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London has more paranormal places per square mile than anywhere else in the UK. Anyone with a spare hour or four who finds themselves in the city could do a lot worse than invest their time walking along the Thames, taking in some of the sights of the haunted metropolis.

The Tower of London is an excellent place to begin the walk. The building is the most haunted place in the city, if not the UK, and the ghost stories date back hundreds of years. For years after his execution in 1606, the screams of Guy Fawkes were heard emanating from the room where he was prepared for his execution. Two hundred and ten years later, a guard outside the Jewel House, now known as Martin Tower, watched as a large bear approached him. The guard tried to bayonet the beast, but the weapon passed straight through the creature. The soldier collapsed and died 'of shock' a few days later, but not without sharing his story of the phantom bear with a handful of others. Much more recently, I received this story from the tower:

Whilst serving in Coldstream Guards on duty at the Tower, we would patrol around the Tower perimeter and meet at Traitors gate. On this occasion, myself and another guard in the night hours, heard giggling noises and a bouncing object outside the Bloody Tower. The giggling sounded like that of two young children. Myself and my colleague both heard them and was very startled by the sounds. The bouncing object sounded much like a ball but heavy in sound.

Hauntings at the tower could fill a book, and it is a subject we'll have to return to in a few months.

Leaving the tower, and walking westward, with a two minute detour to cross Lower Thames Street to view St Magnus the Martyr Church (where a ghostly priest with black hair stands over the tomb of a former bishop), and St Mary at Hill church (haunted by Alice Hackney, upset at being moved from her grave during restoration work), we follow the river until Victoria Embankment.

Waterloo Bridge, probably best known as either the site where Georgi Markov was assassinated with a ricin-tipped umbrella, or for the location of Ray Davies' masterpiece, was also home to a headless phantom of a man whose dismembered body was discovered beneath the structure around the turn of the twentieth century. Thankfully, the phantom didn't hang around too long, and a few weeks after his remains were discovered, the decapitated shade disappeared never to be seen again, even though his killer was never found.

A little further along we find Cleopatra's Needle, erected on the bank of the Thames in 1878. The monolith marks the place where a tall, dark figure leaps over the embankment wall into the river, but the inevitable splash of the person hitting the water never occurs. Thought to be the ghost of a suicide, but no name to the shadowy face has ever been offered. Disembodied laughing is also reported in the area, although the cynical say the sounds come from passing cruise boats or drunken partygoers from the far bank of the river.

An entity known as the Angel of the Thames hit the news in 2006, after appearing before witnesses four times over the period of a few months, hovering over the river close to the London Eye. Some believe the angel to be a modern entity, though a handful of authors have pointed out that the angel may have appeared during the Great Fire of London in 1666, and has also appeared during times of war. Either way, the photographic evidence to support the angel is unfortunately pretty weak, and has more than a passing resemblance to lens flare.

Westminster marks the end of this walk, with two sites to take in. A small boat with a trio of people standing on the deck occasionally passes under Westminster Bridge, although it never emerges from the other side - the jury is out to what the vessel and its crew are doing. Finally, on the south side of the bank stands St Thomas' Hospital, home of an infamous phantom Grey Nurse. The ghost is said to have been mistaken for a real nurse - until she vanishes into thin air. Some people have said the figure is cut off from the knees down, and although her facial details are perfect, witness descriptions do not match anyone who ever worked at the hospital (ruining one theory that the ghost is Florence Nightingale). One local legend has reported that patients who spotted this phantom woman have died soon after, but isn't that what they say about most phantom nurses..?