October in London for People Who Find Ghost Tours Boring: 21 Genuinely Dark Things to Do
Updated: Sep 29
Tired of ghost tours? Here are twenty-one things to do in London in October that actually have some darkness to them.
If your idea of celebrating October leans firmly toward historic true crime, unsettling masterpieces, and anatomical curiosities – and well clear of inflatable skeletons – you are in exactly the right city. These are the things actually worth your time this month: events where the darkness has some substance to it. Whether you are looking for things to do in London in October, these twenty-one picks are where to start.
21 Genuinely Dark Things to Do in London in October
1. Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam – Royal Academy of Arts
Best for: people who like their art with a genuinely disturbing backstory
Where: Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, W1J 0BD
When: Until Sunday 25 October 2026, Tuesday–Sunday 10 am–6 pm (Fridays until 9 pm)
Price: From £15; free for Friends of the RA and under-16s
Book: royalacademy.org.uk
Richard Dadd was a promising student at the Royal Academy Schools in the late 1830s. Then, in 1842, he travelled across the Eastern Mediterranean as a draughtsman, and something on that journey broke him. He came home suffering severe delusions – convinced that his father was the devil in disguise – and in August 1843 he stabbed him to death in a park in Kent. He was committed to Bethlem Hospital in 1844 and spent the next 42 years inside Bethlem and then Broadmoor, painting throughout.
This exhibition is the first major survey of his work in over fifty years, bringing together around 100 paintings, watercolours and drawings.
The most famous is The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, worked on at Bethlem between 1855 and 1864. Standing in front of it, knowing the circumstances in which it was made, is one of the stranger experiences available in a London gallery this year. It isn’t a cute fairy scene. It is an obsessively detailed, inch-by-inch miniature universe, painted by a man who had been inside an asylum for over a decade and would never leave.
Closes 25 October – this one has a hard deadline.
2. There’s a Body in the Cellar – London Month of the Dead
Best for: true-crime obsessives and anyone who has ever watched a forensics documentary and wanted to go further
Where: Mayfair Library, W1K 2AJ
When: Sunday 4 October 2026, 11 am – 5 pm
Price: Check London Month of the Dead website (events typically £20–40)
Every October, the London Month of the Dead runs over sixty events across the city, all themed around death and the macabre. The programme ranges from cemetery tours to candlelit HP Lovecraft readings, and tickets go within days of release.
There’s a Body in the Cellar is the most forensically rigorous thing on this list. Led by Professor Anna Williams, a forensic anthropologist with real police casework experience, and Dr Caley Mein, a forensic science lecturer, it’s a full-day immersive workshop in which you work with actual human skeletal remains. You learn to distinguish human bones from animal ones, work out age, sex and stature from skeletal evidence, and use dental and DNA analysis to identify the fictional victim. The scenario is fictional. The bones are not.
Currently sold out – check the site for returns, and bookmark the full programme. The Month of the Dead runs sixty-odd events in total, and even if this one is gone, there will be something worth your evening.
3. The Execution of Lady Jane Grey – The National Gallery
Best for: anyone who wants a genuinely moving experience without booking anything or spending a penny
Where: The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, WC2N 5DN
When: Open daily throughout October, 10 am–6 pm (Fridays until 9 pm)
Price: Free
Book: nationalgallery.org.uk
Paul Delaroche’s 1833 painting is one of the most viscerally affecting things in the National Gallery’s collection, and it tends to stop people mid-stride without warning.
The year is 1554. Lady Jane Grey – 17 years old, queen for nine days before Mary Tudor deposed her – kneels blindfolded at the execution block in the Tower of London. She cannot see. She is being guided toward the block by the Lieutenant of the Tower, her ladies-in-waiting behind her, one slumped to the floor and unable to watch. Delaroche has given her an expression of complete, bewildered dignity, and the painting is almost life-size. It is enormous, and it is devastating.
It asks nothing of you except to look.
4. Ramses and the Pharaohs’ Gold – NEON, Battersea Power Station
Best for: people who want the mummies and the gold presented properly, not as a theme-park experience
Where: NEON at Battersea Power Station, 2 Circus Road East, SW11 8DQ
When: Open throughout October and until 1 January 2027 (school holiday hours apply 25 Oct – 2 Nov)
Price: From £24.90 for adults
Book: neonatbps.co.uk
This is the connection: the Egyptian Avenue at Highgate Cemetery, entry 10 on this list, was built in 1839 to look like the entrance to a pharaoh’s tomb. For Victorians, ancient Egypt was the original aesthetic of death. This exhibition is where to go to understand why.
