A fascinating first-hand account of a new sighting of one of London’s best-known ghosts unexpectedly cropped up on a comedy chat show a few weeks ago. Comedian Jason Mansford was one of the guests on Alexander Armstrong’s Big Ask on UK satellite channel Dave. In the middle of the show host Alexander Armstrong asked Mansford: ‘You had some weird experience in your dressing room, though, is this true?’

‘I was in a haunted dressing room, yeah – well, I mean, if you believe in all that,’ Mansford replied and then went on to explain: ‘I was talking to my daughter on Skype, and she’s three, and she was at home. And she just went: “Daddy, what is that man doing behind you?”

‘And I said: ‘What? Wha – what does he look like?” And she said: “He’s a soldier.”

I went: “Hang on now, what’s going on here?” But, um, I spoke to the company manager at the theatre and apparently this guy was stabbed at the stage door in 1897, an actor, by an understudy – you know what they’re like, he wanted the part I presume, and, er, he thought that’s probably the best way, rather than just working harder – but that night he was actually making his debut in a play called “The Secret Service” when he was playing a lieutenant in the American Army. So, weird isn’t it?’

Although the theatre isn’t named by Jason Mansford, this is clearly a reference to the well-known Adelphi Theatre ghost, William Terriss. What Mansford was told about the history of the haunting varies slightly from what I had previously known, certainly in terms of how he is dressed. Here’s my brief account in my new eBook ‘Haunted Sites of London’ (http://tinyurl.com/bsvz4dm):

‘In 1897 Victorian actor William Terriss was murdered by a rival actor who was literally mad with jealousy – after stabbing Terriss through the heart as he arrived at the stage door, the killer was declared insane and sent to Broadmoor. The ghost of Terriss – ‘a handsome old-fashioned figure with a flowing tie and a sombrero hat’ – has been seen in a narrow alleyway (leading to Bull Inn Court) alongside the Adelphi. He has also been witnessed in the theatre itself, walking on the stage. The actor Peter Wyngarde reported strange goings-on in his dressing room some years ago and these were put down to the ghost either of Terriss or of Ivor Novello, who some believe also haunts the Adelphi.’

Terris is also said to haunt nearby Covent Garden Underground Station: ‘The ghost of Victorian actor William Terriss, who was murdered outside the nearby Adelphi Theatre, has been seen on many occasions in this busy Underground station, for reasons which remain obscure. He is described as ‘a tall distinguished-looking spectre … wearing a grey suit, old-fashioned collar and white gloves’. One member of the London Transport staff got the fright of his life when a white-gloved hand reached out of the darkness and touched him with icy fingers. Another staff member, back in the 1970s, claimed to have seen the apparition at least 40 times and said that he had got quite used to it.’

On the face of it, the ghost’s appearance as a soldier fails to tally with previous sightings. A quick check of Wikipedia (yes, yes, I know!) does confirm that Secret Service was indeed the play Terriss was due to star in. It later starred William Gillette – remembered today for being the first man to play Sherlock Holmes (it’s possible he took over the role when Terriss was murdered). The rather wonderful poster reproduced below shows the play’s performance at the Adelphi. The hero, whom Terriss would have been playing, is pictured on the stage pointing dramatically. That army uniform could reasonably be described as ‘a grey suit’, although admittedly he isn’t wearing white gloves.

It’s all very intriguing, though, and reminds me that another famous ghost of London’s West End theatreland was seen a few years ago by Star Trek actor Patrick Stewart. In 2009 Stewart saw the ghost of the Haymarket Theatre while performing in ‘Waiting For Godot’ with Ian McKellen.

‘Haunted Sites of London’: http://tinyurl.com/bsvz4dm

Text © Richard Holland 2013

In 1691 an extraordinary book was published by one Richard Baxter. It was called The Certainty of the World of Spirits and was intended to convince the reader that ghosts and other supernatural phenomena existed, and that they were further evidence of the existence of God. Baxter’s book is among the earliest to discuss Welsh folklore and contains within it a strange and disturbing account of a haunting in ‘Gowersland’ at a house called Llanellan (he spells it Llanellin).

