Londoner Peter Young told us about a flat he was helping to do up some years ago in Chelsea. A couple of burly builders got completely spooked in there, so Peter agreed to join them. Apparently, there was a remarkable amount of activity, most of it centring round the drinks cabinet, which kept opening of its own accord. I can’t remember all the details but I recall whisky apparently being drunk by an unseen entity - is that spirit cannibalism?
There were a lot of mysterious noises, glimpsed shadowy figures and - a rather Gothic image this - a swinging chandelier. Needless to say, they finished up as quick as they could and got out of there.
The story Peter learnt later was that a man had killed his lover there in a drunken rage, and he also heard of similar activity in the next-door flat, which at one time had been part of the same suite of rooms.
I also met a lady who used to run an old pub in North-East Wales with her husband. The inn in question, the Pwll Gwyn (which means White Pool) stands along the A541 Mold-Denbigh Road. When I interviewed the then current landlady here for my 1992 book Haunted Clwyd, I was told that the building stood on foundations of a medieval hostelry servicing pilgrims to St Winefride’s Well at Holywell. This was used as an explanation for the apparition of a monk allegedly seen sitting in the dining room, often in daylight.
The woman I spoke to in the Sportsman’s Arms, who was landlady up until the late 1980s, denied any medieval hostory for the building, saying that as far as she was aware it had always been a coaching inn belongining to nearby Maesmynan Hall (I gathered the owner of the Hall kept his own horses stabled there, too). She also knew nothing about a ghostly monk but certainly experienced a spooky presence about the place, especially on the first floor. The publicans I spoke to prior to 1992 had also spoken about an eerie presence upstairs.
But what this lady added to the mix was a phenomenon that may be unique and greatly engaged my interest. Although they saw no appairition duign their time as licencees, she and her husband (and staff) did get used to ciming into the dining room on occasions and finding little piles of salt had been mysteriously appeared on various surfaces overnight. Very neat and tidy, pyramidal piles they were, and the source of the salt was also a mystery. Salt, of course, is a substance seen as sacred in many cultures, representing purity in the Christian religion (and capable of banishing evil spirits). The dining room, of course, is the room where the monk was seen in later years - was ‘he’ responsible for placing the salt?
Copyright Richard Holland 2010
]]>For a while I’ve been compiling accounts where an apparition physically interacted with the witness - the scariest, of course, are those where the ghost assaults or otherwise physically harms a person. The following is an odd twist on twist on such stories. It comes from the latest book I’ve added to my ghostly collection, a lovely 1897 first edition of Andrew Lang’s Dreams and Ghosts in its art nouveau binding. As it happens, it’s the last story in the book. Lang states that it was related by a ‘correspondent of Notes and Queries (3rd Sept., 1864)’ and I quote it verbatim from Dreams and Ghosts:
“Emma S—, one of seven children, was sleeping alone, with her face towrds the west, at a large house near C—, in the Staffordshire moorlands. As she had given orders to her maid to call her at an early hour, she was not surprised at being awakened between three and four on a fine August morning in 1840 by a sharp tapping at her door, when in spite of a ‘thank you, I hear,’ to the first and second raps, with the third came a rush of wind, which caused the curtains to be drawn up in the centre of the bed. She became annoyed, and sitting up called out, ‘Marie, what are you about?’
“Instead, however, of her servant, she was astonished to see the face of an aunt by marriage peerign above and between the curtains, and at the same moment - whether unconsciously she threw forward her arms, or whether they were drawn forward, as it were, in a vortex of air, she cannot be sure - one of her thumbs was sensibly pressed between the teeth of the apparition, though no mark afterwards remained on it. All this notwithstanding, she remained collected and unalarmed; but instantly arose, dressed, and went downstairs, where she found not a creature stirring.
“Her father, on coming down shortly afterwards, naturally asked her what had made her rise so early; rallied her on the cause and soon afterwards went on to his siter-in-law’s house, where he found that she had just unexpectedly died. Coming back again, and not noticing his daughter’s presence in the room, in consequence of her being behind a screen near the fire, he suddenly announced the event to his wife, as being of so remarkable a charcter that he could in no way account for it. As may be anticipate, Emma, over hearing this unlooked for denouement of her dream, at once fell to the ground in a fainting condition.
“On one of the thumbs of the corpse was found a mark as if it had been bitten in the death agony.”
© Richard Holland 2010
]]>There is a wild expanse in Denbighshire, North Wales, known as the Hiraethog. The name is almost untranslatable, the word ‘hiraeth’ meaning somethign like longing, or home-sickness and may suggest a mournful, affecting landscape. At one time the Hiraethog was well-known for its fairy-lore.
The Hiraethog is dominated by the peak of Bron Bannog. The Ychen Bannog, gigantic mythical oxen, appear to have been named after this mountain and it is an interesting fact that it is crowned by two tor-like outcrops of rock which, at certain angles, resemble the horns of a bull.
The Ychen Bannog were the offspring of a fairy cow, called the Fuwch Frech (Freckled Cow), who had her home among the ruins of ancient habitations now swallowed up by the forest of Clocaenog.
