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Hey there, Ryan Reynolds here. It's a new year and you know what that means. No, not the diet resolutions. A way for us all to try and do a little bit better than we did last year. And my resolution, unlike big wireless, is to not be a raging and raise the price of wireless on you every chance I get. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 upfront payment required.
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Equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first 3 month plan only. Taxes and fees. Extra Speed slower above 40 GB on unlimited. See mintmobile.com for details. Hello and welcome to my Victorian Nightmare. I'm your host, Genevieve Mannion, and I'm here to talk about mysterious deaths, morbid fascinations, disturbing stories, and otherwise spooky events from the Victorian era. Because to me, there's just something especially intriguing, creepy and oddly comforting about horror and mayhem from the 19th century. So listener discretion is advised. Hello, friends, and welcome to this, my 26th episode. I cannot believe that I am actually on my way to 30 episodes. I had no idea if anyone anywhere would be interested in this little niche of mine, but. But indeed, there are some folks who enjoy it as much as I do. And that is so nice. Before we begin, I just want to ask, how are you doing? How are you feeling? Things are really thinging lately, aren't they? If you agree, I want you to take a second with me to honor that. Everything you're going through right now, if it's a lot, it should be. Not just because of the wars and the fires and the climate change and the corruption and the emboldening of the very worst possible people to take the helm at this time in history. Not just because we had a full moon in Capricorn that sucked the life out of every single one of us. We all have a lot going on. So I would love to take just one lovely deep breath with you. Nice and deep. As if the breath energy were just coming in through the heart, in, up and out. There we are. I do that about 50 times a day to keep my marbles from spilling out. I'm still insane, but like in a more alkaline kind of way when I take a moment to just do one of those deep heart breaths. Thank you for sharing that moment with me. Okay, today, dear listener, I have some truly, I mean, truly terrible things to tell you that I cannot wait to tell you. That will hopefully give you some respite from the rest of the difficulties and stresses that we're all dealing with. For I will be discussing the grisly history of the graveyard that is London and the subterranean train system built in the Victorian era, within and around the final resting places of literally many millions of tightly packed Londoners. I also have for you a personal ghost story that I have been waiting for the right time to tell you. We will see if I can actually get through it without scaring my own pants off just remembering it. I think today's episode is going to be the very creepiest of them all so far, so have an escape plan ready. Soft blanket and teddy bear couldn't hurt. Today's episode is also not for those of delicate constitution. I will be discussing some kind of gross topics regarding corpses, so consider yourselves forewarned. But before we get to the meat of the episode, the porkchop if you will, a little Haunted Housekeeping. As always, thank you for rating the podcast on Spotify. This is so important to me, so thank you everyone who continues to do so. So thank you for your lovely comments on Spotify episodes and on Instagram yvictorian Nightmare where I post all of the visual aids for each episode. Your comments continue to be my very favorite things to see on the Internet. Thank you to those who joined my Patreon this week who received the show ad free, which you too can enjoy the show ad free by going to myvictorianightmare.com and finding the link to my Patreon. Thank you to those of you who have also purchased some of my merch also available@myvictoriannightmare.com and thank you everyone who has followed my new podcast, Dark Poetry, now available. Most places you find your spooky podcasts I read one of the creepiest poetic stories I think I have ever read in my life on last week's episode, a poem called Dead Man's Hate by Robert Irvin Howard. It takes place in a frontier town where a man has just been hanged. Another guy walks up to this hanging corpse and spits in its face. Then the dead guy wakes up and he climbs down from the gallows and chases the other guy around town with a noose in tow. That one really stuck with me. Really fun. I have some other really wonderful pieces on this week's episode as well. Incidentally, today's episode topic was actually suggested by a lovely listener who snuck right into my DMs on Instagram named Alexandra. She asked if I would do an episode on the creation of the London Underground, and at first I was like, I don't care about trains so much as I do care about plague pits being discovered while building train stations. So I did some digging and had a wonderful time researching this topic. So please feel free to suggest episode topics on Instagram in comments on Spotify. Email me@myvictorianightmaremail.com but don't ask me to do an episode on the Winchester Mystery House, and I'll tell you why. I get that a lot. Don't feel bad if you already have though. Everything that you've been told about that house is a lie. None of it is true, and the real story is really uneventful. So sadly I won't be doing a cool episode on that house. But if you've got another idea, I am all ears. It was actually at the suggestion of a listener that I did the HH Holmes episode as well. So please feel free to share your episode desires with