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There are plenty of movies about horrible things that happen on the London Underground – Creep and Death Line to name a few (not big features as we know) to make even the most frequent Tube rider of his next travel. But there are also many parts of the subway network that are really scary in real life and drive us insane, especially at night.
So what about London’s deepest London Underground station – Hampstead – which takes you 58.5 meters below Hampstead Hill? Wandering around here is probably enough to freak out even the least claustrophobic among us. But what if you get on the elevator at that deepest station on the subway and something goes wrong?
That’s exactly what happened in 2008, when an elevator in Hampstead fell a shocking 200 feet down the shaft. As reported by Ham & High newspaper in 2008, a group of about 15 commuters in the broken elevator cried out in fear when it suddenly, without warning, fell down London’s deepest elevator shaft just after 10pm.
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The newspaper spoke to an understandably devastated Roger Juer, 63, who was trapped in the elevator during the freak accident. He said it was “like something out of a Hollywood horror movie”.
“It was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced,” he added. “The girls in the elevator were screaming and some of us thought that was it. We thought the elevator would hit the ground. I tried to bend over on my knees a bit so my legs wouldn’t break on landing.”
Somehow the elevator righted itself just before it reached the bottom of the shaft, but the passengers were still stuck inside. There was a phone behind a pane of glass, but they couldn’t open it. The traumatized passengers hit the alarm button, but station staff did not respond.
They banged on the elevator doors like crazy, and finally they opened.
“As we got off the lift we tried to contact the station’s control room via the communications system but there was no reply,” said Mr Juer of Adelaide Road, Swiss Cottage, “some of us decided to climb the stairs – all 300 of it – which at 63 is quite a lot.
“When we got to the top, we found three station employees who didn’t seem too bothered. I was so shocked by the whole thing that I was like a zombie the whole next day.” Mr Juer left the train station as quickly as he could and made his way to the Flask pub just in time for final orders to calm his nerves calm.
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Well I guess after that we all need a beer! But that’s far from the only time passengers have gotten stuck in the infamous elevators. As the local paper for the area, Ham & High has rightly kept a close eye on the workings of London’s deepest lifts. It has made freedom of information requests, and in 2013 these found that between January and mid-October of that year, the elevators broke down 90 times – about once every three days.
And the rate rose at once every two days after replacing two lifts at a cost of £800,000 each in July. On a sweltering July day, passengers were once stuck in one of the elevators for 30 minutes and had to be taken through a side wall and down a slope to the second elevator.
Let us know if you got stuck here or at any other London Underground station, or have a spooky Tube story to tell. Email to [email protected]
