London firefighters report spooky sightings at city's oldest fire station

When it comes to eerie stories, firefighters at the London Fire Department have plenty to tell.  

The sounds of footsteps, horses galloping, wooden chairs creaking and some unexpected friendly visitors have been among some of the odd encounters firefighters have witnessed at Fire Hall No. 4 on Colborne Street — London's oldest standing fire station. 

"At No. 4 there's been lots of incidents where people are upstairs, they'll hear footsteps downstairs when they know no one is here, or they'll hear old buckets that were kicked over from horses back in the day," said acting district chief, Jeff Johnston. 

"There's just been so much turnover with people here over the years that I think some of the old crew members and animals, like the horses, they just like to hang around."

Most of his staff who have experienced these incidents tend to brush them off and laugh about it, Johnston said. For others, the strange timing felt like warning signs for dispatch calls they would receive a shortly thereafter. 

"We'd get a lot of alarms throughout the night, and I used to always be woken up about three to four minutes before an alarm went off, and I was good to go when it happened," said Captain Heather Stewart, who's worked at the fire department for 25 years.

"The weird thing is during that time period, dispatch would be getting all the information and getting ready to send us out, which we obviously wouldn't know until our lights came on and the tones came in."

Stewart said the fire hall's doorbells would randomly ring throughout the night and when officials went to the door, no one would be there. The area is large enough that they'd be able to see someone running away, she added. 

She acknowledged that electrical issues in the historic building may be responsible for the doorbells going off, but tried not to think too much about it, said Stewart. 

"All I knew was if there is such a thing as ghosts, this must be a friendly one because it never tried to hurt me," she said.

Although Johnston never experienced the bizarre incidents at Fire Hall No. 4, he said in the late 1990s, he witnessed a silhouette that would often frequent the old Fire Hall No. 7 on Highbury Avenue, which is now a demolished building.

'It's a little chilling' 

"It was about 2 a.m., I went into the dorm at night and I laid down. But five minutes later, I look over and see an elderly woman standing beside me and this other bed next to me with another firefighter there," he said

"She was looking down at him, and I saw her from the waist up. [She had] glasses, hair pulled back in a bun and I can kind of see through her. I rubbed my eyes and thought 'What am I looking at here?' and then the lights come on and we were paged out for an alarm."

He said he later informed his supervisor at the time, who laughed and told him that many others have also seen the same woman. Both Johnston and Stewart said the incidents only occurred occasionally at night, but they never felt unsafe in any of the fire halls they worked at. 

"It's a little chilling and gives you goosebumps but sometimes, its an OK thing," Johnston said.

"They're just visiting, or maybe we're visiting them."