The house belonged to a Lieutenant Colonel Bowen, who had been one of Cromwell’s officers during the Civil War. Bowen was a wild sort of character and he led such a ‘careless and Sensual Life’ that he was sent out of England to Ireland. While in Ireland he sinned ‘without Restraint’, became an Atheist (very shocking in those days) and at last became ‘hateful and hating all civil Society, and his nearest relations’. All this is told through a series of letters to Baxter. The hauntings took place during 1665 and the letters are dated just one year later.

While Bowen was enjoying his wild life in Ireland, he left his wife and family behind at Llanellan. One night Mrs Bowen was disturbed by loud, alarming noises, bangings on the doors or walls ‘as if the whole House were falling in pieces’, and ‘the sound of Whirl-wind’. Mrs Bowen was in her bed-chamber when these malevolent noises started and rather than give way to fear of them, she spent some time in prayer and then got into bed. Shortly after she saw ‘something like her Husband’ appear in the room. Clearly, it could not be Lt-Col Bowen himself, because he was in Ireland, so what was it? It spoke to her: it asked whether it could join her in bed! Mrs Bowen prayed earnestly, told the apparition that it was not her husband and that it could not join her in her bed.

‘What!’ exclaimed the spectre. ‘Not the Husband of thy Bosom? What! Not the Husband of thy Bosom?’

But it kept its distance. The rest of the night was spent in prayer with some other people but they were ‘very often interrupted’ by the phoney Lt-Col Bowen. The next day, the apparition was still in evidence, as ‘the Shadow of one walking would appear upon the Wall’. That night the haunting of Llanellan became truly horrible. The ‘noise of Whirl-wind’ came again, much louder than before, and it was accompanied by eldritch howls and cries. On trying to get into bed, Mrs Bowen saw the impression of a body in the mattress and this was accompanied by ‘the smell of a Carcase some-while dead’. This disgusting effect was added to by invisible rolling from side to side. She and her servants resorted again to prayer but the spirit, or whatever it was, would not let them be. Strange cries were heard, and words they could not understand. Mrs Bowen felt something beneath her knees as she prayed, something like a dog which lifted her bodily off the ground.

The room was filled with ‘a thick Smoak, smelling like Sulphur, darkening the Light of the Fire and the Candle’ and the women were struck and slapped by the entity. By dawn Mrs Bowen and her servants had faces black from the smoke and ‘Bodies swollen with Bruises’. During the day strange lights appeared in the house and in the fields around it and Lt-Col Bowen’s voice could be heard, calling as if to his hawks.

Mrs Bowen did not stay in the house another night, she took her family to safer lodging. When the real Lt-Col Bowen came to visit her fromIrelandsome time later he flatly refused to believe in the existence of his demon double, or any of the frightening events which had taken place at his house during his absence.

Mrs Bowen later joined her husband in Ireland, but in time he turned her and her children out and she was forced to borrow money to pay for her return to Wales. This information is given in a letter dated 1658. Baxter adds as a postscript that Bowen had ‘immured himself in a small Castle [in Ireland], with one Boy who said, he oft rose in the Night, and talked as if someone were talking with him’. This is the last we hear of the troubled Bowens and the extraordinary case of the spectre husband.

Text © Richard Holland 2011, taken from ‘Haunted Wales: A Guide to Welsh Ghostlore’ published by The History Press.

“At Dagworth in Suffolk during the reign of Richard [I], an extraordinary spirit made itself felt on many occasions over a long period of time in the house of Lord Osbourne of Bradwell. She spoke to the said knight’s household, imitating the sound made by a one-year-old child’s voice, and kept referring to herself as ‘Malkin’. She used to claim her mother was staying with her brother in a nearby house, and say that thewy found fault with her and told her off, which was why she was leaving them and taking it upon herself to talk to human beings. She could do and say amazing things, and things which were enough to make people laugh, and a number of times revealed the things other people had done and kept secret.

“At first the knight’s wife and his entire household were terrified by her verbal communications, but later on, after they had become accustomed to what she said and the daft things she did, they began to talk to her with confidence and a sense of intimacy, and asked her a good many questions. She used to speak English in the Suffolk dialect, but sometimes [she would speak] Latin and discuss Scripture with the knight’s chaplain – something he himself roundly swore to me was true.

“She could be heard and sensed, but not seen at all except for one occasion when a little girl, who had earlier pestered and begged her to show himself in visible form, saw her in the likeness of a tiny child wearing a white dress. The [spirit] was unwilling to agree to her request at all until the girl swore, by the Lord, that she would neither touch nor take hold of her.

