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.

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.

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.

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…