Ramses and the Pharaohs’ Gold brings 180 artefacts from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, many never before shown outside Egypt. These include the actual coffin of Ramses II, animal mummies, gold masks from the royal tombs of Tanis, and colossal stone heads. It has run in Paris, San Francisco, Sydney and Tokyo. The objects are the real thing, not reproductions.
Seeing Ramses II’s carved cedar coffin at the end of the exhibition, having spent an hour walking through the context of his reign, is the kind of moment that justifies the ticket price. Visit on a weekday morning if you can. It gets busy.
5. Blood Bath at the Wellcome Collection
Best for: people who want an October souvenir that isn’t a plastic pumpkin
Where: Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, NW1 2BE
When: Open Tuesday–Sunday throughout October
Price: Free entry to the permanent collection
Book: wellcomecollection.org
The Wellcome Collection explores what it means to be human, sick, and mortal. Its permanent collection – antique surgical instruments, wax anatomical models, objects from the history of medicine – tends to produce a strong reaction. Either it becomes somewhere you return to every year, or you walk in once and decide the preserved specimens are not for you.
The gift shop is worth it regardless. They currently stock “Blood Bath” shower gel packaged in an authentic-looking IV transfusion bag, in deep red, scented like cherries. It is the most specific October souvenir in London, and it costs about the same as a coffee.
6. You, The Jury: Ghosts and the Gallows – Bow Street Museum
Best for: people who like their Halloween intellectual and interactive
Where: Bow Street Museum of Crime and Justice, 28 Bow Street, Covent Garden, WC2E 7AW
When: Thursday 22 October 2026, 6:30 pm
Price: Check Eventbrite (typically £10–18 for Bow Street evening events)
Book: bowstreetmuseum.org.uk
The venue is the former Bow Street Magistrates’ Court and Police Station – Oscar Wilde was processed here, and so were the Kray twins. The event is run by Naomi Ryan, a practising criminal barrister. She takes actual historical English court cases – ones where judges and juries had to contend with supernatural claims – and puts them to a live audience.
Cases have included witches charged with leaking war secrets, poltergeists as legal witnesses, and ghosts credited with solving their own murders. The audience acts as the jury. The legal precedents are real. A demon mongoose named Gef apparently appeared before an English court and is, according to Ryan, one of the highlights of the evening.
7. The Haunting of Hill House – Richmond Theatre
Best for: literary horror enthusiasts; anyone who read the Jackson novel and wants to see it on stage
Where: Richmond Theatre, The Green, Richmond, TW9 1QJ
When: Tuesday 6 – Saturday 10 October 2026
Price: From around £15; check ATG Tickets for current pricing
Book: atgtickets.com
Shirley Jackson’s novel – Stephen King once called it “near perfect” – gets a new stage adaptation from Olivier and BAFTA-winning playwright Stef Smith, directed by Martin Constantine. Richmond is its only London stop before the tour moves on to Theatr Clwyd, Brighton, Manchester and Edinburgh.
This isn’t the Netflix adaptation. It goes back to Jackson’s novel: four investigators arriving at Hill House to document the supernatural and finding that the house has other ideas. Reviewers from the Salisbury Playhouse run describe it as quietly relentless rather than effects-heavy – atmosphere built slowly, grief worked through every wall. Worth the trip to Richmond.
8. Paranormal Activity – on UK Tour
Best for: theatre-goers who want something that will actually unsettle them
Where: UK tour – West End run at the Ambassadors Theatre closed 3 October; check current tour venues
When: Tour continues through November 2026
Price: From £35 at most venues
The stage adaptation is directed by Felix Barrett of Punchdrunk – the company behind Sleep No More. The register is less jump scare, more sustained dread: theatrical design doing the work that sound effects alone cannot. Written by Levi Holloway, it follows a couple who move from Chicago to London and discover, slowly, that places aren’t haunted. People are.
The West End run closed 3 October, but the production is mid-UK tour. Check the official website for where it is this week.
