I do not know if ghosts are ever seen about Connaught Square. I can find no trace of spectral visitors disturbing the well-to-do people who pass their lives agreeably in this now fashionable quarter. But if there be any truth in psychical phenomena,—if, indeed, it be a fact that the unsubstantial shades of men love in the stillness of the night to revisit the scenes where they met a violent end,—surely they should marshal here, not singly nor in groups, but in whole battalions, creeping between the motor broughams which noiselessly come and go, or the busier traffic which runs along by Park Lane and Oxford Street. When King Charles II. came back “to his own” in 1660, the triangular gallows at Tyburn was evidently a structure of respectable antiquity. Already it was known to all the populace by its nickname of the “Triple Tree,” which it kept for more than a century. Death was a common state at Tyburn; it was, however, reserved for this strange, easy-going, good-natured voluptuary to hang men who were already dead there. Amid all the horrible scenes enacted at Tyburn, none are more ghastly than the stupid, purposeless indignities wreaked by Charles and his licentious Parliament, a year after his restoration, on the bodies of the regicides, whom death had withdrawn from his active vengeance. The story is briefly told in the little weekly sheet which served the purpose of a newspaper in those days:[3] “This day, Jan. 30, (we need say no more but name the day of the Moneth) was doubly observed, not onely by a Solemn Fast, Sermons and Prayers at every Parish Church, for the precious of our late pious Sovereign King Charles the First of ever glorious Memory; but also by publick dragging those odious carcasses of Oliver Cromwel, Henry Ireton, and John Bradshaw, to Tyburne. On Monday night, Cromwel and Ireton were drawn to Holborn from Westminster, where they were digged up on Saturday last, and the next morning Bradshaw. To-day they were drawn upon Sledges to Tyburne; all the way (as before from Westminster) the universal out-cry and curses of the people went along with them. When these three carcasses were at Tyburn, they were pull’d out of their Coffins, and hang’d at the several angles of that Triple Tree, where they hung till the Sun was set; after which, they were taken down, their heads cut off, and their loathsome trunks thrown into a deep hole under the gallows.”