Local legend had it that the Fuwch Frech was a bounty to the neighbourhood, able to supply unlimited quantities of milk to whoever required it. Unfortunately, a wicked old hag, envious at the people’s prosperity, milked the fairy cow with a sieve until eventually she ran dry. Distressed by this treatment, the Fuwch Frech wandered off and disappeared under the waters of a lake, presumably back to Fairyland.
The Ychen Bannog followed her below the surface of the lake and ever afterwards it was known by the name of Llyn Dau Ychen, or Lake of the Two Oxen. Llyn Dau Ychen has silted up over the years and is now a marsh on the edge of the Alwen Reservoir. It was very near here that Judy Young found her ‘fairy house’.
The story of the Fuwch Frech was told to folklorist Elias Owen by a local farmer, Thomas Jones, in the 1880s. Mr Jones further stated that fairies had been seen in that neighbourhood.
Owen continues: ‘Jones said that some children had seen them on the hill close by. The day was misty and the clouds capped the hills, and the children saw a large number of diminutive folk , dressed in blue, emerging from the clouds, and then rushing back into the clouds.’
And it was well-known that the grandmother of one of Mr Thomas’s neighbours got on very well with the local fairies. This lady - whose name Owen gives only as ‘Mrs R’ - was referred to by the friendly Fair Tribe as ‘Aunty Ann’ and she in turn got to know each of them by name. When she was gathering rushes at Pont Petrual - a very pretty place popular with walkers today - the fairies’ dog would run up to greet her, ‘just as any other dog would come to welcome its master’s friend’.
Adds Owen: ‘It was very evident that the fairy tribe loved Mrs R and that she loved them.’
© Richard Holland 2010
]]>As a 14-year-old first ‘getting into’ ghosts, after the poltergeist which had bothered me had long ago faded safely back into the ether, I picked up a copy of a little book called Discovering Ghosts by Leon Metcalfe, which turned out to be a cracking collection of spooky snippets.
The outré headline of one story immediately leapt out at me: ‘The Leper in the Bird Cage’. Only on turning to page 28 did I discover that the Bird Cage was the name of an inn. We shall pass discreetly over the ghastly image the headline had first conjured up to my gruesome boy’s imagination (alas, not much has changed) and continue instead to what is in fact a fascinating ghost story.
Metcalfe first of all informs his readers that the inn is one of the oldest buildings in Thame, Oxfordshire, and that its odd name may have been suggested by its having once been the village ‘lock-up’. Way back in the 13th century, however, it was an ecclesiastical building where lepers were cared for. It is believed one of these poor souls may have been responsible for the repeated knockings heard on the wall of an upstairs room.
An exorcism was carried out and the leper’s spirit apparently contacted: it was very unhappy at having been disturbed and those taking part learnt that its knocking was no plea for help but merely a malevolent attempt to frighten people away so that it would be left alone. Shortly afterwards, during renovation work, the so-called ‘knocking wall’ was stripped of its facing and a cavity discovered which ‘exuded an unaccountably pungent odour’.
© Richard Holland 2009. This article is an extract from ‘Haunted Hostelries’ which appeared in Paranormal Magazine issue 34. Visit to www.paranormalmagazine.co.uk to learn more about the publication.
]]>Sergeant Melbury, of The Admiralty Police at the G/E Depot at Dinton, has two dogs. He is often on night duty. When he is on night duty, at exactly 3.30am every morning the two dogs rush to the main gate growling and with the hair on their backs bristling. The gate and fence are lit by arc lamps. The sergeant always investigates but never finds any cause for the dogs’ alarm
There was once a Benedictine ‘cell’ in Dinton, probably between the church and the present Phillips House.
Old Mrs M. A. Burton lived most of her life at The Kennels, a cottage on the south side of Dinton Park. For many years she worked as a maidservant for the Wyndhams at Phillips House, then called Dinton House. She died in the winter of 1959 at the age of 92. She several times affirmed that she had often heard singing coming from a place, which she described as ‘between the church and Dinton House’.
Mrs Burton was present at the burial of Mr Engleheart outside the private chapel at Little Clarendon, Dinton. When she heard the priest chanting the funeral mass, she turned round and said to a mourner standing by, ‘That is the music I heard within the park.’
I believe Col Chettle cut a trench between Phillips (Dinton) House from the church and found some foundations and a holy water stoop (now in Little Clarendon private chapel).
I shall never forget the early morning of 18th October, 1916. I was in bed in Watling Street, Gillingham, Kent. I woke up in the middle of a very vivid dream in which I saw my brother, Vivian, in bed in a large hospital ward.
His bed was third from the end on the right hand side. I knew he had been wounded, that he was conscious and wanted to send a message to me, but was unable to do so, because he was wounded in the throat. In my dream I was informed that the hospital was in Leicester. This dream happened at 5 am I looked at my watch when I woke up.
