It’s a misty Tuesday evening in late October and I have exchanged the usual track session with my club for a run with another, quite bizarre group. My heart is thumping hard, not just through exertion but because I’ve had the bejesus scared out of me by a spectre in medieval dress topped off by distinctly porcine features.
“Waaaah! It’s the pig-headed woman of Primrose Hill!” screams Lucy, and we all leg it. The creepy apparition melts into the pitch darkness and our unexpected sprint slows into an easy jog. We giggle, nervously.
The Run for Your Life! tour with Secret London Runs is a hilly five-miler during which you may well see dead people. Or you may think you do. The fact that it starts in St Pancras Old Churchyard, once celebrated as a goldmine for 19th-century body snatchers, should set alarm bells ringing if you’re easily spooked. Still, there’s safety in numbers and the fact that you’re surrounded by nervously smiling runners among the ominously leaning gravestones brings some comfort in the pitch darkness.
Leading this tour of London’s restless spirits is Vanessa Cain, whose passion for history, distance running and the city led her to jack in her City job to found Secret London Runs. She organises themed running tours throughout the year, but as the nights draw in and supermarkets stockpile pumpkins, thoughts turn to the paranormal – and she’s only too happy to oblige.
Cain and her team pride themselves on uncovering information about the city that’s markedly absent from the average guide book, and sharing it on run routes that reveal parts of London you never noticed. Tourists get to take selfies with the picture postcard landmarks, Londoners may prefer finding out about startling events in the capital’s turbulent history explained through the medium of gin, or craft beer, or sex.
Whatever theme or tour you choose, it’s done at a run. And with the ghostly one, inadvertent pace changes come as standard, so it’s a pretty good workout. There’s no need to worry about being in a group with a bunch of gazelles who leave you at the mercy of the body snatchers, however. Beginner runners can join a walk/jog group, then there are “steady”, “speedy” or “rapid” runs.
As dusk falls, would-be ghost hunters booked on the 6pm departure must make their way from slick, snazzily regenerated King’s Cross to the shadowy, mysterious St Pancras Old Churchyard, where the unquiet souls have found it hard to rest over the centuries. It contains one of only two Grade I listed tombs in the country – that of Sir John Soane.
In the 1860s hundreds of bodies were removed from the cemetery to make way for the railway. The not yet successful novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was employed to do exhumations and the gravestones he arranged around the tree named after him have melded in with the landscape to form a slightly gruesome merging of this world and the next. It’s around this reminder of Time’s winged chariot that the tour kicks off and the first ghost stories are recounted.
The route takes runners along the canal to Camden Town, where their guide invites them to test out electromagnetic detectors that sound an alarm when spirits are near. The velvety darkness beyond the trees of Primrose Hill provide a rich seam of paranormal activity and the pace quickens as tales of murder, mayhem and accursed hoggish women unfold.
The latter part of the route takes in the tales of vengeful hags and bloodcurdling violence in the haunted homesteads and pubs of Hampstead. By which time, the heady adrenaline rush brought on by macabre fascination, flights of fancy, pop-up pig heads and running for five hilly miles leave you pickled in endorphins and bonhomie, happy to live, and run, another day.