“She revealed that she had been born in Langham, and that when her mother her took her with her into an open field where she and others reaped the corn, and left her by herself in one part of the field, she was snatched up and carried off by another woman and had remained with her for seven years already. She also said that after another seven years she would come back to live with human beings as she had before, and that she and others wore a hood which rendered them invisible. On many occasions she woulds demand that those in the house [give her] things to eat and drink. These were put on top of a particular chest and would be found now more.”

Although the medieval writer seems to have taken it on face value that the entity was the spirit of a small girl, the story is highly reminiscent of those of domestic fairies. As Maxwell-Stuart points out, one could hardly expect a small child to speak Latin. The motif of a neglected child snatched up from a field where the mother is reaping has been recorded in accounts of changelings. Fairies and what today we call poltergeists were largely interchangeable in previous centuries (cf the Pwca Trwyn, for example, which you can read about in my ‘Haunted Wales’ published by the History Press). It’s amazing to think such stories persisted in Britain from at least the 12th century to the early 19th.

I was particularly intrigued by the entity giving its name as ‘Malkin’. It made me think immediately of ‘Greymalkin’, a popular name for cats in the Middle Ages and one that has been attached to witches’ familiars. In a footnote in ‘Poltergeists’, Maxwell-Stuart explains that Malkin is a diminutive of Matilda and was often used for female spirits or demons. ‘Mallt’ is the Welsh equivalent: ‘Mallt y Nos’ or ‘Matilda of the Night’ is a traditional female ghost said to haunt a number of sites in South Wales.

Text © Richard Holland 2013. Extract taken from ‘Poltergeists: A History of Violent Ghostly Phenomena’ by P G Maxwell-Stuart, published by Amberley in 2011.

I have heard this tale nowhere else but in the parish of Llangynfelyn, and it is less known nowadays due to the locals’ changed way of life. The witch has a terrible curse, and can only be destroyed by fire – as she lives in a boggy swamp there’s little hope of that.

The residents of Tre Taliesin (pictured) lived in fear of the witch for generations. No one escaped her curse, neither grown men nor young children; the witch was merciless. Local folk believed the marsh was her home and that within it she was all-knowing and all-powerful. She never left her home except in the dead of night in thick fog because she was ashamed of her ugliness; luckily for her there was plenty of fog around the marsh.

Betsen of Llain Fanadl met her once. Betsen lived in a cottage on the edge of the marsh, and one evening as she returned from collecting firewood she saw a woman sitting on a hump of sedge. The woman had a large head, and jet black hair that fell in a huge wave down her back and piled up on the floor; she was eating buckbeans and frog meat. Betsen called out ‘Good evening’. The witch jumped up, and Betsen saw she was 7 feet tall, thin, bony and sallow, with black teeth. The witch hissed like a snake in Betsen’s face, then disappeared. Betsen was said never to be the same again.

The residents of Taliesin were troubled for generations by a disease, a type of fever, and the symptoms were particularly bad in some people. At first they felt weak and ill as though they were seasick. Then their whole body would start shaking, which would last a full hour. They would shake once a day, but one hour later each time. This would continue for 8 – 10 days, until their strength slowly returned and the time between shaking would increase to a day, then 2 days, etc. The person could do light work on these days, but be confined to bed on shaking days.

A book by Mr Richard Morgan, MA, of Llanarmon-yn-Iâl, tells of a girl from Taliesin who was in school in nearby Tal y Bont when he taught there. One day she said, “Please sir, I shan’t be in school tomorrow.” “You shan’t be in school tomorrow! And why?” he replied. “Please sir, I shall be shaking tomorrow.”

The disease was believed to be caused by the witch, and it was named after her. On dark nights she made a thick fog, crept in it to the village, sneaked into the house of her choice despite any efforts to prevent her, and into the bedroom, then breathed her curse on the sleepers. They would wake the next morning from a restless sleep full of bad spirits, feeling ill and depressed. Shaking would begin later that day. The shaking could be so strong the whole bed rattled, and the sufferer would be unable to speak. Others would say, “such-and-such has the Old Witch.”

Sufferers of this illness were rarely seen by doctors, for two reasons. Firstly, they were too poor to afford doctors, and the nearest were in Aberystwyth or Machynlleth nine miles away. Secondly, the doctors were powerless to do anything anyway. The illness simply had to run its course. Nobody died of the Old Witch, but it is certain that they were affected to some extent for the rest of their lives.