me. Me. Okay, before we get to the Pork Chop, I want to tell you a little ghost story. A little side dish, I think. Since today we're talking about the building of trains in spooky circumstances, I thought I'd share the one time I am certain I not only saw a ghost, but spent the entire night with one. It's fairly dark and it's related to trains, but I'll get there. This happened when I was very young, only about five or six, and even now I am shaking a little just discussing it. This experience I think shaped my personality in a lot of ways because it was so traumatic. But also I think it's responsible in large part for why I am so drawn to researching folks who are long dead, trying to understand who they were and touch them in a way. And it goes a little something like this. I lived in a little house with my family in Springfield, New Jersey in the 80s when I was a little girl, and on the last night that I spent in that house before my family moved to Westfield, New Jersey. Yes, the home of the watcher and family annihilator John List Couple of ancillary details there. My mom put me and my sister to bed. We were actually sleeping in little sleeping bags on the floor because our beds had been packed up like ready ready for the movers in the morning. My mom turned out the light. My sister instantly went right to sleep. And I noticed something moving in the corner of the room. A dark shadow, darker than the rest of the dark, just hovering. I watched it for a long time, just wondering if it was in my mind or maybe my eyes were not adjusting to the dark. But as moonlight grew in the room, I started to notice details in the shadow that became more and More visible until I could see entirely that this was a hovering man. A black man in a pinstriped suit. And as his mouth became more and more visible, I could see it moving. He was singing and he was staring right at me. As he became clearer and clearer, the louder his voice grew. I can remember even music, jazz music, echoing behind him in the room. I was paralyzed with fear. So much that I wanted to scream to my sister to wake her up, but I couldn't even open my mouth. I was so scared. I didn't understand why the sounds in the room weren't waking her up. This man was so sad, but he was smiling. This man sang at me all night. His feet never touched the floor. He just hung and stared and sang at me until the sun came up. He slowly faded with the sunlight, the same way that he appeared in the moonlight, losing more and more detail with the light. The brighter the room got, the fainter I could hear him sing and see him. It was the slowest sunrise I have ever experienced. I felt like this terror would never end. I didn't sleep a single minute that night. I also didn't tell anyone about it until like a few days later. I was just so terrified, like my little brain couldn't make sense of it. But I told my mom, and my mom, who I've mentioned a few times on this podcast, is a very particular mom. She loves her autopsy shows and also sees dead people. Her reaction was not, you probably just had a nightmare. She said, okay, let's find out who he was. And she took me to the library. I don't remember which records or books she picked through exactly, but she was able to find some record of the history around where my house was. And she said, honey, did this man look like these men? And she showed me a picture of the prisoners who built the train tracks that existed right outside our backyard. Black and white men in pinstriped suits built that railroad in the early 1900s. I don't remember any other details that my mom found, other than that photograph that I still see in my memory. If I ever get up the courage, I might take a trip back to that library to see if I can find more information. If there was a particular man who died there during the creation of that railroad or at another time. He may not have been there for that purpose too. There may be more history to pick through. But I think about him all the time and I wonder if he's still there. Do you have any life altering ghost stories that you would like to share? Share them in the comments. Let's scare the wits out of each other. Thank you for letting me share that with you. There aren't a lot of folks that I can share that with. Okay, you ready? Let's get to the pork chop of today's episode. To speak about the construction of the far cleaner and far more efficient subterranean train system than New York's metropolitan train system, the London Underground, otherwise known as the Chube C H O O B. Presumably you must speak about how it was constructed tediously through the excavation of hundreds if not thousands of years worth of tangled packed, liquefied dead bodies. London, the city of Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Tower Bridge, over the River Thames, and some of the coziest pub food in Europe is essentially one big graveyard just packed with layers upon layers of the unfortunate victims of plagues and epidemics. Side note, I love how in almost every pub that I visited when I was last in London, there was always a cat that they would call the manager in like three different pubs. You got a problem with the stew, take it up with the manager, Gus sitting over there at the end of the bar. That was nice. The paths that the train takes as it winds through the bowels of the city were in a number of cases designed to bypass massive plague pits simply because they were too difficult and God awful to dig through. So I'll speak about the construction of the trains in the Victorian era, but also give a lot of history of how this city came to be one of the most densely populated cemeteries on earth and how these corpses helped to shape the path of the underground we all know and love