The Cottage

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‘Needs a bit of work eh?’, a cheerful voice said from behind me. I turned to see a man with a dog.

‘Just a bit!’, I replied in a similar tone, disguising the fact he’d startled me. ‘Does anyone live here?‘.

The man chuckled in that way that makes you feel you’ve just asked a question you should already know the answer to. ‘Been empty for years. I’ve lived here since the seventies and I’ve never known anyone living there’.

The most obvious thing to say next was ‘Why?’, and so I did. The man shrugged. ‘No idea. Perhaps they’re waiting for it to fall down so they can build on the land?’.

I kept my next question to myself.  Why would you need to wait for a house you own to rot away? Unless it was one of those historic houses that there were rules about knocking down, but this one didn’t look anything special. Just a red brick rectangle with a door in the middle and a pair of windows either side. A bit like the sort of house I might have drawn at primary school. Except my version would have had flowers in the garden and smoke coming out of the chimney and it had been a long time since this one had either.  

‘Tell you something though,’ the man said suddenly. ‘She don’t like it’. He nodded towards the spaniel at his feet.

‘She doesn’t like the house?’, I asked, checking I had grasped the right end of the stick.

‘No, her ball ended up in the garden once and she wouldn’t go in to fetch it. Just stood at the gate, shaking’. A puzzled look must have flashed across my face, as he added, ‘Must have been foxes’.

Looking back, I’m not sure which of us he was trying to convince more. To cut through the awkward silence that followed, I checked my phone. Despite having nowhere to go and nothing to do, I smiled, ‘Well, I’d best be off. Nice to meet you both’.

 ‘Righto’, he replied and we headed off in opposite directions.  

Later, the idea of taking some photos of the place occurred to me and so the next day I made my way back there. As I reached the cottage, a tennis ball sat on my side of the gate.

‘Daisy’s ball. The foxes must have been playing with it’, I thought, although now there was no-one to convince but myself. Pleased with my pictures of the peeling paint and ivy-clad brickwork, and the menacing ‘Not for sale or rent. Keep out’ sign, I headed home. As I uploaded them to Instagram, I saw the light reflected in the windows in a way that made it seem someone might be standing there and wondered if anyone would comment on it.

The following day, the man with the dog passed me in the nearby woods. ‘Did you get the photos you wanted?’ he enquired. ‘I saw you both up there yesterday when I was on my walk with Daisy. Thanks for getting her ball back’. His words only registered after they’d walked on. Both of us? Maybe someone had followed me up there. It wasn’t exactly in the middle of nowhere and someone could easily have worked out where the creepy old cottage I’d shared on my Instagram account was. Could do without the local teenagers adopting it as their new drinking den though.

Feeling some sort of responsibility for the place, I walked over to see if there was any evidence they’d discovered it. From the gate I could see that despite the overgrown tangle of a garden someone had managed to get the door open. I was ok with kids being kids but wanted to let them know their presence there had not gone unnoticed. I picked my way through the wilderness and shouted ‘Hello?. I thought I heard some movement from inside. ‘I think you better come out of there, it’s probably not even safe’. I couldn’t be sure but I thought I heard a giggle. I pushed the door open wider. ‘Come on now’.

More shuffling sounds from upstairs. I put on my adultiest voice. ‘You need to leave NOW’. A gust of wind howled down the stairs, slamming the door shut in my face.   ‘Ok fine’, I thought, retracing my steps through the garden. ‘Serves them right if the foxes eat them’. Thinking I heard a tap from a window, I turned, fully expecting to see a bunch of kids gesturing through the glass but there was no-one.

Later that week, the bluebells in the woods were in full bloom. I bumped into the man again, but this time he was without a dog. Something had spooked her, he told me, and she’d run off. That was yesterday and he hadn’t seen her since. I promised to keep an eye open for her but couldn’t shake off a sickening feeling that I already knew where she was.

