Ghosts have a peculiar affinity with water. There follows a short selection of haunted rivers and lakes, an extract from a much longer article I wrote for the February 2009 edition of Paranormal Magazine (issue 32).
By RICHARD HOLLAND
‘If tragedies are a cause of hauntings, the Thames should assuredly be haunted, for no river in Great Britain has witnessed more murders and suicides.’
So writes Elliott O’Donnell in his Haunted Waters of 1957. O’Donnell claimed to have met several down-and-outs sleeping rough near the Thames embankments in London who had felt ‘a ghostly presence urging them to end their miserable existence by jumping into the river’.
O’Donnell mentions that the ghosts of suicides could be encountered on both Old Westminster and Waterloo Bridges. Waterloo Bridge was also haunted by the headless figure of a sailor, which may have been connected with the gruesome discovery below the bridge of a carpet bag containing the dismembered remains of a human body in 1857. After the body of another murdered man was found near Carron Wharf in Whitechapel, ‘cries and groans’ were heard in the river nearby and witnesses saw ‘the figure of a man of huge stature rise from the water, wave his arms in the air and disappear’.
By far the weirdest spook O’Donnell refers to haunting the stretch of the Thames that flows through London is that glimpsed near Cleopatra’s Needle. He describes a ‘tall, nude, shadowy figure, with a peak-shaped head and a body covered with what looked like scales’. This monstrous apparition would appear near the ancient obelisk and then leap into the river, from which ‘unearthly groans and mocking hellish laughter’ would be heard.
In the north of England, in the vicinity of Thirsk in Yorkshire, there was a haunted stream, whose ghost had earned it the name of ‘White-lass-beck’. Like many old-fashioned spooks, this one appeared as a lady in white but also in a number of other guises. W Hylton Dyer Longstaffe, in his History of Darlington (1854) writes that the ‘White-lass’ often appeared as ‘a white dog, and an ugly animal which comes rattling into the town with a tremendous clitter-my-clatter, and is there styled a barguest. Occasionally, too, she turns into a genuine lady of flesh and blood, tumbling over a stile.’
In Worcestershire, the River Teme is the final destination of a ghost’s mad chase across the countryside between Bransford and Brocamin. The spirit of an Elizabethan nobleman with an evil reputation, ‘Old Coles’, rides in a coach pulled by four spectral horses with fire spouting from their nostrils. The ghostly coach hurtles through the dark, leaping right over the great barn at Leigh Court, before plunging into the Teme.
The Cumbrian lake of Thirlmere (now a reservoir) is the scene of our final plunge into ghost-lore’s dark depths. A bizarre scene like something out of a Gothic novel is played out here, according to Harriet Martineau in her Complete Guide to the English Lakes (1855). She says a ghastly wedding feast takes place at venerable Armborth Hall, standing on Thirlmere’s shore, on the anniversary of a bride’s doomed nuptials. One tradition has it that Hallowe’en was the date chosen for the wedding but no explanation has been offered as to why the bride’s body was found beside the lake – drowned or, as some say, strangled. Had the groom done away with her, having had second thoughts, or was she killed by a former lover, who could not bear to see her married to another. Whatever the origin of the tragedy, this is what Martineau says occurs on its anniversary:
‘Lights are seen there at night; and the bells ring; and just as the bells all set off ringing, a large dog is seen swimming across the lake. The plates and dishes clatter; and the table is spread by unseen hands. That is the preparation for the ghostly wedding feast of a murdered bride, who comes up from her watery bed in the lake her terrible nuptials.’
Back from the depths, indeed.
© Richard Holland, 2009. Please visit www.paranormalmagazine.co.uk for more articles, news reports and correspondents’ personal experiences of the supernatural. You can purchase Paranormal Magazine 32, which contains the full article, from http://www.jazzpublishing.co.uk/index.php?app=gbu0&ns=catshow&ref=paranormal_backissues. Postage is free within the UK.
