The Ghost Bus of Kensington is one of London's more distinctive paranormal traditions for the sheer ordinariness of its supposed vehicle, not a black carriage or a phantom horseman but a London Transport double-decker bus, the number 7, behaving as though it were following its ordinary route at an hour when no scheduled service was actually running. Through the early 1930s, the junction of Cambridge Gardens and St Mark's Road near Ladbroke Grove developed a marked local reputation for accidents that drivers themselves struggled to explain, several describing swerving hard to avoid a bus that had appeared suddenly in front of them, always reported around 1.15 in the morning, only for the vehicle to vanish rather than continue on its way.
The story's most striking and most frequently repeated detail is that this was not purely a matter of driver rumour: following a fatal collision at the junction, a coroner's inquest is said to have returned a verdict that formally named a phantom bus as a contributing factor to the crash, an official, legally recorded acknowledgement of a claimed supernatural cause that is genuinely rare among this register's many private ghost sightings. Whether the inquest record survives in a form that could be independently verified today has not been confirmed for this entry, and the story as it circulates now rests heavily on this repeated but secondhand claim about the coroner's own conclusion.
Whatever the precise legal record actually said, the pattern of accidents at the junction during this period appears to have been real enough to generate sustained local concern and press coverage at the time, giving the Ghost Bus of Kensington an unusual character among London's paranormal traditions: a haunting defined not by a single witnessed apparition but by a cluster of dangerous traffic incidents that a contemporary official body was, by local account, willing to attribute in part to something other than ordinary road conditions.
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