Ghosts and ghouls

The sun is shining on a bustling East End, yet I feel a chill. The reason? I'm being given a tour of the very places where five prostitutes were found murdered and mutilated more than a century ago.

My tour guide, Richard Jones, is talking with a bit too much enthusiasm about his favourite subject. If anyone can shed light on the identity of London's most famous criminal son, it could be him.

East London in the 1880s was a tough place - overcrowded, poor and filled with the uneducated. Whitechapel covered just one square mile and played host to 67,000 people - 1,200 of whom were prostitutes.

The first murder happened on August 31, 1888, sending the media and public into a frenzy. Most of the suspects were unfairly thought to be from the Jewish and Polish areas of Whitechapel - which caused waves of anti-Semitism and racial hatred. The police not only had a killer on their hands but now, it seemed, possible riots. As the murders continued, the police became more frantic and more desperate, taking to the dark streets of Whitechapel dressed as prostitutes. Jack The Ripper was humiliating everyone.

Then, on the night of Mary Kelly's death on November 9, 1888 - two months after the first body was found - the murders stopped. She was his last victim but perhaps endured the most violent and gruesome killing: Jack The Ripper left a skinned, mutilated carcass.

In his 1910 memoirs, Sir Robert Anderson, who worked closely on the case, refers to a poor Polish Jew known as Kosminski as Jack The Ripper. Yet he was never brought to trial, maintaining the mystery. Jack The Ripper personified both the violent Victorian East End and the middleclass fears. 'He entered the national consciousness,' Richard tells me as we amble past Aldgate Tube, concluding a tour which has taken in the areas around Petticoat Lane and Spitalfields Market.

The period houses and quiet pebbled alleyways become brothels, boarding-houses and hives of violence as he points them out.

But are such tours popular with Londoners themselves?

'Yes,' he tells me. 'Some may think that such a tour glorifies violence towards women. The truth is that the majority of people on these tours are women, who often know each other through work and then go for a curry in Brick Lane after.

'I also get 14 and 15-year-old school children - Jack The Ripper is now on some school curriculums.

'Everyone who comes on my tours is simply curious. And so they should be.'

To book a tour with Richard you can contact him on 020 8530 8443 or visit www.haunted-britain.com Walking Haunted London (New Holland Publishers, £9.99) is available now.