9. Murders in the Zoo + Satan’s Slave – Cinema Museum
Best for: film enthusiasts who want something that feels genuinely different from a multiplex evening
Where: The Cinema Museum, 2 Dugard Way, Kennington, SE11 4TH
When: Friday 9 October 2026, 7 pm
Price: Check cinemamuseum.org.uk; season membership £30 for six shows; non-member walk-in typically £7–12
Book: cinemamuseum.org.uk
The Cinema Museum is a Victorian workhouse. The most famous person who ever lived here, as a child, was Charlie Chaplin. The Gothique Film Society has been running horror double bills since 1966 – the oldest specialised horror film club in the country – and this October screening marks their 60th season.
Programme: Murders in the Zoo (1933), a pre-Code horror in which a jealous zoologist disposes of his wife’s lovers using the animals at his disposal, introduced by author Neil Pettigrew. Then Satan’s Slave (1976), a British horror in which a young woman is drawn into a devil cult run by her own family, introduced in person by director Norman J. Warren who brings his own 35mm print – the full uncut version.
Two expert introductions, two films, partial 35mm projection, a cinema that used to be a workhouse. Very good October Friday.
10. Guided Tour of Highgate Cemetery West
Best for: people who want the atmosphere of a Gothic cemetery without the inflatable decorations
Where: Highgate Cemetery, Swain’s Lane, N6 6PJ
When: Guided tours run multiple times daily throughout October
Price: £16 adults, £8 concessions (guided West Cemetery tour); East Cemetery entry from £6
Book: highgatecemetery.org
The West Cemetery is only accessible by guided tour, which is genuinely the right way to see it. You walk through the Egyptian Avenue – a corridor of family vaults built in 1839 to look like the entrance to a pharaoh’s tomb. It connects directly to that Battersea exhibition if you want to spend an October Saturday in thematic order. Beyond it lies the Circle of Lebanon, a ring of catacombs arranged around a 300-year-old cedar. Moss covers everything. Statues emerge from ivy.
The graves of people you’ve heard of are mostly in the East Cemetery, where Karl Marx is buried and which you can visit independently. The West is stranger, older, and harder to reach – which is probably why it’s better.
Tours fill up in October. Book in advance.
11. ShRIek: The Spooky Science of the Paranormal – Royal Institution
Best for: the curious-minded, and families with children who like their science with atmosphere
Where: The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, Mayfair, W1S 4BS
When: Saturday 31 October 2026, 2:30 pm – 3:45 pm (family show); check ri.ac.uk for adult evening performance
Price: Check rigb.org for current pricing
Book: rigb.org
On Halloween, the Royal Institution’s Faraday Theatre hosts ShRIek – a science show built around Victorian instruments and the question of whether every allegedly paranormal phenomenon has a rational explanation. Hosted by Steve McNeil (of the TV panel show WiFi Wars) and Michael Cutts from the RI’s demo team.
They use objects from the RI’s own historical collection to recreate the experiments and stage illusions that Victorian spirit mediums used to pass off as genuine contact with the dead. The afternoon performance (2:30–3:45 pm) is a family show designed for children and adults together. Check rigb.org to confirm whether the adult evening performance is also running.
12. Elegy – Ibraaz, Fitzrovia
Best for: people who want their dark October content to be genuinely challenging art rather than entertainment
Where: Ibraaz, Fitzrovia, W1T 1JY
When: Opens Thursday 8 October 2026, runs throughout the month
Price: Free; check ibraaz.org for details
Book: ibraaz.org
Artist Gabrielle Goliath’s autumn exhibition opens at Ibraaz on 8 October. Elegy is an immersive installation built around towering funerary monolith forms and sound works drawn from testimony and memory, intended as a space dedicated not to the performance of mourning but to mourning itself.
It is not comfortable. It is also one of the most serious things on this list.
13. Magic, Mystics and Martyrs Walking Tour
Best for: people who are bored of the same five Ripper streets
Where: Starts at The Monument, Monument Street, EC3R 8AH
When: Friday 30 October 2026, 6 pm
Price: Typically £15–20; check booking page for current price
Most October walking tours in the City go to the same five streets and cover the same five names. This one goes into the pre-Great Fire city to find the women – the mystics, the accused witches, the dissenters – who were tried, executed, or erased within the old walls. Their histories are considerably stranger than what the standard ghost-tour circuit usually serves up.