The cottage door was ajar again. ‘Daisy?’, I tentatively called from the doorway. A slight whimper came from inside in reply. Then, something rolled down the stairs. Daisy’s ball. ‘Daisy come here! Good girl!,’. More whimpering. I’m not a huge animal lover but the sound was so pitiful I couldn’t just leave her in there. I stepped inside the cottage for the first time. Any curiosity I’d felt about the place had evaporated and there was nothing here that I wanted to see. I tiptoed up the stairs to avoid treading on the handfuls of fresh bluebells scattered on the steps. Trampling on them brings bad luck I’d been told as a child, and didn’t faeries use them as a lure to trap humans too?  

From the landing, I could see Daisy in the corner of one of the bedrooms and stepped inside. Her tail wagged weakly and she started to make her way over. The she stopped dead in her tracks and seemed to stare at something behind me. A soft thud caused me to turn around to see Daisy’s ball slowly rolling towards her. I scooped her into my arms and sprinted for the stairs.  Back on the landing, one of the floorboards in the bedroom behind me creaked and the dog whimpered again. I didn’t take my time on going back down the stairs.

Daisy’s owner was waiting outside. As I passed the trembling spaniel over to him, his look turned from relief to concern. ‘Where’s the other girl gone? She was right behind you’.

‘There was no-one else. Perhaps it was a trick of the light?’, was the answer I gave to reassure him as I looked up to the window.

‘She’s still in there. She always will be’, was the answer I kept to myself.

Footnote: I’ve been toying with the idea of writing more place based fiction for a while. I decided just to be brave and do it…

Death Match

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Here in Lichfield, Shrove Tuesday is celebrated with people dressed up as princesses, pirates or, um, slices of pizza racing along Bore Street as they flip pancakes. Visitors to the city tomorrow may see the old Price of Wales/Chameleon Bar/Feria and think its been boarded up as a precautionary measure in case the shrovetide shenanigans get out of hand but it’s actually just been left derelict for about twenty years.

A flipping disgrace

Somewhere they really do have to take such steps to protect their premises is up the A5 at Atherstone, where instead of pancake racing they play a truly hardcore game of football and have been doing so since 1199. Apparently, once the giant leather ball has been tossed into the crowds onto Long Street there are only two rules. One is that the ball must stay on Long Street. The other is that you can’t kill anyone. I told you it was hardcore (by comparison, the rules of the Lichfield Shrovetide Festivities include mandatory non-slip footwear and that at some point during the festivities the Mayor of Lichfield must be photographed in a spinning teacup on the Market Square).

Pandemonium (Lichfield style)

With this in mind, I am inclined to believe the following anecdote about the good folks of Atherstone. In February 1800, John Massey was executed for murder and his body was gibbeted at Bilstone, near the site where he committed his heinous crime. Eighteen years later, his rotting remains remained on display, and became quite the local tourist attraction for Atherstonians who would pop there for a picnic. Once they’d finished their food, they’d partake in that quaint old pastime of throwing stones at the murderer’s skeleton. Eventually, a grocer called Mr Peach knocked the skull from its boney shoulders and so the group of day-trippers took it back home to Atherstone with them. It seems Peach then presented this sinister souvenir as a gift to his local pub.

My grocer went Bilstone and all I got was this skull of a lousy murderer

I’ve read the skull was lined with silver and turned into a punchbowl. Other versions claim the cranium became a candle holder. Some say it was eventually stolen, others say it’s still kept in a secret safe in one of Atherstone’s ancient inns. If you know anything more, please give me a heads up. Finally, please do accept my apologies if I’ve put you off your pancakes.

Sources:

Coalville Times – Friday 30 November 1956

Loughborough Echo – Friday 25 January 1952

The Sailor’s Skull

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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’.

Jaggery / The Old Vicarage, Church Street, Shifnal / CC BY-SA 2.0

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 19th 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.