This dream worried me very much for many days, and I hesitated to write to my parents to ask if Vivian was safe. He had gone back from leave only two weeks [previously]. To my great surprise my mother wrote to me soon afterwards to say that he had been killed on October the 18th. Some time afterwards Sergeant Valentine, who was with him when he was killed, wrote to say that he died at 5 am from a wound in the throat.
Text and photo © Robert Snow
]]>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.
]]>Yesterday Mr W. E. V. Young told me that a few years ago a woman wrote to the local North Wilts newspaper that she had heard a sound behind her when driving her car from Beckhampton towards Silbury Hill. She looked in her driving mirror, and saw a stage coach.
Thinking that a cinematograph film was being made, she slowed down and allowed the coach to overtake her. She noticed the jangling of the horse’s harness, the dust thrown up by the horses’ feet, the sweat on the horses, and the boot boy blowing his horn.
She followed the coach for some way, but it suddenly vanished at the top of the slope near Silbury. Afterwards several people wrote to the paper saying that they had heard the coach pass along the road at various times. One woman, living in a cottage on a disused green road, stated that the coach had passed her cottage.
During the First World War Bertrand Sainsbury, a schoolmaster in the forces, cycled one Sunday afternoon to have tea with Mr Bert Young of Ebbesbourne Wake, Wilts, whom he had met at his training college. When he arrived at Mr Young’s house, he remarked that Ebbesbourne Wake had a strange custom if they always held their funerals at 4 pm on Sunday afternoons. Bert Young replied that funerals were not permitted on Sunday afternoons, and furthermore he was certain that no funerals had been arranged in the village for that day nor any other day in the near future.
Mr Sainsbury then stated that he had met a funeral procession at Jarvis Coombe Corner, halfway between Prescombe Farm and the fork in the road to Ebbesbourne Village. The road being narrow, he had to dismount from his bicycle, climbed into the bank, had taken off his hat, and proceeded on his way after the cortege had passed. Next day Bert Young visited his uncle James Young and aunt, who lived next door, and related the story. They repeated the story to me.
Walter Coombs, who married the daughter of Mr Bull of Teffont, is the son of old “Cadger Coombs”, who lived for many years at Sutton Row. Cadger was a simple uneducated labourer, but rather a mystic. He had gipsy blood in him.
In the early 1930s his son Walter was passing the church at Teffont Evias one evening when he saw a small funeral procession carrying a coffin “over the churchyard gate”. He was frightened and ran away.
© Robert Snow
]]>So many authentic narratives have been given concerning the Welch lights, that none but the sceptical or incredulous can call their existence in question. These are candles or torches, which are sometimes seen over the house of the sick, and are always sure prognostics of death. They have likewise been seen on other extraordinary occasions, as well appear from the following account, the truth of which is known to many in the north of Wales, where this remarkable event came to pass.
A farmer happening to be overtaken by a violent storm of hail and rain, near the hut of a poor la
bourer, who lived not far from Rhytwin in North Wales, stopped at it, in order to take shelter. The storm continuing, the labourer offered the farmer a bed, which the latter, being very much fatigued, gladly accepted. No sooner was the farmer fast asleep, but the labourer, who conjectured that he must have a considerable sum of money about him, murdered his guest, and taking the money, which amounted to twenty pounds, buried the body on a rising ground behind the hut; and early the next morning went off to Bristol.
The hut was soon after taken by another labourer, who late in the evening after observed a light, which settled constantly on the same spot on the eminence; sometimes there appeared two together, which after blazing a considerable time, suddenly disappeared, and left him filled with terror and consternation. He apprehended that this appearance signified that he was soon to die, and in the anxiety of mind, he imparted what he had seen to three of his acquaintances at Rhytwin, and begged that they would go with him to his hut that evening, that their own eyes might convince them of the truth of what he told them, as they seemed backwards to give credit to an account so extraordinary.
They accordingly went with him to the hut, and after waiting some time, saw, with astonishment, a light settle over the rising ground, and in about ten minutes disappear. They were greatly puzzled to guess at the meaning of this; when at last one of them recollected, that the night before Morgan (that was the name of the murderer) left the country, he happened to pass his hut, and saw a traveller enter.
This circumstance made him form a suspicion that a murder had been committed; he therefore advised to dig up the rising ground, at the place over which the light had appeared. This was accordingly done, and the body being quickly found, put murder out of all manner of doubt. Those who had found the body deposed all they knew concerning it before a magistrate at Rhytwin. The coroner sat upon it, and brought in his verdict, ‘Wilful Murder.’
As Morgan had been seen at Bristol by some of the inhabitants of Rhytwin, after he left Wales, two constables were dispatched to that city in quest of him. Being taken, he was brought back to Rhytwin, and tried at the ensuing assizes, where there appeared such strong circumstances that he was condemned to die. He however persisted in making the strongest asseverations of his innocence, and kneeling down in open court, prayed to God that his legs might rot off if he was guilty of the murder.
Between the time of his sentence and execution, they in fact rotted off a little below the knees. The hand of God was so visible in this judgement, that the criminal confessed his guilt, and was executed, pursuant to his sentence. This extraordinary event, which happened in the year 1627, may be depended upon as authentic.