today. I'll also take you on some fun detours to learn about the Necropolis Railway that transported over 200,000 thousand bodies to cemeteries on the outskirts of the city. The newly discovered plague pits and fascinating pieces of history that are still being found today in new constructions of commuter lines. Anytime I've taken a ride on one of those trains, I always imagine what clothes the ghosts all around me are wearing. Are they 1300s bubonic plague ghosts? Are they cholera epidemic ghosts? Are they wearing burlap or silk dyed green with arsenic or black with coal tar? What are your subway thoughts? Londoners? Ever wonder which layer of history's graves your particular stop was built on? Well, I will give you some insight into that on today's show. I want to make sure that I mention that many of the details that I will be giving about this history originate from a book called London and its Dead by Katherine Arnold. I also used a Gizmodo article by Jeff Mana, two BBC.com articles, one by Bethan Bell and another by Debabani Majumdar, a New Yorker article by Sam Knight, and a my London.com article by Martin Elveri. All of my other references can be found in the show notes. Catherine Arnold, the author who wrote that book, Necropolis, London and Its Dead, states that London is, quote, one big grave. England was ravaged by plagues repeatedly between the 1300s to the 1600s. You may be familiar with the Black Death, or bubonic plague that killed as many as a third of the population of Europe. It arrived In England around 1348 on a ship from Glasgony France, which is incredible that they can figure that out. And we still don't know if it was a bat or a lab experiment gone wrong that caused Covid. There was the great plague of London in 1665. This was the worst plague in England since the Black Death. There were a number of many plagues throughout the 1500s. In fact, there were very few years between the 1300s and 1600s where there were no plagues reported at all. But in this one, the Great London plague, London lost 15% of its population. That was likely over about a hundred thousand people. The man who wrote Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, wrote a book about the great plague of London, believed to be based off of journals of his uncle Henry, who lived through this plague. It was published in 1722. It's called a Journal of the Plague Year. The book tells of how Londoners suffered horrific deaths in the Thousands in 1665. He talks about families being locked in their homes with plague victims to be forced to die together, the sick being buried alive to prevent them from spreading the plague further, and nurses murdering plague victims to hurry their deaths. If you've ever taken the underground to Aldgate Station, know that this station was built upon a plague pit. Defoe describes a gruesome pit that was 40 foot long and 15 or 16ft wide, dug at the depth of 20ft or more, that was filled with 1100 and 14 bodies. He writes. A terrible pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it. For though the plague was long a coming to our parish, yet when it did come, there was no parish in or about London where it raged with such violence as in the two parishes of Aldgate and Whitechapel. He writes about the delivery of the bodies to the pit. The cart had in it 16 or 17 bodies. Some were wrapped up in linen sheets, some in rags, some little other than naked or so loose that what covering they had fell from them in the shooting out of the cart, and they fell quite naked among the rest. But the matter was not much to them, or the indecency much to any one else, seeing they were all dead and were to be huddled together into the common grave of mankind, as we may call it. He writes that his uncle collapsed with grief after seeing a man watch his wife, wife and children unceremoniously dumped into the pit over a pile of moldering corpses. And then in the 1800s, there was the cholera epidemics, plural, that began in 1832. This one came from Russia and a few other parts of Europe that killed over 50,000 people in 1849. About 53,000 people in both England and Wales died from cholera in 1854. And in 1866, you had two more outbreaks. Quick side note, dying of cholera is one of the most horrifying ways to die that I can think of. I speak at length about Victorian epidemics in episode two, the Victorian Cult of Death, but I'll just jog your memory about cholera. Essentially, you die from rapid dehydration and electrolyte loss. It's a very fast killing disease. You can be dead within 24 hours of contracting it, although it can also take up to about three days. I will spare you the worst of the details, but it is a bacterial infection that spreads through ingestion, either through food or water that has been contaminated. It's inconceivable to me to imagine how people in this era lived with this disease, attacking people that they loved, their children, neighbors all around them. Simply horrific. Not to mention tuberculosis that folks were contending with as well. A much slower death, to be sure, but this disease killed millions of people in Europe in the 1800s. So Christ. Starting to feel really ungrateful that one of my biggest problems right now is that I can only find a mattress pad made out of memory foam. I hate memory foam. It makes me feel like I'm sleeping in a wad of chewing gum and I can only find memory foam mattress pads. My new mattress is just a little too firm. I'm gonna go do a gratitude meditation real quick. Brb.