Twenty years ago the curse suddenly stopped, and it is widely believed that the Old Witch must have died during a particularly harsh winter. At the same time the main fuel of the villagers became coal instead of peat, so the marsh is less disturbed – perhaps the Old Witch is just sleeping until the coal runs out…

[One wonders whether the illness was malaria, or is this too obvious? One would expect doctors to recognise the symptoms and make the connection with the marsh.]

Extract from Coelion Cymry by Evan Isaac, Y Clwb Llyfrau Cymraeg 1938. Translation by Rose Smith. The photo of Tre-Taliesin is by Nigel Callaghan (Wikimedia Commons)

My baby being a precocious little thing began to talk at a very early age of twelve months. She had four imaginary friends: Dickens, Noah, Appocolyse [Apocolypse?] and another mummy who floated near the ceiling. She said that the the men and her other mummy were all dressed in long white robes and were there to look after her and were very nice.

My husband would take the dog out for a walk across the fields surrounding our house late at night. On one occasion his torch batteries had failed and he had fallen down a ditch and arrived home covered in mud and stinging nettle blisters. There was no mobile phone coverage in the area so I bought a pair of walkie-talkies just in case he came a cropper again and then he could call me for help.

On returning one evening he entered the conservatory where I was sitting and we were just chatting normally. Both handsets were still switched on: he was holding one and the other was next to me on the sofa. Then out of just one of the handsets (my husband’s) came a most despicable voice. It was that of an old man. It made your skin crawl and made me want to be sick. All it said was, ”I died and now I’m dead.”

How could a signal be received through just one handset when both were tuned to the same frequency? And that voice was beyond chilling. It was not human. I really cannot describe the totaly repulsion it had made us feel.

We put the house on the market then. Over the course of the next few months we had lots of potential purchasers put in offers for the property and for one reason or another they all fell through. I had had enough all the shadows, the noises, the objects disappearing and now the voice, the tension had built to such an extent I truly thought I could take no more. I got to my knees and prayed.

That night in bed I was laying  there trying to fall asleep when I got a strange sensation that there was someone outside my bedroom door, thinking that the precocious one had escaped her cot as she was in the room opposite I went to get up, peering round the door I saw a man as solid as you or I standing facing our front door between my daughter’s bedroom and mine. He had a dark suit and waistcoat, a fob watch and a hat on. The only giveaway that he wasn’t from this world was the fact that his hat didn’t seem to be quite finished at the top and there were bright lights (similar to our fairies) zooming around the top of it as if like a vortex. Screaming I leapt backwards and landed on my sleeping husband’s lap.

You can imagine how the conversation went, but laughing he got up and we both peered around the door, and to my total disbelief  the chap was still there, just looking straight ahead with no expression. We both felt no fear and my husband said to just ignore him and shut our eyes, say a prayer and go to sleep, and to my surprise afterwards we both did just that.

The following morning we were both full of our experience of the night before and decided to compare notes on what we had seen so without discussing it further we wrote down what we had witnessed. On  comparing the notes we discovered it was identical, down to the swirling fairies.

I don’t remember if it was the following day or the day after we received another offer on the bungalow. I tried not to get my hopes up but as the months dragged on and the sale still wasn’t completed I began to drop into despair.

On picking my daughter up from nursery I was driving home slowly, as I really didn’t want to go back there, I saw the most beautiful sight. The sun broke through the clouds and illuminated a cross from what I thought then was the spire of  a neighbouring villages church. It was bathed in a glorious light and was golden in the sun. A feeling of total peace washed over me and at that moment everything was totally all right. I continued home without a care in the world, knowing things would turn out fine.

When I got home the phone rang. Our purchaser had dropped out. He didn’t give a reason but had decided against continuing with the sale. I sobbed like a baby. I had had the most reassuring experience only moments before only to be dropped like  a lead balloon. I think I may have said something like look whoever is here with me if you mean us no harm I don’t mind you moving with us but for God’s sake get me out of this place.

Through my tears I heard a voice, it was calm and half jovial and very soothing he said very clearly “You will move on the 28^th of August”. Yeah right, I thought, one month away, I don’t think so, I’ve just lost the plot completely. But I did feel calmer again and wrote the date in the front of my address book and thought, we’ll see.

