Nine Centuries of Kings, Prisoners, and Executions Inside England’s Most Haunted Fortress

On the north bank of the Thames, just east of the City of London, a squat white keep, encircled by concentric stone walls, has stood guard over the capital for nearly a millennium. Most people who have heard of the Tower of London know the broad outline: a royal fortress turned prison, the site of queens’ beheadings, and the heavily guarded home to the Crown Jewels. Fewer people know that the Tower’s most famous residents, its ravens, are not an ancient tradition after all, or that the legend of Charles II decreeing their protection was likely invented in the twentieth century. The actual history is even more surprising, and significantly better documented.

A Conqueror’s Fortress on the Thames

William the Conqueror started building his Tower of London within a year or two of his successful 1066 battle of Hastings; construction of its central keep, the White Tower, dates to around 1078 and was built under the direction of Gundulf, the Bishop of Rochester. The castle was a statement, as much political as military, built by a Norman victor on a capital city of Anglo-Saxon losers, meant to be seen by both. It was located just far enough to be safe from the attacks of the homesick locals but close enough to be an unassailable symbol of the conqueror’s will. A keep this big with its walls some fifteen feet thick at the base and surmounting towers nearly ninety feet high would have dominated the skyline, a potent symbol of Norman power in the new capital city.

Successive medieval kings built upon the structures of their predecessors, adding new features to their castles. For instance, Richard the Lionheart built an inner curtain wall in approximately 1189, and by the reign of Edward I in the late thirteenth century, the Tower had taken on its present form of a concentric fortress. The castle was surrounded by an outer wall and a moat that was supplied with water from the Thames. There was also a series of towers surrounding the castle, the most famous of which are the Wakefield Tower, the Bloody Tower, the Salt Tower, and more than a dozen other towers built for different purposes. For several centuries, the Tower of London was the actual residence of the kings and not just a fortress. Its successive owners, from William the Conqueror to Henry VIII, all had their private quarters within the Tower and were crowned there before being processed to Westminster.

From Royal Palace to Royal Prison

The Tower’s dual use as palace and prison began early and lasted into modern times. Its first inmate was a Norman Bishop, Ranulf Flambard, in 1100, who is said to have escaped the following year by getting his guards drunk and sliding down a rope smuggled in under cover of a wine barrel; he thus became the Tower’s first prisoner as well as its first escapee. Subsequent occupants of the fortress include some of the most notable names in English history: Sir Thomas More, who refused to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church of England, and was imprisoned and executed there in 1535; a teenage princess Elizabeth, who was briefly imprisoned there in 1554 on charges of plotting against her half-sister, Queen Mary I, and eventually ruled as Queen Elizabeth I; and Guy Fawkes, who was interrogated in the Tower after his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, his signature on a written confession growing progressively more shaky between sessions because of the torture he underwent.

By the time of the Tudors, the Tower’s reputation as a site of state executions was at its peak. Most such executions were actually carried out elsewhere, on Tower Hill, just outside the castle, to allow for maximum visibility by the crowds who gathered to see the spectacle; however, for prisoners of the very highest rank, a small private scaffold was sometimes erected within the castle grounds, on the green next to the chapel, so that the condemned could avoid looking out over the assembled masses to be executed.

The Princes Who Vanished, and the Queens Who Lost Their Heads

No episode in the Tower’s history has been the subject of more controversy and speculation than the mysterious disappearance of the so-called Princes in the Tower. In 1483, the twelve-year-old King Edward V and his nine-year-old brother, Richard, Duke of York, were kept in the Tower, supposedly for their own safety, by their uncle,Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who had been appointed Lord Protector of the Realm after the death of their father. Within weeks, Parliament declared the boys illegitimate and Richard was crowned Richard III; the princes were last seen playing in the grounds of the Tower with decreasing frequency one summer, and then, by most accounts, no longer appeared. What happened to them has never been proved, but their bones were found by workmen in 1674 during renovations near the White Tower, and later interred at Westminster Abbey on the orders of Charles II.

The private scaffold on the Tower Green witnessed the executions of ten individuals from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, among them three English queens. Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, was beheaded there on 19 May 1536, on charges of adultery and treason that most historians now agree were false, by a swordsman specially brought over from France for the occasion; she was buried without a coffin in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, a few yards from where she died. Catherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife, followed her to the same scaffold in 1542. And Lady Jane Grey, the reluctant ‘Nine Days’ Queen’ installed on the throne in a failed succession bid, was beheaded there in February 1554, aged about sixteen or seventeen, after watching her own husband executed on Tower Hill earlier that same morning.

Lions, Ravens, and the Birth of a Tourist Attraction

For many years, the Tower was home to animals that could only be described as exotic. The English kings have had a menagerie of foreign animals since at least the thirteenth century. In 1235, Henry III received three leopards as a present from the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1252, the King of Norway sent a polar bear as a gift, which was allowed to fish for itself in the Thames on a long chain. The Tower was home to animals until 1835, when they were moved to the new London Zoo.

The human residents of the Tower also reflected this change. The Yeoman warders, more informally known as Beefeaters, had a post dating back to the reign of Henry VII. For much of the nineteenth century, it was a cushy job; men bought and sold the posts and were often absent without reason. Thus, the Beefeaters were viewed as unruly and untrustworthy by their contemporaries. It took a massive program of reform by the Duke of Wellington, appointed Constable of the Tower in 1826, to turn these miscreants into the staid, if enthusiastic, keepers of the Tower we know today. As the railway made the Tower more accessible to the growing ranks of Victorian tourists, the Yeomen reinvented themselves as guides, learning the potted history of the fortress and embellishing their performances with chosen tales to sponge up on the generous Victorian philanthropy that made up for their meagre wages. In doing so, they created legends from both the Tower’s true history and its mythic past.