Richard Law / The Jerningham Apartments / CC BY-SA 2.0

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

Caught Red-fingered

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If ever there was an instance of picking on the wrong person, it was at Fenton Toll Gate on a January morning in 1834. Mr Dawes, a surgeon from Stoke on Trent, was walking back home from Lane End, later to become known as Longton, when he passed three men. One of them raised their arm and struck him in the face, knocking him to the ground. As Mr Dawes lay stunned, the man began to rifle through his pockets whilst the two others assisted with this daylight robbery. As the surgeon regained his senses, he started to shout, ‘Murder!’ but one of the thieving trio place his hand across his mouth to silence him.

I think this might be the site of the Fenton Toll Gate (taken from Google maps). I also think the Sixth Form College the sign here points to was the first purpose built sixth form college in the UK which is nothing to do with this story but is a great bit of Staffordshire history,

Dawes saw an opportunity to defend himself and managed to bite down on the man’s forefinger. The more he struggled, the harder Dawes held on. Eventually, the failed footpad managed to escape but left part of his finger in the jaws of Dawes.

Lane Delph, where the Evans Bros. came to the end of the road. Think we need to continue on our journey to the intriguing sounding Warming Castle however

When another Stokie surgeon called Mr Chadwick heard of the attempted robbery, he tipped off the police that he has just attended to a collier who was missing the end of his index finger and pointed them in the direction of the Evans brothers of Lane Delph. Apprehended at the their residence, the missing finger (carefully preserved by Dawes in a bottle of spirits) was found to be a match for Charles Evans’ manual wound and they were arrested. Out of shear desperation at the trial, he claimed he had cut it off when carving mutton in a public house but, despite their denial of any wrongdoing, the Evans brothers were nailed and sentenced to 14 years transportation. Who needs fingerprints when you have the actual finger?

What became of their accomplice and perhaps more interestingly, the incriminating index finger, remains a mystery. Is this body of evidence still preserved in a bottle of spirits somewhere on a shelf in Stoke?

Sources:

http://www.turnpikes.org.uk/Tollhouses%20of%20Staffordshire.htm

Bucks Gazette – Saturday 22 March 1834

Staffordshire Advertiser – Saturday 18 January 1834

The Bible Thief

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When John Duncalf was released from the House of Correction in Kingswinford in 1675, he swore he would never set his feet in the town again as long as he lived. It was a promise that was to become grimly prophetic.

On leaving Kingswinford, he embarked on a life of petty crime and sin. He would later confess to, ‘Idleness, Stealing, Cursing, Swearing, Drunkeness and Uncleanness with Women’, although he explained that he had not actually committed actual Fornication or Adultery with a woman except in the thoughts of his heart, and by lascivious words and gestures, whereby he had endeavoured to tempt them to lewdness in divers places. I think we can infer from this that his lack of lewd action was not for want of trying.

The chapter of crime he was to become truly infamous for was the theft of a bible. If he’d only read one of them, paying particular attention to the eight commandment, things could have turned out a lot differently. But, on 5th January 1677, Duncalf turned up on the doorstep of Grange Mill, masquerading as a beggar. It was the home of Margaret Babb and when she charitably invited him in for a drink to celebrate Twelfth Night, the bad man stole her good book.

Duncalf stealing the Bible from Margaret Babb as she fetched him a drink. I’m not quite sure exactly what Mr Babb is doing. (Woodcut from Divine Judgement and Mercy Exemplified In a Variety of Surprising Instances)

Duncalf sold Babb’s Bible on to a maid at Heath Forge at Wombourne but its provenance was discovered and suspicion fell on Duncalf. He swore it wasn’t him apparently, ‘wishing his hands might rot off, if that were true’. It would turn out to be the second prescient statement Duncalf would make. Soon afterwards, the flesh around his wrists began to turn black. His ungodly wish was about to be granted.

A few weeks later, Duncalf was working in Dudley with a joiner called Thomas Osborn when he felt weak and faint and feverish. It was Shrove Tuesday and he headed home towards Codsall but collapsed in a barn at Perton Hall in Tettenhall en-route. After two days and two nights, he was discovered unable to walk and so was carried back to his last place of settlement. And so it was that John Duncalf found himself back in the town of Kingswinford but, just as he had sworn, without actually set foot in the place. He was taken in by a man called John Bennett and at first he was lodged in a barn belonging to the Three Crowns Inn on the Wolverhampton to Kidderminster Road. After a fortnight, he was taken to Bennett’s house in Wall Heath where his blackened flesh began to rise in lumps at his hands and wrists before beginning to decay.