Well I suppose you can guess the rest, we moved on the 28^th of August. The buyer got back in contact a couple of days later and had changed his mind again. I found rented accommodation for us to move to and all went smoothly.

That’s not quite the end of things, though I have never been able to see the cross from the road again and have tried to figure it out numerous times but the church isn’t visable from there at all.

It wasn’t until a few months after that I decided to tell my mum about the odd things had that happened in that bungalow and she went and got a picture and asked me if I could see the man in our hall on it, and I could. It was my greatgrandfather: the same fob watch, square chin and hat. I had never met him but was told he was very religious, a church warden for a little chapel in Wales. I tried the picture thing on my husband and he picked him out as well. So was he protecting us that night?

Our new home is fine by the way, and nothing makes us uneasy, no crashes no bangs, no unwanted visitors and for the first time in years I can sleep with the lights off and feel perfectly safe. 

The few people that we have told of our experiences haven’t really believed us, although most have said that they believe we are telling the truth, but can not believe what we are saying! There have been two exceptions. One was a neighbour from the bungalow who told us that he was in his garage working on his car, an old army jeep, and the volume on his radio kept being turned up. It was a old dial radio, and he physically turned the dial down only to watch it turn back up again. He threw the radio straight into the bin. He said it wasn’t logical and made his skin crawl.

The other person who didn’t doubt us was my youngest brother who lived at the old house by the church which I believe used to be the gatehouse to the abbey. He worked at the airport and would work odd hours. When returning from work late one night he saw lights in the church which he thought looked like torches. He assumed that someone had broken in or kids were messing around in there so he retrieved a baseball-bat from the shed and quietly made his way into the church. On opening the door the lights stopped, and there was no one in there. After a good look round, he returned home shaken and said he would have preferred to have found robbers! My husband has since admitted that he saw robed figures near the house when walking the dog at night, but didn’t like to tell me at the time.

Nothing unexplainable has happened to us since, and even I, looking back would have started to believe it was my imagination, but my husband witnessed it to, so there is no hiding from the fact that these events happened. I do feel a certain guilt for not telling the buyer of the property about it, but what can you say without sounding crackers? I would also like to add we are not a religious family in the sense we do not go to church. Just thought I would clarify that as it’s only on reading this back to myself that I realised there seems to be lots of churchie connections!

The text is copyright. The illustration is by Arnold Bocklin and does not represent the abbey or church in the story.

My husband and I moved to a 1960s bungalow on the edge of a rural community. It wasn’t our ideal home but we had the intention of renovating and moving on. It was in a beautiful position with a river running through the gardens and the remains of a Cistercian Abbey at the end of the garden.

I can’t pinpoint when the first strange things began to happen but we hadn’t lived there long when I found items began to go missing. I was beginning to have suspicions about the honesty of neighbours: surely some of these valuable items couldn’t just have been misplaced? Over the course of the years I discovered that items would disappear for a few months whilst others were returned in odd places. An example is my husband’s shaver: it disappeared only to be found in the middle of the living room floor three years later. A Gucci watch is still missing, so if anything is reading this over my shoulder please can I have it back now?!

Kitchen and bathroom taps would turn themselves on and off. We laughed about this and said , “Ooh, it’s haunted,” thinking we were just cracking a joke. It became annoying when we had the plumber change the fittings and it continued to happen, with the added bonus of occasional  electric shocks from the water.

One beautiful summers day, after we had lived there for about a year, we returned from work to find our newly renovated bathroom, which at that point had no windows (we were waiting for the builders to put in a skylight), filled with green grasshoppers. Wondering vaguely how they all got there we gently caught them all and popped them in the garden. This continued for a few weeks defying all explanations. Almost a year to the day later we returned from work to find our bathroom filled with green grasshoppers. Hey presto the following year and the one after that…

Things began to take a turn for the strange the winter after we first got our conservatory. When it was newly completed we would enjoy the novelty of sitting looking up at the stars on a cold night all warm and comfortable inside. It was my husband who noticed them first: bright balls of light around the Maple tree in the garden. They were beautiful  and it seemed they were moving together, almost dancing. We joked they were fairies! And no we didn’t go and look to see what was causing them. They were there and that was that; surprisingly we weren’t curious enough to go out into the cold night.

