We all love a bit of gothic fiction but I’ve often said that the strangest stories are those which are real. If you need further convincing, in April 1950, the following line appeared in an article in the Wolverhampton Express and Star. ‘The Rev. J.W.M. Finny, vicar of Shifnal, uses a human skull as a tobacco jar’.

The skull was apparently gifted to Finny’s father, a medical practitioner in Manchester, who was called to a hospital to attend to an American sailor fatally injured in a brawl at Salford Docks. On his death bed, he bequeathed his body to the School of Anatomy. His skull however was given as a gift to the doctor who had attended him in his final hours on the condition that it was to be used as a tobacco jar. A huge incentive to give up smoking right there on the spot surely? But no, the medic accepted the seaman’s skull and used it in the way the former owner had wished. And that’s not even the strangest part of this story,,,

A young RAF man on leave stayed at the Vicarage in what was known as the ‘Pink Room’ but was found at 7.30am as white as a sheet, dressed and ready to leave. ‘Never’, he said, ‘could I spend another night in this room’. He revealed he’d not had a wink of sleep thanks to a series of raps, bangs and rattling, and perhaps worst of all, the sense that someone, or something was in the room with him.

Other weird occurrences included the front door knocking when there was no-one there and lights in the study being switched on when the room was apparently empty. The housekeeper had several experiences, including being disturbed in the passages (ooh er matron) and the impression of something brushing past her.  Back in the Pink Room, people reported having trouble opening the door as if something was blocking the doorway on the other side. Something like a body…

The Rev Finny referred to his ghostly guest as Freddie and there was a suggestion that the skull was responsible for the strange occurrences at the Rectory. Yet, the paranormal activity in the building apparently began long before the poor American sailor came to rest his head there. Indeed, the son of the man who was Vicar of Shifnal in 1891 told Finny that similar activities had been reported there in the 19^th century with the poltergeist popping across the field to the Jerningham Arms from time to time. It seems that even ghosts want to go out out sometimes.

Guests at the now closed inn reported being grasped by unseen hands and flung out of their beds. Footsteps and other noises were heard from empty rooms. In August 1950, Frank Ferriday the landlord told how the ghost had learned a new trick. A few empty glasses had been left in the sink and were later to be found filled to the brim with beer, even though the beer pumps had been switched off. Apparently, a sticky substance was found on the handles and I think it best we just note this unsettling development and continue without further comment.

The Ferriday family had named the ghost Oswald but by 1965, landlord Trevor McNeill believed the phantom punter was actually a nun after a waitress claimed to have seen a black-cloaked figure in one of the upstairs corridors. Her supernatural presence at the pub was supposedly at its strongest on New Year’s Eve and so McNeill held his own candlelit hootenanny down in the cellar near to the blocked up doorway. Fans of folklore bingo will of course be delighted to learn that this was believed to lead to a secret passage where the nun had been killed. However, what this supernatural sister was doing down a supposed secret tunnel in Shifnal in the first place is as much of a mystery as why someone would give away their own skull to be turned into a tobacco jar.

Disappointingly in May 1950, the Council for Psychical Research declined to send an investigator to Shifnal on the basis that, ‘everything is quiet there these days’. I assume it still is? Both the vicarage and the inn are privately owned properties these days and so hopefully Freddie/Oswald/the beer serving Sister are behaving themselves.

Sources:

Wolverhampton Express and Star – Wednesday 26 April 1950

Birmingham Daily Gazette – Friday 05 May 1950

Crewe Chronicle – Saturday 13 May 1950

Birmingham Daily Gazette – Wednesday 09 August 1950

https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1176147?section=official-list-entry