variations elsewhere. New York has its alligators and Florida has, you may have heard of this lot, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

It's not just porkers that are rumoured to be living underneath us. There's also a story about a tribe of subterranean troglodytes who have lived down there for so long that their language has devolved to the point that the only words they can say are, and this sounds very plausible, "MIND THE GAP".

Votive offerings of spoons were, fairly recently, found attached to Holborn Viaduct and these were to mark the deaths of heroin addicts. Further north, it is said that Faringdon station is haunted by the ghost of Anne Naylor. A poor girl from the workhouse who was taken into what was laughably called care and beaten and abused by the couple who took her in. Eventually they killed her and disposed of her body by chopping it up and forcing it down into the sewers.

Where she waits restlessly until this very day. Apparently! The no longer in use station for the British Museum, not so far away, is said to be haunted by the ghost of an Egyptian mummy from the museum.

Finally the 63 bus, and us - its passengers, reach our destination. King's Cross. Where we can all gather on the concourse to raise a glass to Clive James, Gary Rhodes, and Jonathan Miller (the news of all three's passing had come through earlier in the day) and be regaled with further tales of extraordinary and fantastical events on Transport for(tean?) London. As well as a poorly received (but not by me) joke about So Solid Crew.

Chris Roberts told us about 'the ruined bride' whose spouse calamitously stuck his head out of a train window on his honeymoon only to lose it. The tragedy becoming a mystery due to the account of the story claiming the bride was left holding his head, not his body. We learnt about the ghost locomotives that have been spotted on the decommissioned line (now a linear path) between Finsbury Park and Highgate, the haunted barges on the Hertfordshire canal, The Aldgate Electric Angel, and the Crossbones graveyard in Southwark.

We digressed into stories of the Necropolis railroad between Waterloo and Brookwood which took corpses to the enormous burial site in the Surrey town (there are nearly one hundred times as many dead bodies in Brookwood as there are living ones). The train even had a bar which jokingly boasted "spirits served here".

Chris told us how work on Crossrail has created a heated debate about Boudicca's massacre of the Romans in the Walbrook. During Crossrail excavation work, skulls were unearthed in the river. Some believe they are victims of the massacre, others hold the belief that they're simply people who were buried nearby. As an aside, Chris topically mentioned that had Uber not lost their license to operate in London earlier this week there would soon, no doubt, be plenty of Uber related ghost stories.

Whilst giving honourable mentions to Charles Dickens and M. R. James, Chris told us the story of The Black Nun of Bank who still begs for the pardon of her husband who was hanged for embezzlement and that of Rebecca Griffiths of Liverpool Street. Rebecca, a former inmate of Bedlam, was buried without the penny she held in her hand throughout her life. She waits now in the afterlife with her hand outstretched and open in eternal hope of the return of her one belonging.

It was a touching note to end a fantastic speech, delivered by a fantastic and passionately interested, speaker. In Chris Roberts I saw a kindred spirit. A man with a profound love for London, its history, and its mysteries. The history of London is so rich, so varied, so layered, and so disputed that I could study it until the day I die and never get bored. I can only give thanks to Chris Roberts and, as so often, the London Fortean Society for an evening that's far more fun than sniffing somebody's armpit on the Jubilee Line in the rush hour. Mind the gap!