The Old Operating Theatre Museum

Hidden in the garret of St Thomas’s Church, The Old Operating Theatre Museum preserves a place of extraordinary suffering from the pre-anesthetic era of surgery. This Victorian operating theatre, where conscious patients endured amputations and other brutal procedures, is considered one of London’s most haunted locations. Staff and visitors report hearing agonized screams and moans emanating from the theatre itself, despite the space being empty. These phantom cries are most often reported during evening hours and seem to come from the wooden operating table at the room’s center.

The museum’s collection of surgical instruments and preserved specimens appears to carry residual energy from the trauma witnessed within these walls. Security personnel working overnight shifts describe seeing shadowy figures writhing on the operating table, accompanied by the sound of sawing and the smell of blood and ether. Some witnesses report encountering the ghost of a nurse or surgeon in period dress, moving among the exhibits as if still preparing for procedures that ended over a century ago.

The herb garret, where medicinal plants were dried before the space became an operating theatre, experiences its own distinct phenomena. Visitors and staff report sudden feelings of overwhelming dread and nausea, particularly when standing near the operating table. Some describe experiencing vivid, disturbing visions of surgical procedures being performed on conscious, screaming patients. The wooden floorboards are said to still be stained with the blood of those who died here, and several psychics who have visited claim the space retains such powerful traumatic imprints that it may never be truly free of its ghostly patients.