Instead of describing a ‘ghost’ as a dead person permitted to communicate with the living, let us define it as a manifestation of a persistent energy.

—Fred Myers,

Proceedings of the Society
for Psychical Research 6,
1889

Chapter 10

10

THE AUTUMN OF 1888 WAS KNOWN AS THE AUTUMN of Terror. Jack the Ripper was out there somewhere, in the fog, waiting with his knife. He could strike anywhere, at any time. The thing about autumn this year was that everyone knew precisely when the Ripper was going to strike, if he kept up with the schedule he’d set so far. The next date was September 30. That was when Jack the Ripper struck twice, so it was referred to as “the Double Event.” The Double Event was a big part of the reason Jack the Ripper was seen as so amazingly scary—he managed these brutal and somewhat complicated murders right under the eye of the police, and no one saw a thing.

On that point, the past and the present were exactly alike.

The police had nothing. So, to help them, thousands more people joined the ranks of amateur detectives. They flew in from around the world. There was, the news reported, a 25 percent increase in tourism during the month of September. Hotels in London were getting unprecedented numbers of reservations. And all those people came to hang out in our neighborhood, to crawl over every inch of the East End. You couldn’t walk anywhere without someone taking pictures or making a video. The Ten Bells, which is the Ripper pub where the victims used to drink, was just a few streets over and had lines of people waiting to get in that stretched down the block. Hundreds of people shuffled past our buildings every day on any one of the ten Jack the Ripper walking tours that crossed our campus (until Mount Everest complained, and they rerouted around the corner).

The Ripper shaped our school life as well. The school had sent out letters to all our parents assuring them that we would be kept under nonstop lock-and-key surveillance, so really, school was the best place for us to be, and it was best to proceed as normal and not disrupt anyone’s studies. On the night following the second murder, they changed all the rules about leaving school grounds. We had to be present and accounted for by eight o’clock every night, including weekends. We could be in our houses or the library. Prefects were stationed in both of these places, and they had clipboards with all our names. You had to check out with the prefect at your house, then check in with the prefect at the front desk of the library, then vice versa when you went home.