We didn’t see the lights in the garden again. The next time we saw them they were in the conservatory itself. They would be there every night dashing across the conservatory shooting up and down the hall. They didn’t seem to be doing any harm. What could we do about them anyway?

Sitting watching telly one night we got our first real taste of things to come. Out of nowhere we got soaking wet! It was as though a bucket full of water was tipped over our heads. Obviously we shrieked and jumped up, but the ceiling was completely dry. Everything was, apart from us.

The dark shadows appeared next: fleeting glimpses from the corner of your eye but when you turned nothing would be there. This was not an occasional occurrence, it was all the time.

The atmosphere in the house became very heavy. It felt as though there was a constant loud party going on that we couldn’t hear and that we weren’t invited to.

You would think that at this point that we would move but we had a baby on the way, and you even sound crazy to yourself when you start having niggling thoughts that maybe your house has some uninvited guests. The dog growling and raising his hackles at various corners of the room was put down to mice in the walls (no, we didn’t actually have any) and his tail wagging at the chair was put down to him being a daft dog.

The bangs and crashes which started disturbing our sleep were ignored. The fact the we had to sleep with lights on to feel safer we dismissed as our own stupidity. We just couldn’t admit that we had a growing problem and that we were both feeling really quite unwell.

Well, our baby was born and the nightmares for me began in earnest. I put them down to hormonal changes and being so tiered, the way you only can be with a new born. Every night when I was grabbing those few hours of precious  sleep my head was filled with being stalked by an unknown predator, sometimes it was in human form others it was of big cats, but the feeling of something trying to get in the house to get at me was overwhelming. These dreams only went when we managed to move house.

I must add to this part of my recollections that when my daughter was about four years old she and my husband were out walking our dog and they saw a panther about four feet from them lying at the riverside in the sunshine. This was accompanied a few weeks later by growling from the hedge near play equipment in the garden.

It bothered my husband to such an extent that he called the police. The police came and told us there had been a few reports and to move the play equipment closer to the house as children playing and screaming sound like an animal in distress and would attract a big cat for food! I never witnessed the cat but my husband and daughter still talk about it to this day.

IN PART TWO: A full-body apparition, experiences of neighbours and the phenomenon which finally made the family decide ‘enough is enough’!

The text is copyright. The illustration is by Arnold Bocklin and is chosen for its spookiness, not because it represents the abbey in the story.

Britain’s old inns are famously haunted. I’ve noticed that waterside pubs seem especially prone to being ‘ghosted’. Perhaps the best-known and most haunted of seaside pubs is the unusual Marsden Grotto in Tyneside, but I have written about this elsewhere (http://www.uncannyuk.com/823/top-50-most-haunted-places-in-britain-13/).

Further down the North-East England coast, at Scarborough, there is an ancient inn, now a private home, with an interesting ghostly legend attached to it. The Three Mariners on the seafront was built in the 14^th century and was for centuries a hostelry before, temporarily, being a museum devoted to the Yorkshire town’s smuggling past. The inn was said to be haunted to a headless woman who would appear as a warning to fishermen of bad weather out to sea. Her origin is a mystery. For some years her legend was transposed to that of an old figurehead rescued from the sea after a shipwreck and set up over the doorway. ‘Elvira’, as she was known, became the warning spirit on stormy nights, clambering down off her perch and knocking on fishermen’s cottage doors.

Way down at the opposite end of England, the 16^th century Dolphin Inn on the waterfront at Penzance in Cornwall was a smugglers’ hide-out. Its greatest claim to fame – if local tradition is to be believed – is that it was the first place in England where tobacco was smoked and potatoes eaten (it was to Penzance that Elizabethan explorers returned from the Americas). The ghost of the Dolphin is described by Peter Underwood as ‘an old sea captain dressed in laced ruffles and a three-cornered hat, who died there’. Although he is seldom seen, his measured tread has often been heard pacing the upper rooms of the inn.

Another nautical man, one of more recent date, haunts the Shipwrights Arms, an atmospheric old inn in an isolated position among the marshes near Faversham, in Kent. In a reefer jacket and peaked cap, he is an unusual ghost in that he has a smell about him – that of tobacco and rum! According to Richard Jones, his story is that he fought his way through the marshes after his ship ran aground and hammered repeatedly on the Shipwrights’ door to gain shelter. The inmates ignored him and his body was found slumped against the door the next morning. Since then he has haunted the inn, startling occupants with his glaring eyes.