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Edu okay, I'm back. By 1801, London had a population of about 1 million people, and this population rapidly grew to 2.5 million by 1851, due to migrants traveling in from all over Europe and beyond. The dead in these days were primarily buried in churchyards, but these were rapidly filling up beyond capacity and could no longer accommodate the massive influx of folks in need of burial. The situation was so dire that bodies were just beginning to be packed into vaults. A gravedigger named William Chamberlain at St. Clement's testified to the House of Commons in 1842 that the ground was so full of bodies that he couldn't make new graves, quote, without coming into other graves. He and his fellow gravediggers were instructed to chop up the coffins and bodies to make room for new ones. He said, quote, we have come to bodies quite perfect, and we have cut parts away with choppers and pickaxes. He continues, we have opened the lids of coffins, and the bodies have been so perfect that we could distinguish males from females. And all those have been chopped and cut up. During the time I was at this work, the flesh had been cut up in pieces and thrown up behind the boards when which are placed to keep the ground up where the mourners are standing. And when time mourners are gone, this flesh has been thrown and jammed down and the coffins take away and burnt. He also mentions one day I was trying the length of a grave to see if it was long and wide enough. And while I was there, the ground gave way and a body turned right over and. And the two arms came and clasped. And the two arms came and clasped me round the neck. End quote. A likely story, but then again, who am I to doubt him? He's the expert here in corpse jamming. Okay, guys, I'm sorry. I'm gonna. I'm going for it. I need to tell you a few more details of this ilk apart from smashing up coffins with bodies and just lighting them on fire or jamming them down, as it were. Sometimes bodies would just be thrown into basements of churches. For example, I gotta tell you about ynon Chapel. This was a place of worship on Clements Lane, which is today St. Clement's Lane, which happens to be quite near the Strand Bookstore that was built in 1823. The upper part of the church was dedicated to worship and the lower part was just a big room for dead bodies. Not a crypt per se, just a big space where bodies were simply shoved. This basement vault and the top floor were separated only by floorboards. Over the course of about 20 years, this church packed not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands of bodies. Up to 12,000 bodies into its basement. A man named Walter Thornby wrote a book in 1887 called Old and New London. And in this book he describes this church. He says the basement quote, soon became filled with coffins up to the very rafters, so that there was only the wooden flooring between the living youth and the festering dead. End quote. It is said that the Reverend offered low price burial fees and there were at least 20 packins. I don't think you can call them burials a week. It is said that the parishioners breathed the noxious fumes of rotting flesh from the room below for years before the bodies were discovered. People would often faint and vomit due to the fumes. According to Katherine Arnold, the parishioners could even taste the air, describing it as an acrid oily smell slick on their tongues. Resulting from the humid corpse fog in the church. It created a sort of artificial weather system. Meat exposed to this atmosphere turned putrid after an hour or two. It's kind of wild to think that I left the church because I read the Bible and simply didn't like what I read. Imagine not leaving a church packed with 20,000 dead bodies with its own artificial weather system of corpse gases. Faith is a magnificent thing for some, I suppose. Incidentally, in 1847, once the situation was brought to the attention of the House of Lords, whose members went to visit the church to find out what in God's name was going on there. They were refused entrance, so they didn't push the matter and just left. But in 1847, a prominent surgeon purchased the church and had all of the bodies removed to Norwood Cemetery where they would be reburied in a single grave. He described the removing of bodies as a pyramid of human bones exposed to view separated from piles of coffin wood in various stages of decay. And up to 6,000 people came to spectate the removal of the bodies. This church was again sold and bought by a circus impresario who fitted it out to be like a theater for pantomime and a circus. But after being informed that not all bodies had actually been removed, there were still a couple left behind, he backed out of the purchase. Eventually it was turned into a cabaret like establishment, otherwise referred to as a quote, low dancing salute where it was advertised that you would be dancing on the dead. The advertisement also states, no lady or gentleman admitted unless wearing shoes and stockings. In 1849, the London Hospital maintained its own graveyard until 1860. Once that burial site was filled to capacity, housing for the medical staff were simply built on top of them. The graves were not too far below the surface, and this made for some very unsettled safe ground conditions. In Catherine Arnold's book, the Necropolis Book, she says the remaining part of the burial ground became a garden for nurses and medical students, complete with tennis court, where they were in the habit of capering about in their short times off duty, and where sometimes it happened that the grass gave way beneath them. An ordinary occurrence when the subsoil is inhabited by coffins. The idea of Victorian nurses capering about playing tennis on the grounds of an old cholera hospital garden and like falling through the ground into coffins, is a nightmare that I very much want to have. Apart from the jello ified corpses smelling terrible and collecting in not just