It was a pretty freaky sight.
If you were walking through the centre of London yesterday morning, you might have thought you were in a scene from the Book of Revelation.
Behold a white horse, its hoofs and chest apparently covered in blood, galloping through the city streets alongside a similarly riderless black one.
You look up, and the clock on Big Ben – that paragon of reassuring reliability in the capital – has stopped at 9am. Its bongs are not ringing out as normal.
At that point, you’re probably expecting the ground to crack open beneath you as the sky fills with wailing souls and Night on Bald Mountain blares out.
But no. Two chilling portents just happened to occur at the same time in the same part of the city.
The horses were two of five from the Household Cavalry that had been spooked by noise from a building site near Buckingham Palace.
A pair of them, named Vida and Quaker, are in a ‘relatively serious condition’ and have undergone surgery, the Army later said.
Meanwhile, a team of engineers worked to fix the clock issue on the Elizabeth Tower – widely known as Big Ben – yesterday morning.
By 10.15am, it was showing the correct time and bonging as it should.
That didn’t stop people from freaking out slightly on social media, though.
In a popular post on X, Erica Buist wrote: ‘Big Ben has stopped and there are blood covered horses running through the streets of London.
‘Maybe someone should check on the ravens in the Tower because this feels a LOT like a season finale.’
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Gyll King added: ‘Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if this isn’t some herald of the Apocalypse, so dystopic this nation has become.’
‘This is 100% something a One Eyed Witch would warn as a sign of some disaster about to happen,’ wrote Doc Strangelove.
At time of writing, Armageddon has not arrived in London. But we might start listening to some of those ‘end times’ preachers a little more closely than usual.
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