Many of London’s riverside pubs have ghosts. The Anchor, down by the Thames in Southwark, is also claimed to have been the haunt of smugglers and press gangs. A phantom dog, scruffy and rather forlorn, has been seen snuffling around the bar. If you see him, you may notice he has no tail – it was accidentally snapped off in a door centuries ago. With nothing to wag in the afterlife, he returns to the Anchor in search of it.

The Gun Tavern in the Docklands has vague spook, the shadowy figure of a man in one of the bedrooms. Because Lord Nelson is said to have met Lady Hamilton here on a number of occasions, previous landlords have voiced the hope that it might be him.

Nelson’s greatest victory is recalled in the name of the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich. ‘Tavern’ is a modest word for this magnificent public house, which was built in a spectacular riverside location during the first year of Queen Victoria’s reign. The great and good of the Victorian age made a habit of dining at the Trafalgar so the identity of the ghost which has been seen walking around the first floor rooms is anybody’s guess. The fact that he sometimes likes to sit at a piano may perhaps be a clue but there are no theories so far.

In the western suburb of Harefield can be found tucked away a charming pub called the Coy Carp, which overlooks the Pynesfield Lakes. It has two ghosts: a cavalier in doublet and hose who has been seen and heard stomping up a staircase, and the figure of a hooded monk in a bedroom.

Finally, I must mention one of the best-known haunted hostelries in England, the Ferry Boat Inn at Holywell in old Huntingdonshire (now Cambridgeshire). Here the ghost of love-lorn ‘Juliet’ appears on the anniversary of her death, March 17. Juliet hanged herself from a tree after suffering the pangs of unrequited love; as a suicide, her body was prevented from being buried in consecrated ground, and now rests under a slab, formerly on open ground beside the River Ouse but now incorporated into floor of the inn’s bar.

That at least is one version of the story. Joan Forman, in her Haunted East Anglia (1974), learnt from a local man that treasure was buried beneath the flagstone and the girl’s ghost used to point it out to people. I suspect that if treasure ever was hidden there, it has now long gone!

Text © Richard Holland 2012  The painting of the Old Ferry Boat Inn, Holywell, is by W F Garden and was painted in 1902.

Sightings of the ubiquitous phantom coach and horses have become increasingly rarer since the advent of the motor car, but they are still occasionally reported. For example, a lady driving along the A169 between Louth and Grimsby, related her experience of this phenomenon to Jared Williams in the ‘Lincolnshire Life’ of April 1985.

She said: ‘I was driving down to Grimsby just as day was breaking. As I approached the village of Waithe I was surprised to see a horse-drawn cab ahead of me and going in the same direction. As it had no lights I thought I’d better over take and tell the driver. I did so. But when I looked in the driving mirror the road was empty. And there was no turning this cab could have taken.’

At ‘Double Tunnels’ between Fulstow and North Thorsby it was said that ‘something used to roll across the road and frighten horses’. Nobody liked to drive there at night and many accidents occurred where the thing was seen.

An extraordinary amount of paranormal activity is associated with the A15 north of Sleaford, near the Ruskington turn-off, in Lincolnshire. In 1998 the A15 shot to national prominence when it was featured on ITV’s daytime show This Morning. Dozens of viewers phoned into the programme to report sightings of a ghostly figure in black which ran out into the road before vanishing.

One witness had an unnerving encounter when driving home at 3am from Lincoln to Sleaford. He described seeing something that looked like a white bin liner float across the road, attach itself to his windscreen and morph into the shape of a man. He later described the apparition as ‘having dark hair, greenish pitted skin, and a sort of Mediterranean look’. The only other parts of the ghost visible to him were it neck and an arm that was held up in a ‘stop signal’.

Another witness was convinced she had run over a man dressed all in black but when she got out to check there was no trace of anyone. A number of theories have been offered to explain the phantom. Some believe it to be the ghost of a highwayman because of its tendency to appear in an area known as Hangman’s Haunt, once a notorious place for footpads and highway robbers. Another theory is that because the remains of the medieval village of Dunsby – wiped out by the plague – is nearby, the ghost may be that of a villager trying to warn people of the disease and warning them to turn back.

Text © Sean McNeaney 2012

Two friends of mine recently told me of their encounter on the road with what they could only describe as a “ghost”. It happened on a clear frosty night in February 2003, when the couple were driving along the A1086 road to the village of Grasby to collect their daughter from her grandparents’ house.