places of worship or hospital grounds, they were also extreme exploding. The cheap, tight coffins that folks were buried in were dangerously pressurized from the gases of decomposing individuals. The result could be subterranean infernos. A fire beneath the Church of St. James on German street started from exploding bodies that burned for days. I've mentioned before, one of my favorite shows was the Frankenstein Chronicles. It was starring Sean Bean. It takes place in more of like the 1820s, 30s ish. And he takes a job of a porter of bodies. A coffin explodes in one scene and hits him with shrapnel that gets stuck on his sides. It's pretty gross. To prevent these coffins from becoming incendiary devices, sextons of churches became required to, quote, tap the lids, ensuring there was enough space between the coffin and lid for explosive gases to release. That gravedigger who gave the horrid detail about cutting up bodies a bit earlier, he was testifying to the House of Commons. Because by this time, the 1850s, things were getting completely out of control in regard to the haphazard internment of the dead throughout the city, contributing not just to the smell, but the rapid spread of cholera. Due to the leaching of this disease into groundwater from the tightly packed corpses, Something simply had to be done. So in 1852, the Burial act of 1852 was passed. This act required new burial grounds to be approved only by the Secretary of State, and also enabled the Secretary of State to close metropolitan London London churchyards to any new burials. And the newly formed necropolis and National Mausoleum Company was formed with the ambition to create London's one and only burial ground on the outskirts of the city where, quote, solitude herself might here find retirement. As the company stated, however, being 23 miles from the center of London in Brookwood, it could take up to 12 hours to get to this cemetery by horse drawn funeral cart. So a quicker and more convenient solution was the Necropolis railway line, dedicated to the transportation of bodies and mourners to the cemetery. And if you'll follow me through this very large group of folks who have gathered outside the Necropolis railway line, we'll take a short trip with them while I tell you a little bit about the line itself. This particular group of about 5,000 or so people are Londoners of Indian descent. And this one is one of the largest funerals the train has and will ever carry. The year is 1891 and the burial of Charles Bradlaugh will take place today. He was a member of Parliament of Northampton, very vocal advocate of Indian self government, and a very popular figure among the Indian community in London. The community wasn't very large at this time. It was estimated to be about 46,000 or so in those days. Oh, okay. It appears the train is now pulling up here. Just take my hand. There's also a very important figure on this train who I hope that we'll get to meet. Oh, just watch your step there. But in the meantime, I'll tell you a little bit more about the history of this train. In 1852, the Brookwood Cemetery opened. It was designed to create a perpetual feeling of spring. The trees and plants were selected for this purpose. And with the creation of the necropolis train in 1854, mourners and their deceased loved ones could travel to the cemetery in under 50 minutes. The station was built at 188 Westminster Bridge Road, between Westminster Bridge and York street, at which which is now Leak Street. It was close enough to the river Thames for bodies to arrive at the station by river if need be. The nearby bridges made it easy for mourners to travel by road to the station. And the station had its own built in mortuary so the deceased could arrive early and wait to be transported when the mourners arrived. Isn't that nice? Funeral parties would soon depart at Waterloo and wind through the woodlands and countryside towards Surrey, A picturesque trip thought to be peaceful for those in mourning. When I searched newspapers for information about the Necropolis, I found thousands of mentions, specifically in obituaries. For a time, virtually all obituaries in London added the time and date that their Necropolis train would be departing. The Necropolis train station building where mourners would board the train still exists, although the train does not. It closed in the 1940s due to greater competition from newly built cemeteries around London. And it's up for sale last I checked. For £4.2 million you can own this 750 square meter building or give it as a gift to a certain spooky podcaster who would greatly appreciate it. But. Oh, okay, we are almost to the cemetery, but I brought you along on this trip for a reason and I think, I think you'll appreciate it. Okay, there are two men getting in a fight over there. As you can hear. Yes, on a funeral train, the fight is between a Hindu gentleman and an atheist. But look to your right at the man watching them fight. That is a 21 year old Mahatma Gandhi. Wait for it. Biting does not solve anything.
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You.