A vicar visits Duncalf just before he’s about to lose his left hand (Woodcut from Divine Judgement and Mercy Exemplified In a Variety of Surprizing Instances)

The account I’ve read comes from James Illingworth, one of the clergymen who visited him amidst the crowds. He says that by the end of April, ‘many little Worms came out of the rotten flesh, such as are usually seen in the dead Corpes (sic)’. Many visitors also appeared, posies pressed to their nostrils to block out the putrid smell, hoping to see the man who they believed was being literally and directly punished by God for his sins. Despite everything, Duncalf did not appear to have learned his lesson. Illingworth heard him tell his keeper John Bennet that he wished his visitors’ noses might drop off and asked why he did not dash out their teeth to stop them from grinning at him.

Eventually, Duncalf asked for Margaret Babb to visit, and she came with the maid he had sold the stolen book to. He confessed his crime to them and asked their forgiveness, which both of them granted. When his hands rotted off, there was hope that penance had now been paid and that God would punish him no more. Yet, the suffering continued. By 8th May, both of his lower legs had fallen off at the knee, although he didn’t realise it until Bennett held them up to show him.

According to the Dudley Archives and Local History Service, the entry in the parish register at Kingswinford shows that John Duncalf was buried on 22nd June 1677, and is described as, ‘the man that did rott both hands & leggs’. The entry notes that he stole a bible, a charge, ‘he wickedly denyed with an imprecation, wishing that if he stole it his hands might rot of which afterwards they did in a miserable manner’. It adds that, ‘many people (I verily believe hundreds) saw him as hee lay with his hands & leggs rotting off, being a sad spectacle of God’s justice and anger’ and ends by saying it was registered as, ‘a certain trueth, to give warning to posterity to beware/ of false oathes’.

Clearly there is a certain trueth to this story which elevates the death of John Duncalf to more than mere folklore but what did cause his terrible demise if it wasn’t a punishment dished out via divine judgement?

Keith Evans / St Nicholas Wattisham / CC BY-SA 2.0

A memorial in the tower (which you can see here around 13m20s in) and an entry in the parish register at the now disused church of St Nicholas at Wattisham in Suffolk describe the sad fate of the Downing family who all lost their feet in 1762, although four of them survived. I’ll spare you from the full gory details but belief amongst local people was that the poor family were victims of witchcraft. The local vicar Rev Bones (I kid you not) was not convinced and set out to ascertain the cause of their affliction sending several letters to the Royal Society who concluded the culprit was gangrenous ergotism caused by eating grains infected by the fungus Claviceps purpurea.

I’ve seen this ‘tragic ‘singular calamity’ as Rev Bones called it, described as the only recorded case of ergot poisoning in England. However, I strongly suspect that John Duncalf may have been another of its victims and possibly, had John Bennett and others sought medical attention for him rather than condemning him to be some sort of religious freak-show, he may even have survived.

I definitely wouldn’t swear on it though…

Sources

Ian Atherton (2022): ‘John Duncalf the Man that Did Rott Both Hands & Leggs’: Chronicle of a Staffordshire Death Retold in the Long Eighteenth Century, Midland History, DOI: 10.1080/0047729X.2022.2126237

Divine Judgements Exemplified

https://www.facebook.com/dudleyarchives

https://wellcomecollection.org/works/uh33ekuf

Hereford Times – Saturday 09 March 1867

Click to access brforeignmcrev72717-0202.pdf

The Accidental Villa at Acton

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The plan was to spend the day foraging for folklore in the villages to the west of Stafford but we accidentally ended up at Acton Trussell and then found out that archaeologists had accidentally found a Roman villa underneath the local church.

