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The Suicide Phantoms
The Cleopatra’s needle in London is one of a trio of obelisks that are located in London, Paris and New York City, each of them are made from red granite, stand about 68 feet high, weight about 180 tons and are inscribed with hieroglyphics.
The needles are genuine, but have no connection to Cleopatra as they were erected on the order of Thutmose III in about 1450 BC; the inscriptions were added about 200 years later by Ramses II to commemorate his military victories.
The London obelisk is located on the Victoria Embankment in Westminster near the Golden Jubilee Bridges. It was presented to the UK in 1819 by Mehemet Ali, viceroy of Egypt in commemoration of the victories of Lord Nelson at the Battle of the Nile and Sir Ralph Abercromby at the Battle of Alexandria in 1801.
The Obelisk remained in Alexandria until 1877 when Sir William James Erasmus Wilson paid the large sum of £10,000 for it’s transportation to London. It was dug out of the sand in which it had been buried for almost 2000 years and was encased in a large iron cylinder floating pontoon named "The Cleopatra" which was to be towed to London by the ship Olga.
The transportation nearly ended in disaster and cost six lives on 14th October 1877 when the Cleopatra was capsized in a storm in the Bay of Biscay, but it did not sink and drifted in the Bay until it was rescued by the English ship Fitzmaurice and taken to Spain when the pontoon was repaired. It finally arrived in Gravesend on 21st January 1878 and was erected on the Victoria Embankment the following August.
Cleopatra’s Needle is flanked by two fake bronze sphinxes, on the 4th September 1914 during WW1 there was a German air raid near to the site and the shrapnel holes and gouges can still be seen on the right hand sphinx.
The main ghost stories associated with the needle involve suicide phantoms, one story tells of two separate Policemen being stopped by a woman urging them to come to the banks of the River Thames because someone was about to jump in, only for them to get to the banks near to Cleopatra’s Needle to see a woman in identical dress as the one that approached them toss herself into the River.
There are also accounts of a tall, naked figure that jumps from the parapet by the obelisk into the River on foggy or misty nights, but who doesn’t make a splash when he hits the water.
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