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You two need to get a grip. I thought it would be funny to see Gandhi tell some folks to get a grip. Also never seen him roll his eyes before. Okay, end scene. This really happened, by the way. I didn't make that up. I don't know if he told him to get a grip, but everything else is true. Okay, let's now talk about how the corpses of London helped to shape the building of the London Underground. You may notice, if you are a daily rider of this train, an otherwise inexplicable shift in direction in the Piccadilly line passing east out of South Kensington. As Katherine Arnold states, the tunnel carves between Knightsbridge and South Kensington stations because it was impossible to drill through the mass of skeletal remains buried in Hyde park. End quote. The 1960 century builders of the underground couldn't even hack their way through the hundreds of years of packed plague victims. Intertwining bones. The tube deviates. Excuse me. Tube deviates southwest by northeast to avoid the interlocking knots of skulls, ribs and femurs tangled in the earth. The railway began construction in 1863 using gas lit wooden carriages hauled by steam locomotives. London's Circle line was completed in 1884 and most of the lines the City South Railway, Waterloo and City Railway, Central London Railway, Great Northern and City Railway were completed between 1898 and 1904. The men who built these systems were referred to as navvies, derived from navigator. It was said that there were more than 200,000 men working around Britain to build these lines, most of them being former tin miners from Cornwall or farmers from Scotland or Ireland. Pay was low but consistent. But the hours Were long in often dangerous and horrid conditions. They dug through the streets of London from Paddington to Farringdon. They used a method called cut and cover where a trench would be dug below an existing road track would be laid and shored up on either side by a lining of brick. The trench would then be roofed and the road rebuilt on top. When they came upon bodies, they would do their best to dig through them, but if they could not, they would diverge, as in the case with that sharp shift on the Piccadilly line. And although I wasn't able to find many personal accounts of these poor folks digging through bodies to build this railway from the period, there are plenty of accounts from those continuing to build the railway lines today. Those digging the Crossrail, London's new underground commuter line. The largest Crossrail dig, it's across from Liverpool street station was once London's first municipal graveyard. First used in 1569 during another outbreak of bubonic plague. It went on to become the resting place places for radicals, non conformists and migrants. It closed due to overcrowding in the 1700s. 10,000 people are buried there. When digging up the space for the rail line, eight skeletons per cubic meter were found. Graves within graves. According to the crossrails lead archaeologist quote, there's a lot of death here in Liverpool street. End quote. In the Victorian era, two railway stations were built here and later merged into one. They unearthed over 5,000 skeletons that date back to the Roman era. A few hundred yards away in Spital Fields. Spitalfields. Spital Fields were more than 10,000 medieval skeletons that were unearthed between the 1990s and 2000 2007. These were victims of a volcanic eruption in 1258 that disrupted the climate and harvests. A priest at this time, the 1200s named Henry D. Knighton wrote of the time, quote, the pestilence was immense, insufferable. End quote. 1800 bodies have been removed from the Crossrail dig so far. Carver, the lead archaeologist, believes there are more than 3,000 or so. And their excavation isn't just for the purpose of building a new train line. The lead archaeologist wants to know if there were Africans or Asians or new world visitors walking London's streets centuries ago. He wants to know what they were drinking and smoking. They want to learn more about the plagues that ravaged the area. Of all of the thousands buried in this area, only two were buried with slabs that bore their. Richard Whiter, a grocer in 1583 who died of burning jaw which sounds horrible, don't know exactly what that was. Sadly, I couldn't find the name of the other person that was found. This area was also where Bedlam's hospital was located, Europe's first insane asylum, and many of the dead here are also from that hospital, although the archaeologists believe that they will never find the names of those poor souls there. Once these bones have been thoroughly studied, they will be reburied near the mouth of the Thames Estuary on Canve island in Essex. The lead archaeologist will ensure a plaque will be dedicated to their memory when the Crossrail is complete, he said. We are hoping that everyone who walks down here will know that these people were here. Today was a tough one, tougher than most I'd say. So here is something to make you feel a little bit better. I mentioned that the Necropolis eventually closed down because of more competition, inspired by more cemeteries that were opened around London in the Victorian era. These are called the Magnificent Seven. They are Abney Park, Brompton, Highgate, Kensal Green, Nunhead, Tower Hamlets and West Norwood Cemeteries. The architects of these cemeteries took inspiration from the beautiful Pierre Lachaise cemetery in France and included extensive landscaping, mature trees, diverse plant life, intricate funerary sculptures and gardens. These cemeteries were so lovely that it became a semi established custom for visitors to picnic among the graves. Now that folks weren't to be packed into church basements or overcrowded churchyards anymore, families could finally spread out a bit and create gorgeous mausoleums, beautiful ornate headstones and skull sculptured monuments. It's so nice to know that after so many hundreds of years thanks to the Victorians, you can now enjoy a lovely picnic and a cup of tea with your deceased loved ones in a beautiful place. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please rate this podcast on Spotify. Leave me comments, share it with your friends and join my Patreon. If you would like to hear it ad free by going to myvictoriannightmare.com Be kind to yourselves and I will see you in your nightmares.