In the 1970s, a local archaeology group started to wonder why the church of St James was built someway outside the village. Clearly the two women we asked for directions to the church who after asking, ‘What church?’ then sent us in entirely the wrong direction, thought it should have been nearer to the village too. The obvious assumption was that the centre of Acton Trussell has shifted over the years but when fieldwalking between the church and village produced just a scattering of late medieval pottery, this seemed unlikely. What did start showing up however was evidence that there had been Roman activity at the site. Several sherds of pottery and two coins from the 3rd century posed a new question. What were the Romans doing here?

To the south of the St James, the field-walkers found fragments of roof tiles, suggesting the source of the Roman remains was somewhere near the churchyard. and then an excavation which began in May 1984 revealed that the church of St James and its graveyard actually stood upon the site of a Romano-British villa. Was this just a coincidence or could there be some sort of deliberate continuity here?

© Tony Habberley (cc-by-sa/2.0) geograph.org.uk/p/3242311
Late 2nd C. Apsidal wing of Roman Villa, taken Friday, 5 July, 1985

It’s not unknown for Roman sites to have been converted to Christianity. I was at Wroxeter in the summer and read that part of the Roman complex at Viriconium may have been adapted for use as an early church. It’s not watertight but the availability of a cold plunge pool in the frigadarium and bodies found nearby hint that the baths may have been used for those two Christian bookends of baptism and burial.

Wroxeter Roman City

This brings me back down the A5, and makes me wonder about Wall, where there are clues that Letocetum may have been home to an early Christian community. Again, evidence is mostly circumstantial but the most convincing argument comes in the form of a long lost bronze bowl with a Chi-Ro symbol on it. It was discovered in a grave in 1922 along with 30 coins dating to the 4th century and one of the 1st century and exhibited by Mr F Jackson at Wroxeter at a meeting of the Birmingham Archaeological Society. Afterwards it disappeared. and is now probably in a private collection but it belongs in a museum (yes, I have been watching Indiana Jones over the Christmas holiday). Thankfully, the other physical evidence that Christians once worshipped at Wall is in a museum. Well, in the Birmingham Museum Collection Centre anyway. Amidst stones carved with heads and horns, believed to have come from a Romano-British shrine local to Letocetum and rebuilt into the walls at Wall, was a stone carved with a cross.

Archaeologist Jim Gould suggests stylistically the cross most likely belongs to the period of the 6th to 9th century, which would tie it into the time-frame of the tantalising verse that is, ‘The Death Song of Cynddylan’ which recalls three battles fought by Prince Cynddylan of Powys. One of these was at a place called ‘Caer Luitcoed’, which translates to ‘the fortified grey wood’ or, as everyone now calls, Lichfield. Here’s a translation of the relevant part of the poem:

Before Lichfield they caused gore beneath the ravens and fierce attack
Lime-white shields were shattered before the sons of Cynddylan.
I shall lament until I would be in the land of my resting place for the slaying of Cynddylan, famed among chieftains.
Grandeur in battle, extensive spoils
Moriel bore off before Lichfield
1500 cattle from the front of battle,
80 stallions and equal harness.
The chief bishop wretched in his four-cornered house
The book clutching monks did not protect
those who fell in the battle before the splendid warrior.

The relevance to a possible early Christian community in the area are those book-grasping monks and the bishop in his four cornered house. According to Jim Gould, written evidence can also be found in Eddius Stephanus’ Life of Bishop Wilfrid which suggests that there was some sort of church and monastery in the area before St Chad set up alongside the spring at Stowe. Wulfhere, King of Mercia between 657 and 674, gave lands to Bishop Wilfred to found monasteries at existing holy places deserted by British Christians.