14. The Hunterian Museum
Best for: anyone who wants one of the most extraordinary free things in London that most people still don’t know about
Where: Royal College of Surgeons of England, 38–43 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Holborn, WC2A 3PE
When: Tuesday–Saturday throughout October, 10 am–5 pm
Price: Free (timed entry ticket recommended)
Book: hunterianmuseum.org
His collection, purchased by the government after his death, now fills several floors of the Royal College of Surgeons. There are thousands of specimens: anatomical jars, skeletal remains, surgical instruments, pathological curiosities. And the preserved body of Charles Byrne (the “Irish Giant”), whose acquisition by Hunter in 1783 is itself a whole other story.
It is not for everyone. But for the people it is for, this is a serious contender for the most affecting free experience in central London. Spend time with it. The Wednesday afternoon curator tour is unhurried and very good.
15. Francis Bacon’s Triptychs – Tate Britain
Best for: people who want to be genuinely disturbed by a painting in a major free gallery
Where: Tate Britain, Millbank, SW1P 4RG
When: Daily throughout October, 10 am–6 pm
Price: Free (permanent collection)
Book: tate.org.uk
Two Bacon triptychs are in the permanent collection at Tate Britain, both worth going specifically to see.
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) comes first: three screaming, eyeless creatures on a burnt orange ground. Each neck is elongated into something that looks like it should not be able to support a head.
Bacon painted it in two weeks under what he described as “tremendous hangovers and drink.” It was first shown publicly in April 1945, the same week photographs from Bergen-Belsen began appearing in British newspapers. The timing was accidental and the critics said so anyway. He called the figures the Furies – the Greek goddesses of vengeance who pursue the guilty after death – and declined to explain further.
Triptych August 1972 is the other. It is from the Black Triptych series Bacon painted after his lover George Dyer killed himself in a Paris hotel bathroom in 1971, the night before Bacon’s retrospective opened at the Grand Palais. The central panel contains a bird-like creature with a snarling human mouth. Bacon kept painting Dyer for years after his death.
Both are free. They are not comfortable paintings to stand in front of and that is the point.
16. Sir John Soane’s Museum – the Seti I Sarcophagus
Best for: people who want the most atmospheric free room in London
Where: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Holborn, WC2A 3BP
When: Wednesday–Sunday throughout October, 10 am–5 pm (last entry 4:30 pm)
Price: Free (timed ticket required – book ahead at soane.org)
Book: soane.org
Sir John Soane designed the Bank of England. He also built himself a labyrinthine house in Holborn and filled it with plaster casts of Roman monuments, Greek vases, and a fictional ruined Gothic abbey in the garden. He invented a monk named Padre Giovanni who was transparently himself, and died having arranged for Parliament to preserve it all exactly as it stood. It has been a public museum since 1837.
In 1824, Soane bought the alabaster sarcophagus of Seti I after the British Museum turned it down for being too expensive. It was carved around 1279 BC and inscribed with the sky goddess Nut to guide the dead into the afterlife. He paid £2,000 to the widow of Giovanni Belzoni, the former circus strongman who had pulled it from the Valley of the Kings.
He was so pleased that he threw a three-day party for over a thousand guests. London society came down to the basement by candlelight; he lit the sarcophagus from within so the alabaster glowed amber. The museum still recreates that lighting on its monthly candlelit evenings.
For a regular visit, the sarcophagus sits in the Sepulchral Chamber surrounded by funerary casts and obelisks. It is about three metres from a plaster cast believed to be the death mask of Oliver Cromwell.
17. The Freud Museum – 2,000 Antiquities Watching You
Best for: people interested in what a collector’s obsession looks like when the collector is Sigmund Freud
Where: 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, NW3 5SX
When: Wednesday–Sunday throughout October, 10:30 am–5 pm
Price: £14.50 adults
Book: freud.org.uk
Freud fled Vienna in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria. He was allowed to take his furniture, his library, and his antiquities collection – nearly 2,000 objects. When he arrived in London, his housekeeper Paula Fichtl reassembled the study from memory, placing every figurine back exactly where it had stood at Berggasse 19 in Vienna. He died here in September 1939. The house stayed in the family until Anna Freud’s death in 1982, then became a museum at her wish.
What stops people in the study doorway is the density of it. Ancient Egyptian gods, Greek figures, Roman bronzes, Chinese jade, a Peruvian mummy cloth – covering every surface, filling every cabinet, arranged along the desk where Freud wrote until the early hours. Some of them he placed deliberately to face him while he worked.
The current special exhibition, 40 Objects, 40 Years, runs throughout 2026 to mark the museum’s fortieth anniversary. It brings objects out of the study cabinets and into proper display for the first time – some of them not publicly visible since they left Vienna.
