Halloween Horror With Adam Wood At The Anglican Chapel, London Road Cemetery, Coventry, 30 October

Coventry’s ghost talk for Halloween takes place inside a cemetery chapel, and the tickets have already gone. Historian Adam Wood tells real recorded tales of hauntings and grim deaths from old Coventry at the Anglican Chapel in Paxton’s Arboretum, London Road Cemetery, at 7pm on Friday 30 October, and Historic Coventry Trust lists the event as sold out.

• Date: Friday 30 October 2026
• Start: 7pm
• Venue: Anglican Chapel, Paxton’s Arboretum, London Road Cemetery, Coventry CV1 2JT
• Tickets: £12, through Historic Coventry Trust’s Ticketsolve page
• Availability: Sold out at the time of writing

The Facebook header shows “12 PM PDT”, which is noon on the American west coast and 7pm in Coventry on the same day. The talk starts at 7pm local time. Doors, running time and a minimum age are not stated on the event page, so anyone with a ticket and a question should ask the Trust directly.

Four Stories Are Named On The Bill

The talk draws on reported hauntings and unpleasant deaths from Coventry’s past, and the Trust’s page names four of them.

• A policeman’s encounter with a weeping figure at Charterhouse
• A pale shape seen moving outside the cemetery wall, so the venue itself has a story
• A severed arm holding a torch, said to have appeared at St Michael’s
• Footsteps heard by two men sitting up overnight with a body in an empty house

Wood presents these as accounts people recorded at the time, not as fiction written for the night, which is the difference between this talk and a ghost walk with an actor in a cloak.

Adam Wood Edited Ripperologist For 25 Years

Wood is a Coventry author, speaker and tour guide whose subject is historical crime. He was executive editor of Ripperologist, the long-running journal on the Whitechapel murders, for more than 25 years, and in 2023 he launched Crime Through Time. A speaker with that background will have read the inquest reports and newspaper columns the stories came from, so the detail should hold up to a question from the floor.

The Chapel Was Built In 1847 And Restored Recently

The Anglican Chapel is Grade II listed and dates from 1847, the year the cemetery opened. It was restored through a project between Historic Coventry Trust and Coventry City Council and now hosts talks and events through the year. Refreshments are available on the night, there are wheelchair-accessible toilets, and the Trust warns that the cemetery paths are uneven, which matters on a dark evening at the end of October.

Getting There Takes 15 Minutes On Foot

• From Coventry station or the city centre, the Trust puts the walk at 15 to 20 minutes
• Drivers should use the Charterhouse car park on London Road, CV1 2JR, where charges apply, and enter the cemetery through the carriageway entrance
• A torch is worth carrying, given the paths and the hour

London Road Cemetery was laid out by Joseph Paxton, the gardener who went on to design the Crystal Palace, and the grounds are registered Grade I as a historic park, one of only a handful of cemeteries in England with that grade. The arboretum in the venue’s name is Paxton’s planting, so the trees the audience walks under to reach the chapel are part of the exhibit.

Historic Coventry Trust Is The Organiser

The event is run by Historic Coventry Trust, the charity that looks after Charterhouse, the London Road Cemetery chapels and several other historic buildings in the city, with the chapel’s own Facebook page as co-host. It is a talk, not a tour or a theatrical scare event, and it is not a Coventry City Council event, though the council was a partner in restoring the chapel. With the date sold out, the Trust’s what’s-on page is the place to watch for a returned ticket or a repeat.