Alone with the sobs of a ghostly child

By Julie Myerson

Published: Apr 12, 2008 

I can't remember how I heard about it but it certainly wasn't on the tourist map in the way that the London Dungeon or Madame Tussaud's are.

The House of Detention in Clerkenwell, central London, was once, long ago, an infamous Victorian prison. Ideal, because the novel I was writing back then was set 100 or more years ago and I had a scene that took place in a prison. I've always been a minimal researcher, preferring to pull substance out of the uneasy chaos of my own head. But here I knew that I needed something my imagination couldn't quite provide - the crunch of fact, of how things might have been. I phoned and checked the opening times.

There'd been a prison of some sort on this site ever since 1616 but the current building dated from 1845. By that time it was being used as a temporary home for inmates awaiting trial and something like 10,000 miserable souls a year passed through its gates. In 1890 the ground-level part was demolished but its subterranean passages and cells were later reopened as a bomb shelter during the Blitz. But after the second world war it was shut up again and pretty much forgotten until, in 1993, those cells and passages were reopened as a museum. And now, on a sunny, blue-skied morning in 1999, in T-shirt and jeans and with a basket on my shoulder, here I was.

I walked down some steps towards a little booth where a grey-haired woman seemed startled to see me. "We don't get many visitors here." (Yes, I swear she really did say that.) Then she sold me a ticket and came out of her booth to point out the entrance of the museum: "See that doorway? Just go in there and follow the yellow arrows until you come out the other end." I thanked her and, without a second thought, I walked in.

I should have had a second thought.

It's almost 10 years ago now and, in the occasional retelling, the tale has turned from horrible to comical and somehow back to horrible again. But at that moment when I first walked in I don't think I felt anything but open curiosity. This was research for my book, right? In I went.

I found myself in a narrow, dimly lit brick passage. A drip-drip of water from the low ceiling. Now and then some cell bars - the glimpse of a face, waxwork, grim and toothless. "Just special effects", I told myself and I walked on, only slightly tense.

I was aware of sighing. And groaning. And sobbing. More effects. And maybe it was at that moment that it dawned on me that I was completely alone. I looked back to see how far I'd come. Hard to tell. And the yellow arrows ahead seemed to lead me on into rankest darkness.

The air was sticky, chill. And somewhere a child was sobbing but I couldn't tell if it was in front of me or behind. "It would be fine," I thought, "if there were just some other people in here." A few tourists in anoraks, anybody. But there was no one.

"Actually, there's not much more point in doing this research", I thought, as I noticed that I was shaking and that my neck and head felt cold as stone. "No point if I'm terrified. Maybe I've got enough. Maybe I'll just go now, get out".

And I glanced behind me again and that's when I realised: if I retraced my steps and attempted to go back the way I came - less than five minutes, surely? - I might manage it. But I also might not. And if I didn't manage it I'd be in here for hours. So, heart banging and sweat on my neck, I was condemned to follow the only guide I had - the yellow arrows - to watch the dank bricked darkness unravel in front of me, with no idea of how long or short this trail might be.

It's all a long time ago but even writing this now I feel the grip of fear. The knowledge that the only way to get out is to keep on going forwards, going in. I know that the ceiling is too low over my head and the taped cries of the child are unbearable.

How long was I down there? How long before I saw daylight again? I have no idea. It felt like an hour but it might have been only 10 or 15 minutes. Coming out to feel sun on my face, I hurried to nearby Farringdon Road, where I sat on a low brick wall facing the steady grey traffic. I sat there for a long time and then I caught a bus home because I couldn't bring myself to go down underground again and travel on a Tube train.

I told my family the story. I told it against myself - stupid, research-mad novelist finds herself trapped in that horrible place - and they all laughed. It was quite funny if you thought about it. I wrote the scene in the novel and it did have atmosphere.

Yet it wasn't until years later, just quite recently in fact, that I stumbled on a piece on the internet that said that the House of Detention in Clerkenwell was one of Britain's most haunted sites. The kind of place that people only consider wandering around in a crowd because hundreds of people have seen and felt the freezing cold, seen apparitions - and heard the heart-rending sound of a little girl who cries incessantly.