It wouldn’t be a complete leap of faith to imagine this could have included Lichfield, would it?

https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/photos/item/AO56/208/8

https://actontrussellromanvilla.weebly.com/

https://www.wallromansitefriendsofletocetum.co.uk/index.asp?pageid=709225

https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/2415.64

The Archaeology of Roman Letocetum (Wall, Staffordshire), Implications of the proposed West Midlands Northern Relief Road, Draft for Consultation, County Planning and Development Department Staffordshire County Council

Gould, J 1993. ‘Lichfield before St Chad’, in Medieval Archaeology and Architecture at
Lichfield (ed J Maddison), Brit Archaeol Assoc Conference Trans 13, 1–10, Leeds: Maney Publishing

The Valley of Phantoms

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I’m reading the memoirs of a man named William Purcell Witcutt. Like me he had connections to both Birmingham and Staffordshire, and was fascinated by folklore. Unlike me, he was an protestant vicar who converted to Catholicism before being exiled to the furthest outpost of the Diocese for the crime of commenting on the corrupt nature of many medieval priests. Yes, they sent him to Leek.

In his book, ‘Return to Reality’ there is a chapter called ‘The Valley of Phantoms’, in which he describes how, ‘Leek lay hidden in mist and woods in the middle distance, and one of the older boys tried to convince me that it was invisible from the air. Leek will never be bombed said he, and quoted with assurance the prophecy that there would come a time when, ‘there will be no safety in the land save ‘twixt Mow Cop and Morridge’.

No I can definitely see it

Witcutt was soon to find plenty more superstition in this Staffordshire Moorland town. It seemed to him that the valley and moors around it swarmed with ghosts and bogies, which people still believed in. There was the Headless Horseman, or in Leek dialect, ‘a man on an ‘oss without yed on, an awful gory sight’, and nearby was a Black Dog who guarded the graves of those who died a violent death. According to Witcutt, the Queen of the Leek demons was the Mermaid of Black Mere, who I wrote about many years ago here. A new story to me was that of ‘Ball Haye Jack’, a little grey man whose appearance in front of one of the mills was believed to bring bad luck. One curious custom Witcutt noted was that on seeing his collar, the girls and women who worked in the mills would touch the factory railings, a somewhat unsettling reaction given it seems to be linked to the superstition that touching iron would protect against the power of a sorcerer.

One of the strangest spots Witcutt writes about is the Coombes Valley, When he visited in May 1940 he found a farmer planting potatoes and as the man sowed his spuds, he shared stories of the valley. At a place nearby, the spectre of a murdered man was said to ride up and down the ridge. Once seven priests came to lay him but all but one of the gathered fathers fled. The final man standing held up a stone in the brook, dismissing the pleas of the phantom for mercy, and laid him beneath the rock. The process appears to have been unsuccessful however and so the dead man rode out once more. This next time he was laid beneath a hawthorn tree at a place known very appropriately as Spirit Hole. Even that was only sort of successful though as he still haunts the valley, although now in far less malevolent form of a bird heard singing as the night falls at the Spirit Hole. The stone which had failed to keep the ghost grounded was still there when Witcutt visited (and I believe it still is), and according to the farmer it had once been a stone of sacrifice.

No wonder the valley is full of phantoms.

Source: WITCUTT, W.P. Return to reality, Macmillan, 1955.

And Then Another

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Three men, three deaths all seemingly linked. Somewhere in the story there must be a clue to tell us whether it was coincidence or if something creepier was at play here.

Engraving. An Ignis Fatuus, or Will-o’-The-Whisp. As seen in Lincolnshire. engraved by T. W. Cook after Pether. Published by R.N. Rose, London, 1820. © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum, London
Science Museum, London

As the harvest of 1853 was gathered from the fields at Rownall in Staffordshire, Colonel Thomas Powys sat beneath the shade of a small oak tree, overseeing the work of the new labourers he had hired. Hours passed and day turned to dusk, but still Powys remained sat under the tree until Jack Shaw, one of the seasoned workers wandered over and found him in a state of insensibility, muttering the same phrases over and over. ‘And then another’, ‘Yet another’ and then, ‘The grass’.

Shaw shouted to the other men to stop their work in the meadow and together they carried the near comatose Captain back to his home Westwood Hall. The doctor was called for and when he arrived Powys was still saying those strange words. ‘And then another…then another…the grass’, although his voice was now not much more than a whisper. Soon afterwards, he was dead.

