Back home after dark and as I opened the door, I was greeted by the drip. I cursed myself for forgetting to ask around for a plumber’s number at the pub. Now I’d have to resort to the local Facebook group.

I poured myself a drink, collapsed onto the sofa and located the group online. As I went to start typing, a new post about the reservoir caught my attention. Someone had been seen walking across the dried-up bed late last night and the poster wanted everyone to know that it was FOOLISH and VERY DANGEROUS.

The following day was at least as hot and the pub was just as busy. I couldn’t blame them. If my financial circumstances were different, I’d be on the other side of the bar too. By the time I got into my car, I was utterly exhausted. I drove back to the cottage over the causeway. My headlights picked up a figure at the side of the road which I barely had time to register before it disappeared. The air in the car felt hot and clammy as Mike’s story popped back into my mind. I glanced into the rear-view mirror to see if anyone was still standing there but for a split-second I thought I caught a glimpse of someone sitting on the back seat. I put my foot down and sped home without looking behind me again. It must have been tiredness or dehydration causing me to hallucinate, I told myself. The puddle of stagnant water I found when I pulled up at home and was finally brave enough to check the back seat suggested otherwise.

I got inside and called my friend Alexis. She’d know if I was ringing rather than messaging then something was up. A sleepy voice answered.

‘Hello? You alright, bab?’

‘Um… yeah. I’m ok’.

‘But you’re ringing me. And your voice sounds weird. What’s going on?’

I hesitated for a second, just enough for her to start speculating.

‘Mate? This isn’t about that bellend again, is it? Don’t tell me you’ve contacted him?’

‘God no. It’s just that…’. I took a deep breath. I think there might be a ghost’.

There was a short silence and then a laugh.

‘A ghost? What you on about? Where? At the cottage?

‘Maybe. But mostly in my car’.

‘Oh mate, I warned you not to move to the middle of nowhere with nothing going on, didn’t I? Now you’ve lost the plot’, she joked.

‘I’m being serious!’, I protested, whilst wondering if perhaps I had. ‘I saw something in my car just, driving home from the pub. It was standing on the side of the road and then I think it was on the back seat’.

‘What was it?’

‘A person. A girl, I think. A chap at the pub said he saw something at the reservoir too, during the last drought. I think it might be the same thing’.

‘So who is it?’

‘He said her name is Kitty. Kitty Fisher.’

‘As in the nursery rhyme?’

‘No, she’s a real person. Well, she was. Before she jumped off a bridge’.

‘OK. This is mental. I’m coming over. Let me go and fire up the Mystery Machine’.

When she arrived, we hugged on the doorstep. ‘Thanks for coming’ .

‘No problem, mate. I ain’t afraid of no ghost. Wait, what’s that dripping sound?’

Over a couple of glasses of wine, we concocted a plan. We’d visit the local church in the morning and see if there was anyone there to ask about local history.  When we arrived, the door was open and we found a woman decorating the church for a wedding.

‘Hi…we’re looking for a grave?’, the woman carried on arranging orange lilies in a vase. ‘There’s a register of burials in the churchyard over there’. She nodded towards a desk near the back of the church.

‘OK thanks’, we picked it up and pored over it, scanning centuries of village life and death, looking for the name ‘Kitty Fisher’.

‘You sure that’s what she was called?’

Our discussion attracted the attention of Hyacinth Bucket, as we would later refer to her. ‘I’m actually part of the village history society. Who is it you are looking for?’

‘A young woman. Kitty Fisher?’

Hyacinth all but tutted, ‘Oh, because of the bridge at the reservoir?  I’m afraid you won’t find that name in here. It’s an insult, a nickname given to a woman who steals someone else’s husband. You know, as in the nursery rhyme when she ended up with Lucy Locket’s pocket’.

I’d spent my whole life until now thinking she’d literally found a purse.

‘Not a penny was there in it.  You see, the bloke was broke’, she smiled, satisfied at her own rhyme.  ‘My guess is our Kitty Fisher was a gold-digger but not a particularly successful one’. Our Kitty Fisher? Her words left me feeling strangely protective of a dead woman I had no connection to beyond a fleeting encounter which I may well have imagined.   

As Alexis and I exchanged glances relating to this development, she continued. ‘Anyhow, even if we did know her real name we’d still not find her here. The story is she was a suicide. She’ll be buried somewhere out there’.

She gestured in a vague direction indicating somewhere outside of the churchyard. I couldn’t help but interpret it as a nod in the direction of the reservoir but asked, ‘Out there where?’.

Hyacinth shrugged. ‘Near where she took her own life, probably. Maybe even with a stake through her heart’, the woman delivered the last part with a little more relish than I found palatable. Perhaps seeing the horrified look on our faces, she reined it in a little. ‘The church is much more understanding these days’.

‘I’m sure that would be of great comfort to her’, muttered Alexis. As we walked away it was becoming clear to both of us. It was neither a priest nor a plumber who would be able to help stop that drip.

As the sun set that evening, we loaded the car with the supplies we’d gathered. ‘Got everything?’, asked Alexis.

‘Yep. Let’s do it’.

We drove to the edge of the reservoir and parked up. The air was still stifling and it was just about light enough to pick up the outlines of the crumbling structures which had recently remerged from the mud. ‘That one is the bridge’, I indicated and we trudged over together.

We set up our makeshift shrine above the keystone and laid down a posy of wildflowers. Forget me nots, poppies and irises seemed more appropriate than the high maintenance blooms Hyacinth had been fussing over at the church. I set down the candle and the bell, allowing myself a small smile at the latter, given Mike and his friends’ conversation about the stories of one tolling beneath the reservoir’s surface.

Once set up, we paused. ‘Do you think she’s here somewhere?’, I asked.

‘I don’t know’, whispered Alexis. ‘Try speaking to her’.

‘Kitty? I’m sorry I don’t know your real name. I know that has been taken from you. We’re here to let you know that you aren’t bound to this place anymore. You don’t have to stay here’. I lit the candle.

‘Please, go in peace now’, I said softly, and rang the bell. As Alexis and I reached for each other’s hands, we felt a spot of rain. Then another. And then, finally, the heavens opened. 

We returned to the cottage, soaked to the skin from the thunder storm raging above. As we walked through the door, Alexis said, ‘Listen!’. The rain was hammering on the roof but the drip had finally stopped.

Epilogue

A few days later, Alexis messaged me to say the storm had caused some sort of power surge at my old house and that my ex’s 85 inch television was no more. The temptation to gloat was strong but in the end, I actually felt a bit sorry for him. Eventually, there comes a time for all of us to move on.

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