Why the Tower of London Is Considered Haunted

Anne Boleyn’s Silent Procession

Of all the Tower’s ghosts, it seems that Anne Boleyn’s is the most common one to be seen. According to the stories told over the years, her ghost is said to be seen leading a procession of spectral courtiers from Tower Green towards the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula where her body lies, a haunting that, unlike most ghost stories, imagines its subject not as a victim wandering in torment but as a queen quietly returning to her own grave with something like dignity restored.

The Praying King and the Battlements’ White Shape

Other Tower ghosts have a more specific schedule. Henry VI, murdered in the Wakefield Tower in 1471 while he knelt in prayer, is said to appear in that same chapel every year on the anniversary of his death (May 21st) as a mournful figure who fades slowly back into the stone. Lady Jane Grey has her own annual date, as there have been numerous sightings of a white shape forming against the Battlements around the anniversary of her execution, including, according to one account, two guardsmen as recently as 1957. Other residents in the Tower Green quarters have reported being shaken awake or even thrown from their beds, a sentry in 1864 encountered a white figure his bayonet supposedly passed straight through, and Yeoman Warders have long noted that the Salt Tower has an unusually cold, unsettling reputation as some claim their dogs are refusing to be brought into the room. In 1851, a soldier on duty in the Martin Tower was said to have died after encountering what they described as a shapeless, pyramid-like gray mass, which entered Tower folklore as the ghost of a bear (a fitting echo for the real bears that were once locked inside these walls).

The Raven Legend That Isn’t Ancient at All

No Tower legend is repeated with greater confidence, or turns out to have less of a foundation, than the story of the ravens. Today, tourists are still being told, on the Tower’s own tourist literature, that ravens have been guarding the fortress for centuries, that Charles II decreed by royal edict that they must never be allowed to leave on the strength of an old prophecy that the Crown and the Tower itself would fall the day the ravens departed, and one popular version even supplies a scene: Charles supposedly watched ravens fouling his telescopes at the Tower and ordered them destroyed, only for his royal astronomer, John Flamsteed, to warn him off, at which point Charles compromised by moving the Royal Observatory to Greenwich and letting the ravens stay put.

The story is a wonderful one, and a researcher who spent years trying to verify it, digging through scholarly biographies of Charles II, historical archives, and the Tower’s own official records with the cooperation of a former Tower curator, was unable to find a single reference, in text or image, to ravens at the Tower predating the close of the nineteenth century. It turns out that the ravens were introduced to the Tower grounds around 1883, at which point Yeoman Warders, already busy reinventing themselves as historical tour guides, began using the birds as props in Gothic tales told to tourists, including a colorful but unsupported claim that the ravens had once devoured the bodies of Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey. The specific legend that Britain itself would fall if the ravens ever left the Tower turns out to be even more recent, and considerably stranger in its origins: it emerged during the summer of 1944, when the Tower’s ravens were informally pressed into service as spotters for incoming enemy aircraft and bombs, and the story took roughly its present shape just before the Tower reopened to visitors in January 1946. In the interim, one of the two ravens who had survived the war, a bird named Mabel, escaped the grounds entirely, with her mate soon following her over the wall, setting off a minor panic among Tower authorities who were anxious to keep the legend, and the birds, intact.

Visiting the Tower of London Today

The Tower of London is located on the north bank of the Thames, a walk from Tower Bridge, and within easy walking distance of Tower Hill Underground station. Open daily except December 24-26, and January 1st, from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and last admission is at 4:30 p.m. It is recommended that you have at least two or three hours to see the Tower of London, though it is not difficult to spend awhole day there.

As of 2026, the admission for adults is £37 (gift aid £40.70), while children from 5 to 15 years old pay half the adult price of £18.50 (gift aid £20.40). Senior citizens, full-time students, and persons with disabilities can count on concessionary fares of £29.50 (gift aid £32.50), while children below 5 years old may be admitted for free. All tickets to the Tower of London include a Crown Jewels and Palace & White Tower visit, a Yeoman Warder talk with a guided tour that depart between 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. (the last tour leaves at 2 p.m.). Besides, it is worth mentioning that warders and their families still live in the fortress, and it is considered the best and most interesting way to explore the Tower. This is where the legends of the Tower of London begin and end, told and continued by Yeoman Warders, the guardians of the castle, and its residents for hundreds of years. There are also seven resident ravens, whose wings are clipped and kept in special tippets by the Ravenmaster. For more than a century, the post has been held by Yeoman Warders, who look after the birds and perpetuate the myth that they must be kept safe and well-treated in the castle.

Given the volume of visitors the Tower draws year-round, tickets are best booked online in advance rather than purchased at the gate, and the site tends to be noticeably quieter in the afternoon than in the first hour or two after opening.

Would you linger by the Wakefield Tower on the evening of May 21st, or keep your visit strictly to daylight hours? Let us know in the comments below.

Sources consulted for the historical details in this post include Boria Sax, “The Tower Ravens: Invented Tradition, Fakelore, or Modern Myth?” Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 6, No. 3 (September–December 2010): 231–240 ; Janette Martin, “Reinventing the Tower Beefeater in the Nineteenth Century,” History, Vol. 98, No. 5 (December 2013): 730–749 ; Joanna Timms, “Ghost-Hunters and Psychical Research in Interwar England,” History Workshop Journal, No. 74 (Autumn 2012): 88–104; Historic Royal Palaces’ official history and ghost-story pages for the Tower of London; and current Historic Royal Palaces visitor and pricing information.