The City of London Cemetery, opened in 1856 and Grade I listed, is a large municipal cemetery and crematorium at Manor Park, in the London Borough of Newham. Its burials include Catherine Eddowes and Mary Ann Nichols, two victims of Jack the Ripper, and Percy Thompson, whose murder in 1922 was a famous case. It is also the final resting place of the soft-tissue remains of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man.
The anomaly reported there is a light. According to the Newham Recorder, since the mid-1970s locals have complained about a brilliant orange light coming from one of the tombstones in the western section of the cemetery, and investigators have found no source of any light that could explain it. Spooky Isles puts it in similar terms: locals were perplexed when a gravestone in the western sector began glowing bright orange, and despite investigation the cause was not found.
Neither source names the grave, the investigators or any date beyond the mid-1970s, and a glow from a polished stone catching street or vehicle lights is an obvious ordinary explanation that neither article rules out. The story is a single local tradition, repeated by two outlets, and is tagged as such. It may be compared with the Plaistow cemetery scare of 1889, where a granite tombstone caught the light. The pin is approximate, since the western section is not mapped in the sources.
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