18. Dennis Severs’ House – Silent Nights
Best for: the single strangest evening available in London this October
Where: 18 Folgate Street, Spitalfields, E1 6BX
When: Silent Night evening visits throughout October; check dennissevershouse.co.uk for specific dates
Price: £25 for Silent Night visits; £16 for daytime relaxed visits
Book: dennissevershouse.co.uk
Dennis Severs was an eccentric Californian who arrived in London in the late 1970s and bought a derelict Georgian terraced house in Spitalfields. He invented a fictional Huguenot silk-weaving family – the Jervisses – who had lived there from 1724 to 1914. Twenty years went into staging each of the ten rooms as if that family had stepped out moments before.
The Silent Night visits are what October calls for. You go in the evening, when the house is lit only by candlelight and firelight. No talking. You move through the rooms in near silence, attended only by the ticking of clocks, the creak of floorboards, and the occasional sound of footsteps above you that might be staff and might not be. It is not haunted. It is considerably stranger than haunted.
Book well ahead. Evening slots sell out.
19. The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities – Hackney
Best for: people who want dodo bones, a two-headed lamb and an absinthe cocktail under one roof
Where: 11 Mare Street, Hackney, E8 4RP
When: Tuesday–Friday 3 pm–10 pm; Saturday–Sunday noon–10 pm
Price: £12 adults, £8 concessions
The collection runs from dodo bones and shrunken heads through two-headed lambs, thylacine specimens and Fiji mermaids. It also holds McDonald’s Happy Meal toys arranged without apparent irony alongside Old Master etchings, and the largest collection of work by occultist artist Austin Osman Spare currently on public display anywhere.
The framing is deliberately that of a 17th-century Kunstkammer – a cabinet of curiosities assembled on aesthetic and associative logic rather than taxonomy, with no attempt to explain what any of it means. In October there are specific events: a storytelling evening in the museum on 5 October, and a guided tour of the basement collection with Wynd himself on 6 October. Both book quickly.
20. The Grant Museum of Zoology – UCL
Best for: the most overlooked free natural history collection in London
Where: UCL Rockefeller Building, 21 University Street, WC1E 6DE
When: Tuesday–Friday 1 pm–5 pm; Saturday 11 am–5 pm
Price: Free
The Grant Museum of Zoology sits inside a UCL university building on a quiet street near Euston that most visitors to London never find. It has been there since 1827. The whole collection – around 68,000 specimens from across the animal kingdom – occupies a single Victorian room, floor-to-ceiling cases of skeletons, mounted animals and wet specimens.
The quagga skeleton is one of seven left in the world. The last quagga died in 1883. There are dodo bones. There are thylacine specimens from an animal extinct since the 1930s. There is a jar containing eighteen moles, which is exactly what it sounds like, and which has become famous enough to have its own pin badge in the gift shop.
The museum is free, takes about forty-five minutes, and is genuinely one of the best things in London that most people in London have never been to.
21. Wandsworth Prison Museum – Heathfield Road
Best for: people who want the real machinery of Victorian punishment, not an actor in a costume
Where: North Gate car park, HMP Wandsworth, Heathfield Road, SW18 3HR
When: By appointment only in October; the open weekends are usually in June
Price: Free on open weekends; ask when you arrange an appointment
Book: email wandsworthprisonmuseum@justice.gov.uk
This one takes planning. The museum sits in a car park outside the gate of a working Victorian prison. It is run by a serving prison officer as a volunteer, so there are no walk-in hours. Email well ahead.
Inside it is one small, crammed room. Nooses hang from a wooden frame. There is a blue cell door, a judge's black cap, and a photograph of the gallows, which were kept in working order at Wandsworth until 1993. Oscar Wilde and Ronnie Biggs both passed through this prison.
I went on a grey Sunday, and the whole area felt creepy. Everything I saw inside is in my guide to the Wandsworth Prison Museum.
Which one are you going to?
Between Victorian murderers, anatomical collections, haunted houses and genuinely unsettling art, there is more than enough darkness to fill the month. Most of it is considerably stranger than anything you’ll find on a standard walking tour.
Book early, particularly for the smaller events and the Month of the Dead programme. And embrace the fact that the best October experiences in London are rarely the ones with the most ghosts.
All event details are correct as of September 2026. Dates, prices and availability can change – check the relevant booking pages before travelling.
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