When Jack Shaw returned to the tree where the Captain had sat he noticed the grass where the man’s feet had rested had withered. Shaw’s son, telling the story to the Newcastle Under Lyme Times in October 1940, said he had witnessed it himself and that no grass would grow on the spots for some years after. Another odd detail about the death of Captain Powys is that when Mr Leese the coffin-maker was called to measure him for his coffin, he noticed that the corpse hadn’t stiffened and still hadn’t done so by the time it was placed in it.

The story would be strange enough as it stands but several years later another man died in the very same spot beneath the oak tree. Mr Yates, the tenant of the farm had felt faint and gone to sit in the shade. Just like the Captain before him, he had to be helped home and never recovered from what ever malady struck him that day. And just like the Captain, his corpse never stiffened.

A man named Heath became a tenant of the farm and, one day whilst cutting rushes in the same meadow where the other men had been stricken, he too was taken ill and died shortly afterwards. Shaw Jnr could not confirm whether or not he had sat in the same spot as Powys and Yates prior to his demise but he does recall that Heath’s body remained flexible even as he was placed in his coffin. He adds that after each of the three men died, so one of the tree’s branches. Of course, there were theories from the locals. One was that all three had entered into some sort of trance and that they were still under it when they died. If true, it would make a strange story truly sinister as it suggests they may have been buried alive. Shaw Jnr’s own explanation was that all three contracted some sort of illness from the marshy ground at the end of the field. He had seen the will o’ th’ wisp there on several occasions and as the explanation for these eerie lights is that they are caused by the spontaneous combustion of gases, perhaps he was on to something?

I am a storyteller, not a scientist, and so I am asking any readers of this post to share their theories regarding the mystery of these three strange deaths in the Staffordshire Moorlands.

There’s folklore and there’s legendary

Sources

Newcastle-under-Lyme Times – Friday 04 October 1940

The Burial of Charles Blood

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We are over half way through October and I don’t feel like I have indulged in anywhere near enough spookiness as I should have this year. I’m going to try and play creepy catch-up starting with the bizarre burial of Charles Blood at Church Leigh nr Uttoxeter, which took place while the village was cut off after a snowstorm in March 1909.

Once the funeral service had concluded & the mourners dispersed, the sexton, Edward Alcock, was filling in the grave of Charles Blood when he became aware of a knocking, seemingly coming from inside the coffin below him. He described it as the sound of someone rapping on an empty box and counted twenty taps in total, loud at first but gradually becoming fainter. Concerned the poor man had been buried alive, he called over to his brother Harry to fetch Samuel Hollins the undertaker. As the small group of mystified men stood together in the snowy churchyard, they received instructions from the rector in his warm bed, to raise the coffin from the cold grave and carry it into the church. It was something of a struggle due to the corpulent nature of the corpse within but eventually they managed to manoeuvre it. Once inside the chancel, the undertaker unscrewed the lid. It was immediately clear that there were no signs of life and nothing to suggest anything sinister was afoot. The only change was that the hands, originally placed on the deceased’s stomach, were now lying by his sides. A doctor’s assistant from Tean who was passing by the church yard was called in to confirm that Charles Blood was definitely dead and that he definitely had been when he was placed in the coffin.

Weirdly, when the coffin was lowered back into the earth, the tapping began again although this time Charles Blood was left to lie in peace. Well, it would have been peaceful apart from the tapping.

The undertaker’s explanation of the mystery was that the unnerving noises were caused by compressed air in the coffin. He dismissed the suggestion that it was earth falling on the wood, as the taps were too regular. The sexton had no rational explanation for the strange sounds, having buried hundreds of bodies before without incident. It seems he may have suspected a supernatural cause for the sounds as it’s reported that after the strange affair, he would walk a mile out of his way at night to avoid the churchyard. He wasn’t alone. Some of the more superstitious villagers at Church Leigh were convinced it was a sign of some impending disaster.

