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American History

Queen Victoria’s Chimney Stalker and Other Creepy Moments From History

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex - Buckingham Palace
Queen Victoria's most famous stalker was a begrimed urchin. Iluminasi

37. The Stalker and the Queen’s Panties

A soot and grease begrimed urchin. Timeline

Thomas Flower’s stalking of Queen Victoria was creepy, but it paled in comparison to the stalking of Edward Jones, a teenager dubbed “Boy Jones” by palace staff. Around 5 AM on December 14th, 1838, a palace servant saw a gargoyle of a face in a window, that appeared to be smudged with soot, and belonging to an ugly youth who was impishly grinning at him. Investigation revealed that a palace room had been ransacked, so the alarm was sounded, and the hunt for the intruder was on.

A constable spotted a teenager outside the palace, gave chase, tackled, seized, and hauled him in. A closer look revealed that the arrestee was an unfortunately featured young man, whose face and clothes were covered in grease and soot. He was wearing two pairs of pants, and when the outer one was removed, several pairs of ladies’ drawers fell out – Queen Victoria’s panties.

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A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.

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