There are many ways to prepare for an international cricket Test Match. You might practise your bowling, review footage of the opposition, or get a solid eight hours of sleep in your plush five-star hotel room. What you probably don’t plan for is the Langham Hotel haunting switching your bathroom taps on at 2am while a glowing Victorian gentleman floats menacingly toward you with his legs missing below the knee. And yet, here we are.
The Langham Hotel Haunting: A Brief and Deeply Unsettling History
The Langham Hotel, that magnificent pile of Victorian grandeur nestled near Oxford Circus, has been receiving guests since 1865. It has hosted royalty, diplomats, and Mark Twain. It has also, apparently, been quietly hosting at least one fluorescent spectral gentleman who never checked out and refuses to pay his bill. The third floor, in particular, has developed a reputation that no amount of Egyptian cotton sheets or complimentary toiletries can quite shake.
Back in the 1970s, the BBC used the Langham as staff accommodation for early morning radio presenters — the sort of people already running on four hours of sleep and the existential dread of the Today programme. It was, apparently, an open secret among BBC staff that Room 33 on the third floor was haunted. In 1973, radio announcer James Alexander Gordon — the beloved voice of the football results — woke in the night to see a fluorescent ball which gradually morphed into a man in Victorian evening wear. The apparition then floated toward him, arms outstretched, eyes staring, legs mysteriously absent from about two feet below the waist. Gordon, to his eternal credit, apparently asked it what it wanted before concluding that absolutely nothing about this situation was acceptable.
Stuart Broad, Matt Prior, and the World’s Most Exclusive Sleepover
Fast forward to June 2014, and England’s cricket team is in town for a Test Match against Sri Lanka. The players, however, have bigger concerns than spin bowling. England fast bowler Stuart Broad found himself lying wide awake in the small hours when his bathroom taps turned themselves on. He turned the lights on — taps off. Lights off — taps on again. It was, as Broad himself noted with admirable understatement, “very weird.”
Meanwhile, at approximately 1:30am, Broad awoke with the overwhelming conviction that something else was in his room. He did what any rational, highly trained international athlete would do: he went on the internet. There he discovered that teammate Matt Prior was also online at that very moment, in his room on the same floor, equally sleepless and equally spooked. Broad promptly abandoned his room and spent the rest of the night in Prior’s spare bed. Two England Test cricketers, together in a twin room, hiding from a ghost. The selectors were presumably not informed.
When the Partners Refuse to Check In
Broad’s girlfriend Bealey was reportedly “pretty spooked” by the whole affair. Furthermore, according to Broad, Moeen Ali’s partner refused to stay at the hotel altogether on account of the ghosts. Ben Stokes, meanwhile, was apparently also suffering sleepless nights on the notorious third floor. Consequently, it appears the Langham was single-handedly disrupting England’s entire domestic arrangements during a home Test series, which is not something that tends to appear in post-match analysis.
The Fortean Times, that estimable journal of the strange and inexplicable, notes that the Langham itself leans cheerfully into its haunted reputation — which does at least suggest a certain institutional confidence. The hotel’s website has been known to reference the ghostly occurrences directly, which is either admirable honesty or very bold marketing, depending on your tolerance for things that go bump in the night.
The Langham Hotel Haunting: Five Stars, Zero Exorcisms
The paranormal community has long maintained that genuine hauntings tend to cluster in older buildings with complex histories — and the Langham, which has seen everything from wartime requisitioning to BBC bureaucracy, certainly qualifies. However, it is worth noting that no ghost, however persistent, has yet managed to affect England’s batting average. That particular horror remains entirely self-inflicted.
What the Langham Hotel haunting does prove, quite definitively, is that the British capacity for stoically enduring the inexplicable — reporting it politely, asking for a room change, then getting on with things — remains entirely intact. Some traditions, unlike the legs of the third-floor apparition, are unbroken.
Read the original story at The Fortean Times.
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