As I write this in July 2023, Coutts Bank is suffering a tide of uncomfortable publicity over the closure of a bank account for the Brexit politician Nigel Farage. Amid the furore – and I may be the only one to recall all this – mention of the prestigious Coutts brings back for me some entirely different associations, memories of another time when the bank was caught up in controversy, long before anyone had heard of Mr Farage or his bank account. This was back in 1993, when the news was not about Coutts barring an unwanted customer but its efforts in ridding itself of an unwelcome ghost (see FT69:16, 80:19).
Generating breathless headlines such as ‘Haunted Coutts calls in the ghostbuster’ this was a story of alarmed bank staff, a 70-year-old medium named Eddie Burks, a distinguished aristocratic and titled family, a Roman Catholic priest and a ghostly Elizabethan noble beheaded in 1572. And though not mentioned at the time, it also has links with another ghost story and the mysterious death of a wealthy young lord in Norfolk in 1569.
It all began in 1992 when four reception staff at Coutts headquarters on the Strand, opposite Charing Cross Station, London, all reported strange manifestations. This was surprising since it was a building exuding modernity, constructed with reinforced glass, chrome and steel and with an escalator. Lights flickered on and off, temperature drops and electrical malfunctions occurred, and a dark shadowy figure was seen crossing the atrium. The ghost appeared male and with one witness reporting it seemingly lacked a head. Soon this inflated into stories of
