Opposite West Brompton Tube on the District Line.

To whom it may concern,

Firstly like my novels, which are entirely based on facts, this ghost story is also true but there is no need to be scared because I am the ghost.

Hopefully my experience of turbulent times may give you an insight in how to deal with your future. So here is something of my history, the better to judge my opinion.

Looking back, I must have been around seventy-five when I first met Joseph Bonomi.

It was an age of séances and spiritualism. Charles Dickens had published A Christmas Carol to extraordinary success and everyone seemed convinced that the veil between this world and the next was becoming thinner by the day. I was no different.

London meanwhile had a rather more practical problem: where to put its dead. The overcrowded churchyards had become a public disgrace, so seven great new cemeteries sprang up around the capital. They were not merely places of burial but fashionable parks where respectable families might spend a Sunday afternoon strolling amongst monuments to other people's prosperity.

Death had become fashionable.

Families enriched by Empire, industry and invention now competed in the cemetery as enthusiastically as they had in the drawing room. A modest headstone no longer sufficed. Every merchant wished to be mistaken for a prince, every banker for a Roman senator, and every widow insisted that grief should be carved from the finest granite.

Naturally, where there is money there is scandal.

By night these magnificent cemeteries attracted a rather less respectable clientele, giving me ample material for my Scandal Gallery pamphlets. I first wrote of grave robbers, body snatchers, dubious land deals, quarrelling undertakers and funeral arrangements that deserved considerably closer scrutiny than they usually received.

The proprietors were not always pleased.

The advertisers, however, were delighted.

Before long my weekly pamphlets carried notices from undertakers, monumental masons, sculptors and even the cemetery companies themselves. Death, I discovered, had become one of London's most competitive businesses.

It was through those advertisements that I encountered Joseph Bonomi.

Bonomi, born in 1796, was an Egyptologist, sculptor and artist of considerable reputation. Ever since Napoleon's expedition to Egypt half a century earlier, Britain had developed an insatiable appetite for everything Egyptian. Greek and Roman styles still governed most public buildings, but Egypt suggested something older, stranger and infinitely more mysterious. Obelisks, sphinxes and hieroglyphs hinted at forgotten wisdom and life beyond the grave.

His Egyptian obelisks, sphinxes and statues of Bastet, the cat goddess, became increasingly fashionable, I considered ordering one for myself and his advertisements soon became regular features in the Scandal Gallery. My readers admired his illustrations enormously, and so did I. My own fascination with Egypt and the hereafter steadily increased, whilst Bonomi discovered that appearing in my publication did his business no harm whatsoever.

If one's indiscretions were destined to be exposed, there were worse places for them to appear. My little publication had grown from recounting the nocturnal exploits of ladies of the night watched over by marble angels to chronicling the indiscretions of ministers, princes and the great families of Europe. Strange though it may seem, being featured in the Scandal Gallery had become almost fashionable.

Business prospered.

Death had become the latest investment opportunity.

A monument was no longer merely a marker of mortality but a declaration of success, and no commission excited Bonomi more than the one offered by Hannah Courtoy of Portman Square.

Hannah had married well, inherited handsomely and had absolutely no intention of being remembered by an ordinary gravestone. She wanted a monument that would announce her arrival in the next world while reminding those remaining in this one that she had left her mark.

Hannah had fallen completely under Egypt's spell. Osiris, Isis, the weighing of the heart and the Field of Reeds were not curious legends to her but comforting possibilities. If eternity existed, she intended to arrive there in suitable style.

Her two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary Ann, inherited much of their mother's enthusiasm. Neither ever married. They were devoted to one another, shared her fascination with ancient Egypt, particularly the goddess Isis, and quietly assumed they would one day occupy the same mausoleum. Where they differed was over the address.

Hannah wanted Highgate.

The magnificent Egyptian Avenue represented everything she admired. If London had built a gateway worthy of the Pharaohs, then that was where she intended to spend eternity.

Her daughters preferred Brompton.

