Here's a pair of queens who lost their heads on Tower Hill.  That' Anne Boleyn on the left and Catherine Howard on the right.
This pair of queens is Anne Boleyn (left) and
Catherine Howard (right). These pretty young
women were decapitated because of a combination
of political, dynastic, and romantic reasons.

The Tower of London's Spooky Spot

So many royal and noble heads were lopped off where the scaffold stood inside the Tower of London courtyard that even today visitors to the spot often feel an eerie shudder of dread as if the place where the likes of Anne Boleyn lost their heads possesses some sort of supernatural power. I can personally testify that I felt the chills run up and down my spine when I visited the spot. As the tour guide pointed out that I was standing on the actual spot where a whole boatload of queens, dukes, earls, princes, and so forth were decaptitated, I felt as if the icy dead fingers of those long-dead aristocrats were beckoning me to come closer and listen to their sad stories. I could almost hear the ghost of poor Anne Boleyn weeping over the injustice of her death in 1536. However, even as early as the 1530's, visitors to the spot were already reporting supernatural phenomena at the site. Witnesses during executions as well as visitors to Tower Hill at other times regularly reported the eerie appearance of ghosts, angels, symbolically hopeful doves, and grimly emblematic ravens. Perhaps an incident reported by Alison Weir in The Six Wives of Henry VIII (London, 1991) is the weirdest example of all:

As Anne [Boleyn] prayed aloud, saying over and over again, "Jesu, receive my soul! O Lord God, have pity on my soul! To Christ I commend my soul!", the executioner retrieved his sword and cut off her head "before you could say a Pater Noster", according to Sir John Spelman, who was present. Then the headsman picked up the head and held it aloft, crying, in heavily accented English, "So perish all the King's enemies!" At this moment, the onlookers saw the dead woman's eyes and lips move, a reflex action resulting from the shock of the decapitation to the nervous system, yet to Tudor eyes almost a supernatural phenomenon. (p. 337)
Call it a reflex action if you like, but I have felt the power of the place, and I am perfectly content to say that supernatural things have been happening there at least since the time of Henry VIII.

Comment: notice how in the second half of the paragraph, the writer works in a quotation from the book where she got most of her information. And also notice how the writer works in the name of the book and the author she is quoting from.

Click here for more samples of Stage Two one-paragraph essays.

Return to main page.