Geoff Manaugh shares a spooky anecdote from Catharine Arnold’s Necropolis: London and its Dead:
As Arnold points out, there is an otherwise inexplicable shift in direction in the Piccadilly linepassing east out of South Kensington. “In fact,” she
writes, “the tunnel curves between Knightsbridge and South Kensington stations because it was impossible to drill through the mass of skeletal remains buried in Hyde Park.” Put another way, the ground was so solidly packed with the interlocked skeletons of 17th-century victims of the Great Plague that the Tube’s 19th-century excavation teams couldn’t even hack their way through them all. … Thus, like the example of the Aztec skulls unearthed by subway crews in Mexico City, London’s Tube also sits atop, cuts around, and tunnels through a citywide charnel ground of corpses, its very routes and station locations haunted by this earlier presence in the ground below.
(Photo: A sign announces a skeleton crew at London’s Barons Court station. By Annie Mole)
The Dish 