It was newer, more convenient and, above all, considerably cheaper.

"Brompton is perfectly respectable," Elizabeth observed.

"And perfectly affordable," added Mary Ann.

"Respectable?" Hannah replied. "My dear, I have never aspired merely to be respectable."

So Bonomi prepared magnificent Egyptian designs for a mausoleum intended for Highgate.

Then fate intervened.

Hannah died before a single stone had been laid.

Whilst she rested temporarily in Brompton's catacombs, her daughters inherited not only her wishes but also Bonomi's drawings and the account that would accompany them.

Practicality prevailed.

The mausoleum would indeed be built—but at Brompton.

The same magnificent Egyptian design could be erected for considerably less money and, standing almost alone, would attract far more admiration than amongst Highgate's increasingly crowded splendours.

Better still, it would become the permanent home of all three women.

Mother and daughters.

Together forever, honouring Hannah's wishes whilst quietly improving upon them.

Indeed, the mausoleum is so large that it dwarfs every other monument nearby. Set apart to the east, where the plots were cheaper, it stands surrounded by modest stones, well away from the hoi polloi jostling for prominence along the Central Avenue, the Great Circle and beneath its colonnades, or forgotten altogether in the catacombs.

In saving a fortune, Elizabeth and Mary Ann created what became Brompton Cemetery's most extraordinary monument—and extraordinary it most certainly is.

Massive yet elegantly proportioned, fashioned from polished grey granite, it bears no inscription beyond the modest initials C H upon its bronze door. Had it stood sentinel beside the mighty Nile between Thebes and Karnak, no traveller would have questioned its antiquity.

The Courtoys' interest in Egypt soon broadened into a fascination with spiritualism. They spoke freely of Isis, séances and the possibility that science might one day explain what religion merely promised.

It was at Hannah's funeral that Joseph Bonomi introduced me to Samuel Alfred Warner.

Warner was an inventor of unusual reputation. Parliament had debated his inventions at length. He claimed to possess secret weapons, invisible shells and extraordinary long-range explosive devices. Some considered him a genius. Others regarded him as a charlatan. Most could not quite decide.

Whatever the truth, he possessed remarkable confidence.

His involvement in this affair arose from one of the sisters' séances. Thoroughly taken with Warner's reputation and scientific ingenuity, Elizabeth and Mary Ann wondered whether modern science might accomplish what religion merely promised: transport a spirit safely into eternity, and an Egyptian eternity at that. Warner assured them it could. He even proposed a suitable apparatus to be incorporated into the mausoleum, for a fee upon which all parties readily agreed.

One afternoon both gentlemen invited me to inspect the now nearly completed Courtoy Mausoleum.

"So this is merely an illusion to comfort grieving souls?" I enquired.

"If it allows the living to live peacefully," Warner replied, ushering me inside, "and transports the dead, who make no complaint, it has done its work."

An Egyptian frieze ran below the ceiling and ahead a circular mirror was set inside a large brass cogwheel, flanked above by two smaller cogs, the whole mechanism driven by a single wheel to the lower right.

At the lower left stood a Leyden jar connected to a small glass globe, with matching glass spheres mounted either side near the top of the apparatus.

The whole contrivance had a certain familiarity. I had seen something remarkably similar at Doctor Graham's Temple of Health and Hymen, powering his Celestial Bed, which I had written about extensively in my Scandal Gallery pamphlets.

Warner explained that one trial remained and that they required a novice to test the contraption—someone they could trust to remain discreet, preferably a gentleman with an interest in Egypt and the hereafter. Only then could they be certain everything would function correctly when Hannah was finally laid beneath the great stone slab and her daughters spent a last private moment beside her, as the machine conveyed their mother's spirit to the Field of Reeds.

I was intrigued and eager to test what I considered nothing more than an illusion—mechanical trickery amidst a field of marble props serving much the same purpose for those blessed with more money than sense.

But what if it were not an illusion?

What if it worked?

