Day Twenty Four: Jack the Ripper Tour

Tuesday October 18th, 2011

No class, but homework still exists for Richard today. I tried to blog some, as well as got us tickets to the late-night London Jack the Ripper tour, in honor of upcoming Halloween. I bought tickets with http://www.thejacktherippertour.com/ a company that advertised a new type of technology which was basically a portable projector which allowed them to display images on any surface (brick and concrete walls mostly) which I thought would definitely add to the spooky factor.

After meeting up with our tour guide at the Aldgate East Tube station (near Whitechapel), we started off, ready to be throughly scared.  Our guide was a petite dark-haired girl with a satisfyingly loud voice and the wealth of knowledge of a dedicated Ripperologist. (One who makes a study of Jack the Ripper).

Unfortunately, I wish I had known just a bit more beforehand about Jack the Ripper before embarking on a tour down dark alleys, moreover, a tour with visuals. All I had known beforehand was that he was a serial killer - I, previous to the tour, was unaware that he was a serial killer with unsual patterns of severe mutilations of his all-female victims. Ewwwww!!! and, umm, Eewwwwww!!

Guess I probably could have figured it out from the name of the guy - But. Had not.

As you can see below - the picture projection was kind of smallish and underwhelming - I was thinking like, movie screen size in my head - but still, I think visuals did make the tour a lot more interesting AND a lot more disturbing. Seeing photographs of the women who died - before AND after in some cases - well. Yeah.

I do wish that I had written down more about the tour closer to when we took it, because maybe then I could remember the place the two spooky buildings below had in the tale.

One of the rather more interesting things for Letty during the tour was the slight shortcut we took through a thoroughly picturesque tiny British street in the middle of the Ripper's old stomping grounds. My camera practically jumped in my hands when my guide informed us it was one of the filming locations for Diagon Alley of Harry Potter fame. The video below is not real great, but it should give ya'll a look around it anyway.

All said and I done I did throughly enjoy the tour. It was definitely uber-creepy to be standing on the same cobblestones as Jack the Ripper did when he stalked his next victim - I've never visited the scene of any murder before, and so this tour definitely hit all my creep factor nerve endings. Not sure I will be taking any more after-dark jaunts anywhere in London for the rest of our time here. Perhaps I should have saved this tour til the end of our stay...

After going on the tour with Ripper Vision, I think I would like to take it again, either with London Walks (their guides are ALWAYS amazing - they are the best at EVERYTHING else in London, so why not this. Or else with Discovery Tours http://www.jack-the-ripper-tour.com/ because everyone on tripadvisor seemed to love them too. I'm not saying ours was deficient in any way - I'm just saying I picked it for the multi-media aspect, which no one else has. For pure facts and/or storytelling capacity and subject expertise a different firm could be better - our gal was great, but was clearly too young to have spent decades studying the subject like the guides from other tour companies. (Yes, there are many, many, many Jack the Ripper Tour companies that operate year round- who'd have thought? Your first clue was the fact that Ripperologist is NOT a word I made up.)