I’ve been to visit the churchyard but couldn’t see, or hear, the grave of Charles Blood. I reckon this chap knows more that he is letting on though…

Sources

Uttoxeter Advertiser 10th March 1909

Hull Daily Mail 13th March 1909

Liverpool Echo 10th March 1909

Memory Lanes

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Perhaps it’s the autumnal feeling the air has acquired after such a scorching summer but I had a bit of a panic that the devil might be spitting on the blackberries earlier than Michaelmas Day this year. So, I dug the Tupperware out from the back of the cupboard for its annual outing and headed over to Pipe Green.

Let’s get ready to crumble!

It was meagre pickings for the first half an hour and my mind wandered back to the brimming bowls of berries I used to collect in my grandad’s back garden in Birmingham. It never occurred to me at the time but the bushes must have been remnants of the fields of farmland that the council house was built on in the 1920s, near the intriguingly named ‘Madcap’ (or ‘Madcat’) Lane, now known as something far more sensible. Even in 1947, the Evening Dispatch acknowledged that Madcap Lane sounded much jollier than sober Graham Road.

Trying to workout where the name comes is driving me mad

Happily, the bushes at the Abnalls Lane end of Pipe Green were much more fruitful. Once my crumble ingredients had been collected, my thoughts shifted once more to something else I’ve been gathering here over the years. Ghost stories.

I found this first one way back in 2011, in the early days of the blog. It was relayed by local historian JW Jackson via his local history column in the Lichfield Mercury around the mid-twentieth century as follows, “Half a century ago considerable alarm was caused by reports of a spectre being seen by various passers-by at belated hours. The writer personally visited (at midnight when ghosts are said to appear) on several occasions but after patiently waiting saw nothing of a spectral character further than weird forms in the trees and bushes in the dim light, and on one occasion the gentle waving of a white nightgown pegged on a clothes line”.

I know that the ghost turning out to be someone’s pyjamas is something of an anti-climax but believe me, I’ve heard others since which will give you nightmares…

As alluded to above, my childhood was spent foraging in South Yardley and so I didn’t grow up around here. Someone who did told me how she and the other local kids would scare themselves silly with stories of a weeping lady in white, wandering the woods and lanes of Leomansley. I was also told of another woeful woman who was seen standing at the side of the road by a motorist. He gave her a lift to a pub in Burntwood and, as he watched her walk inside, thought he should probably check she was ok given how distressed she was when he dropped her off. Inside, there was no sign of her and the customers confirmed no-one had entered the pub before him. I didn’t think to ask the storyteller if she was wearing white.

Can you spot the face?

A local undertaker told me of the time that his brother was walking up Abnalls Lane and heard the approaching footsteps of someone behind him. He slowed to let the person pass by but instead he felt whoever, or whatever, it was pass straight through him. Over at Cross in Hand Lane, where two houses were being knocked into one, one of the builders saw a man in an old-fashioned country smock entering the property through what had been a doorway, recently blocked up and replaced by a window.

The most haunting story I’ve heard about these holloways is the experience a man had after a shift at the Nelson Inn, Cresswell Green. In the car park, he found the owner’s two dog whining and pawing at his car. He shooed them away, got in and drove off down the dark lanes. As he approached Abnalls Lane, the atmosphere in the car inexplicably turned icy. When he glanced into his rearview mirror he saw an elderly man, wearing an worn overcoat tied at the waist with a rope belt, sitting silently in the back. He barely had time to register what he was seeing before his phantom passenger seemed to slide sideways, off the seat and out of the car.

I shall leave you with one final story. North Lane, now nothing more than a footpath across a field linking Cross in Hand Lane with the Stafford Road, was said to be haunted by a man who had hanged himself on an oak tree there. Could this be linked to a man called Gratrex, whose death was reported by the Aris’s Birmingham Gazette on Wednesday 7th September 1763? According to the announcement, an inquest found him guilty of felo-de-se and he was buried in the highway in Lichfield. It doesn’t specify which one but such burials normally took place at a crossroads near to a parish boundary and so it is possible that the remains of this poor soul lie somewhere near here at the edge of the city.

Have I ever experienced anything myself? Not here no, but elsewhere. Those are tales for another time though…