An unusual ghost from Shropshire - how can it shriek without a head?
By Richard Holland
Whittington is a village in north Shropshire distinguished by the rather pretty remains of a moated castle. According to several correspondents of a long defunct Welsh Borders journal called ‘Bye-gones’, the road between Whittington and the neighbouring village of Gobowen was the haunt of a very weird ghost. Its area of activity was a place called the Stanyards.
On May 24, 1905, a correspondent wrote: ‘Within the last two years a native of Gobowen was returning home one evening from Whittington, and on passing under the bridge was conscious of an object which accompanied him on the opposite side of the road. When he stopped it did likewise. There was no moon to account for a shadow. On arriving at Pimligog Lane the object darted up it, and gave utterance to a terrific shriek and disappeared. Needless to say, the traveller continued his journey home in a very distressed condition.
‘Close to the Stanyards is a stile, and it is known as Duckett’s Stile, and it is said that, within the memory of many, a ghost appeared in the form of an enormous large-headed black dog.’
Another correspondent stated that a lady who had died ‘recently’ at the age of 80 told him that far from being a shrieking thing or a ubiquitous black dog, the ghost of the Stanyards was neither more nor less than – a headless donkey! This belief may have been the inspiration for a humorous tale, published many years earlier in the local parish magazine, which recounted ‘the terrors suffered by a half-witted inhabitant who was startled by an apparition all in white, which on subsequent investigation turned out to be nothing more harmful than Dick Morris’s White Mule’.
[SOURCE: Bye-gones, May 3, May 24, June 21, 1905.]
