When it comes to spooky stories, firefighters at the London Fire Brigade have plenty to tell.
The sounds of footsteps, galloping horses, creaking wooden chairs and some unexpected friendly visitors were among the strange encounters firefighters have experienced in Fire Hall No. 4 on Colborne Street – London’s oldest surviving fire station.
“At Number 4 there have been a lot of incidents where people are upstairs, they hear footsteps downstairs when they know no one is there, or they hear old buckets that used to be kicked over horses,” said actor district manager, Jeff Johnston.
“There’s been so much turnover of people over the years that I think some of the old crew members and animals, like the horses, just like to hang around.”
Most of his employees who have experienced these incidents tend to shrug them off and laugh about it, Johnston said. For others, the strange timing felt like warning signs of emergency calls they would receive shortly afterwards.
“We got a lot of alarms throughout the night and I would always wake up about three to four minutes before an alarm went off, and I was ready to go when it happened,” said Capt. Heather Stewart, who has worked in the fire service for 25 years.
“The strange thing is that during that period the center was gathering all the information and getting ready to send us out, which of course we wouldn’t know until our lights came on and the tones came in.”
Fire Hall No 4. on Colborne Street is London’s oldest surviving fire station. Over the years, firefighters have described footsteps, galloping horses and other strange noises in the historic building. (Isha Bhargava/CBC)
Stewart said the fire hall doorbells would ring randomly all night and when officials went to the door, no one would be there. The area is so large that they could see someone running away, she added.
She acknowledged that electrical problems in the historic building may be responsible for the doorbells going off, but tried not to think about it too much, Stewart said.
“All I knew was that if there was such a thing as ghosts, it had to be a friendly ghost because it never tried to hurt me,” she said.
Although Johnston never experienced the bizarre incidents at Fire Station No. 4, he said in the late 1990s, he witnessed a silhouette that often visited the old Fire Station No. 7 on Highbury Avenue, which is now a demolished building.
‘It’s a bit chill’
“It was about two o’clock in the morning, I went into the dormitory at night and lay down. But five minutes later I look over and see an older woman standing next to me and another bed next to me with another firefighter there ” he said.
“She looked down at him, and I saw her from the waist down. (She had) glasses, her hair in a bun and I can kind of see through her. I rubbed my eyes and thought, ‘What am I looking at ?’ here?’ and then the lights came on and we were called to an alarm.”
He said he later informed his then-supervisor, who laughed and told him that many others had also seen the same woman. Both Johnston and Stewart said the incidents only occasionally occurred at night, but they never felt unsafe in the fire halls where they worked.
“It’s a little bit horrifying and gives you goosebumps, but sometimes it’s okay,” Johnston said.
“They’re just visiting, or maybe we’re visiting them.”