Cursed gifts and untold visions: The Headless Statues of Crystal Palace Park

There is much to be written about the drifts of psychic memory that swirl through Crystal Palace Park. The famous dinosaurs are a petrified glimpse into the knowledge and preoccupations of Victorian science. A deserted and beautiful subway lies hidden under an A road, a reminder of the long-demolished railway station it once served. And root-mangled stairways lead to shabby remnants of 20th Century concrete utopianism.

Keep wandering. The vast, splintering void of the soggily marooned concert stage beckons you to who-knows-where. The maze is said to be London’s largest; it is certainly its hardest to escape. The park’s resident crows guard crumbling Italianate terraces and peck at the charged ground of the burned-down Crystal Palace itself, which had been intended by the Victorians to be a permanent beacon of culture, sciences and the arts.

But all of that is for another time.

This post will be a short summing up of one of the more tangible (albeit only recently documented) phenomena: the apparent emergence of vision-inducing powers in a number of the park’s headless statues.

In each case, reports seemed to begin at around the turn of the millennium.

‘Dante’

This manuscript-clutching gentleman is said to be a representation of Dante, who’s Inferno famously begins in a dark, impenetrable wood. It is unclear whether this claim predates the number of reports in which those who have come into contact with it find themselves standing in the middle of a thick, shadowy wood or forest.

For most, this vision seems to be fleeting and apparently harmless – the worst case being the commenter on an online forum who wrote that since touching the statue and experiencing the vision, a burning sensation occurs in his right hand whenever he enters a wooded area.

The Hollow Woman

This one bites a little harder, so it is just as well she is up on a plinth, currently fenced off. In 2011, a woman grasping the statue while clambering up to get a better photo of the park and the distant North Downs, found herself suddenly and frighteningly transported to a ‘black and hellish’ dimension of unknown definition.

It took the very loud shouts of her boyfriend to pull her back from this vision and give her the will to remove her hand. Luckily, her subsequent dazed fall landed her on the three-foot-drop side of the wall, not the fifteen-foot-drop side.

Others who have placed a hand on the statue have described finding themselves horrifyingly breathless, adrift in a vast galaxy of stars.

Either way, we wouldn’t risk it.

The Seated Woman

This one, situated at the top of the park – not far from the historical site of the Crystal Palace – is to be avoided at all costs. In 2004, a schoolboy using the statue as a goalpost rested his hand on her shoulder while defending a corner. It took the boy’s friends several minutes to prise his hand free, during which time the unfortunate victim had been locked in a ‘terrified trance’.

No-one knows what he saw, because he has been unable to communicate since, but his parents told a local reporter in 2014 that a decade on, their son’s nights were still plagued by relentless, screaming nightmares, and while awake their ‘ghostlike’ son was cursed by a chronic fear of music, poetry and prose.

• Candidate: The Crystal Palace Headless Statues
• Type: ‘Vision’ type gateways
• Status: Presumed Active