As they approached a turning leading to the village of Ownby a figure with its head bowed and ‘wearing a kind of tweed-patterned overcoat with the hood up’ stepped from the verge straight out in front of them. There was a screech of brakes and they could only watch helplessly as an imminent collision between car and hapless jay-walker seemed inevitable. The impact never came however, because the figure simply vanished into thin air.

They stopped the car and got out to look but the road was empty and deserted. The couple have since found out that years earlier the body of a murder victim was found close to the spot where the apparition appeared.

My friends’ unnerving encounter has prompted me to recount the following purportedly true stories of paranormal happenings on some of Lincolnshire’s highways and byways, starting with a haunting that took place in the 1950s on the A16.

Near the hamlet of Walmsgate, motorists travelling this stretch of road reported seeing a green glowing mist come out of an old sandstone pit, which then drifted across the road and disappeared onto fields on the other side. The place became known as ‘Green Man Pit’ because the mist, according to some, was said to take the shape of a man.

One night a driver travelling towards Walmsgate stopped his car when he saw a glowing green figure emerge from a copse and onto the road in front of him. The figure dashed towards the car and the terrified driver could only watch in disbelief as the apparition ran straight passed him and disappeared into the night. It is interesting to note that a Neolithic long barrow, the biggest in the county and said to be the grave of a dragon slain by a local knight in the 12th century, is situated just north of the road here (see picture). Such ancient sites have long been associated with paranormal activity.

A more recent encounter with a phantom of the road occurred in June 2006, when two holiday makers from Leicester reported seeing an old man ‘wearing a jacket, trousers and a cloth cap that looked to be from the turn of the century’ riding an equally old- fashioned looking bicycle along the middle of the Louth bypass. The sighting occurred in the afternoon between London Road and the A157 roundabout. They said the man was only a short distance in front of them but when they drove closer both cycle and cyclist vanished into thin air.

[Sean will continue his review of the haunted roads of Lincolnshire in a subsequent article.]

Text © Sean McNeaney 2012. Photo © Chris Collyer 2002 It shows the Beacon Plantation long barrow beside the A16.

Whilst researching the Dragons of the South of England, one particular location immediately stood out for me – St Leonard’s Forest to the east of Horsham in Sussex.

What made this site really interesting was that it had not just one, but two dragons associated with it, albeit 1,000 years apart. What’s more, there are even contemporary reports today, some 1400 years after the first report, although it is unclear if these have been influenced by what has gone on before.

The first dragon occurs in the 6^th Century and, as a result, was responsible for giving this area of the Weald it’s name. Aethelweard’s translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle from 975A.D. refers to St Leonard, a hermit from France, who lived at a hermitage deep in the forest. Sadly, no trace of the hermitage exists today.

One day, whist he was carrying out his daily duties, St Leonard was set upon by a dragon. Despite being seriously wounded in the initial attack, St Leonard fought off the dragon and eventually slew it after long and bloody encounter. It is said that, where his blood fell, white lilies grew and today this area of the forest is still known as ‘the Lily Beds’.

Asked what he wanted as a reward for killing the dragon, St Leonard requested that snakes be banished from the forest and that the nightingales, that constantly disturbed the Saint’s prayers with their singing, would be silent. An alternative version of the story has the Saint request that snakes be made deaf, although the reason why is never explained. The legend is supported by a Dr Andrew Borde who, in the 16^th Century, wrote that the nightingales didn’t sing in the forest because they “disturbed the devotions of a forest hermit”. However, today the nightingales appear to have regained their voice and the snakes have returned to the forest.

We encounter the second dragon in 1614, when a pamphlet was produced describing the horrific actions of a dragon over nine feet in length, that was terrorising the people of the forest and the surrounding area. Unlike most dragon stories however, there appears to be no happy ending here and the creature appears to have been left to its own devices. 

Some think this was a typical example of a story circulated by a local smuggling gang to persuade people to avoid the area but, even today, there are contemporary reports of an unknown creature that lives out its life in the branches of the trees and rarely, if ever at all, visits the forest floor.

The dragons of St Leonard’s Forest stand out in British folklore and with current accounts of monsters in the woods, the Forest is surely the premier UK location for the modern-day Dragon hunter.

© Mark Davies 2012