I had turned eighty. Winter was upon me. These were two very talented gentlemen, greatly respected in their own fields, and I admit it, I was flattered. Besides, should the thing actually succeed, the banks and breezes, the warmth and scents of the Nile seemed infinitely preferable to another English winter.

I should have known better.

I arranged to meet an hour before dusk as the park emptied before closing and met them in front of the tomb.

The door slid open, seemingly of its own accord, I imagine they had rigged a counterbalance, triggered in a way that was not apparent, simply to intensify the illusion.

In order to obtain an accurate reading, I was persuaded to enter the tomb and look directly into the mirror without any prior knowledge of what to expect, so no preconception would cloud my judgement.

Bonomi told me to concentrate as if I was in a seance and stare into the mirror, which I was more than happy to do.

The next moment I heard the door close behind me and I was alone.

“Don’t worry, just keep concentrating,” Bonomi shouted from outside.

Cogs began turning, the globes began glowing and I perceived myself startled, as if waking in the mirror, from which miasma began swirling. I found myself unable to do anything but nervously breathe it in, and felt myself propelled as if beyond Earth itself.

The next thing I knew it was night and I was standing alone outside the mausoleum.

At first I believed I had died.

I could see perfectly well, yet I could not feel the ground beneath my feet. I could walk but experienced neither fatigue nor hunger. Rain passed through me without discomfort. Wind stirred the trees but I never felt it. The strangest thing though I found I could pass straight back through the door and for almost two and a half centuries the Hannah Courtoy Mausoleum has been my home.

I later learned that Warner and Bonomi had created a time machine and had required a volunteer to test it. Whether that was true I cannot say. I can assure you that I cannot travel backwards or forwards through time.

What I can do is observe it.

I have witnessed every passing year from my earliest memories to this. Empires have risen and fallen. Kings and prime ministers have come and gone. I have watched London survive war, reconstruction and reinvention. I remember horse-drawn omnibuses and now watch driverless trains.

As technology improved, so too did my circumstances.

Radio was a revelation. When broadcasting began the machine acted like a crystal set and making adjustments I could receive both the BBC's Home and Light Services.

Then came the iPhone, which transformed my existence entirely. One can charge them on certain London buses if one knows where to sit.

How did I come by one you ask?

Dear reader I have not had one, I have had many.

Brompton Cemetery is a bustling green space, operated by the Royal Parks. If you lose your phone there, doing whatever you are doing, they are the people to contact.

The internet is astonishing.

A lifetime spent collecting scandals suddenly became useful once again. YouTube is particularly informative, though I confess many modern politicians would struggle to survive a single issue of my original Scandal Gallery.

Which is precisely why I have decided to revive it, not as pamphlets but as YouTube videos.

After all, if one has spent well over two centuries observing human folly, one ought to make something of the experience.

Well, what happened to me shook Bonomi and Warner to the core.

They returned the following day with shovels, dug the chamber deeper and buried me without a coffin. Some time later Hannah's coffin was placed above me.

They could not, however, risk the same thing happening to the sisters.

So they simply told them that the machine would convey each of them in turn to the Field of Reeds. Hannah was laid beneath the great stone slab before the machine and, in due course, Elizabeth and Mary Ann joined her.

Thus I acquired three remarkably quiet neighbours.

Now I have never been one to complain, but some years ago, despite doing my utmost to remain incognito, rumours began to circulate that the Courtoy Mausoleum possessed a resident spirit. My beautiful home suddenly attracted rather more attention than I had hoped, though I assure you it remains considerably more handsome than a certain zebra crossing in St John's Wood.

So if you visit, please do not shout, "Hello Darcy!"

I have to live with my neighbours, who are trying to rest in peace. Instead, whisper your hopes and prayers to the little orifice above the door and I shall do my very best to pass them on.

If you look down, you will see another reminder of the Great War to end all wars—an irony that transformed the cast-iron spearhead railings guarding so many tombs into weapons of war.

Darcy Blaze
Resident and free spirit