Ghosts · London

Captain Bell and the Old Man in White

King Street and Whitehall, Westminster

Family-friendly

Captain Henry Bell had spent years abroad on the King's business, and he could read German. One day a German gentleman, Caspar von Sparr, sent him a very rare book: a copy of Martin Luther's <i>Table Talk</i>. Nearly every copy had been burned, and anyone found with one might be put to death. Von Sparr was too frightened to keep it and couldn't bear to destroy it, so he begged Captain Bell to put it into English.

Bell meant to. He began the translation again and again, but every time some other business called him away, and he never got any further.

About six weeks after the book arrived, he was lying in bed one night between twelve and one o'clock. His wife was asleep, but he was still awake. Suddenly an old man was standing by his bed, dressed in white, with a long broad white beard hanging down to his belt. The old man took him by the right ear and said:

Sirrah, will not you take time to translatethat book which is sent unto you out of Germany?I will provide for you both place and time to do it.the old man's words, as Bell remembered them

And then he vanished. Bell broke out in such a sweat that his wife woke and asked what was the matter. He told her. But he was not a man to take any notice of visions and dreams, and he soon forgot all about it.

About a fortnight later, on a Sunday, he went to Whitehall to hear the sermon, and came home to his lodgings in King Street, Westminster, for dinner. He had just sat down with his wife when two messengers arrived from the King's Council with orders to take him to the Gatehouse prison at Westminster and keep him there.

Nobody told him why. He was kept locked up for ten years, and he spent five of them translating Luther's book. “I found the words very true,” he wrote, “which the old man in the aforesaid vision said unto me.”

No plate yet. We are still looking for an old picture of this place.

What people said

  • The real reason. John Aubrey heard that Bell had really been locked up because he kept pestering the Lord Treasurer for a large sum of back pay, and the Lord Treasurer, not wanting to pay, “clapt him up into prison.”

Other tellings

  • The earliest telling. Bell told the story himself in the preface to his English translation of Luther's Table Talk. [TODO: the date of Bell's translation and a free copy]
  • John Aubrey retold it in his Miscellanies (1696), and John Ingram took it from Aubrey in 1884.

What the history says

Ingram says, from Bell, that the book had been condemned by Pope Gregory XIII and its copies ordered to be burned, and that von Sparr found a surviving copy in 1626. [TODO: check these details, and Bell's dates, against a modern history source]

[TODO: where King Street ran, and what stands there now]

Go and See

Where
Whitehall, Westminster. The pin marks the Banqueting House on Whitehall, near where Bell went to hear the sermon.
Access
Whitehall is a public street.
Allow
A few minutes.
Families
A gentle, rather funny tale. The ghost is kind, and it's the government that's frightening.

Visiting details checked 24 October 2026 with OpenStreetMap. Always check before you travel.

51.5046° N, 0.1259° W · Open in OpenStreetMap

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Sources

  1. John H. Ingram, The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain (1884; illustrated edition 1897), “Westminster: King Street”, quoting Bell's account as given in Aubrey's Miscellanies. Internet Archive.
  2. John Aubrey, Miscellanies (1696), as quoted by Ingram.

This is a legend, told as people told it. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.