Tag Archives: folklore

Cursed Soles Part II

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On our second visit to Papillon Hall, we’re going to step away from the tales of the infamous cursed footwear. Instead, let’s meet the man painted as the villain of the piece and his portrait, an artwork which appears to have had the power to scare the heebie-jeebies out of anyone who gazed upon it. Disclaimer – when I included an image of it in part I I did not know this. Please read at your own risk.

David Papillon was born in 1691, and was the grandson of the man who had originally built the hall earlier that century. Most biographies depict him as a respectable and upstanding gentleman but local folklore hints that there was a darker side to the man they called ‘Old Pamp’1.

Papillon Hall, before it was rebuilt with wings in 1903

Pamp was said to be something of a sorcerer with such a mesmerising gaze that he could bewitch people to the point that they were powerless to move. His portrait also appears to have possessed the same power. Sometimes visitors to the hall would stand and stare at it for long periods of time, seemingly incapable of turning away. Even more chilling are the stories that on some nights Pamp himself would actually step out from the artwork and roam the rooms of Papillon. One servant girl reported seeing him stood at the end of her bed wearing the same clothes as he did in the painting.

When the portrait was moved to Crowhurst Park near Hastings, Pamp’s ghost went with it. Bertha Tufnell, who was letting Crowhurst from his descendant Pelham Rawsthorn Papillon, saw Pamp standing in the drawing room as if he’d just climbed out of the painting. Following this he tried to materialise on several other occasions but Bertha worked out that reciting a prayer seemed to stop him from fully forming outside of his frame. As a more permanent solution she sent a desperate letter to Pelham and he arranged for the creepy canvas to be removed to his residence in Hastings.

An intriguing article appeared in the Market Harborough Advertiser in December 1946 with the author ‘FPS’ claiming that forty years ago he’d met a man who was on his way to Papillon Hall and tried to engage him in conversation. When he mentioned the famous infamous cursed footwear and the ghost of Pamp the man became visibly uncomfortable and reluctant to chat. FPS tired to reassure him that ghost stories were nonsense but this distressed the man even more. The man clutched the author’s arm, warning him to be careful as Old Pamp could get nasty and had a tendency to appear when people were dismissive. Undaunted, FPS joked that he’d like to see him so that he could ask about a painting he had which once used to hand in Papillon Hall.

A few months after this encounter on the Theddingworth to Lubenham Road, strange things began to happen at the home of FPS. It started with the Papillon painting falling to the ground with a crash. The cord was replaced, the nails secured and it was put back up again but the painting fell down a further three times. New fasteners were added to the frame, along with two brass chains and two lengths of copper wire, all separately fastened to hooks secured in the newly re-plugged wall. A length of hempen rope was also added for extra measure and FPS felt confident the painting would now stay put. Funnily enough, it did not.

The painting was left leaning against the wall and that night, FPS and his wife heard footsteps on the stairs and a bell ringing violently somewhere in the house. In the morning, another painting was found to have fallen. Things soon escalated from ‘a bit odd’ to ‘outright terrifying’, one night when a howling was heard outside the house. As the author and his wife discussed if the sound could be made by a dog, it came nearer. As FPS recalled,

“Description fails, words cannot express the unholy thing, it was vilely evil, blood-curdling, only someone or something in hellish torment could howl like that. It came still nearer and we could track the sound as ‘It’ approached the house. A moment later it seemed even still nearer, then, to our unspeakable horror we realised the ‘thing’ was in the house”.

FPS grabbed a candle and went downstairs. As he descended the house seemed filled with the sound but then came an unnatural silence. He could find nothing to account for the sound, though the dogs were cowering and staring at something invisible. Suddenly, a shriek cut through the silence, seeming to emit from the spot the dogs were staring at. They bolted from the room, with FPS not far behind them. Half-way across the hallway, the candle went out. In the darkness, the howl came again, this time from between his feet, before moving level with his head. Then he heard his wife shouting to him, ‘Quick! Quick! it’s on the stairs’, and managed to get back into the bedroom where he and his wife held the door fast until the howling ceased. He never heard it again. Perhaps David Papillon had made his point.

Incredibly, there is yet more of this mysterious story to share. There’s a line in the Market Harborough Advertiser which lends weight to the story that a skeleton was found when the hall was being renovated at the start of the twentieth century. In a review of the year 1903 it simply says ‘December 3 – a quantity of human bones were found at Papillon Hall’. Frustratingly, the newspaper archive does not appear to have digitalised the edition for December 3rd 1903 which presumably contains more details of the discovery. Elsewhere, there are suggestions that the hauntings relate to the pre-Papillon history of the site and involve a lepers’ hospital, a monk and some buried treasure. Then there are the experiences of Captain Frank Belville, who lived at the hall for a while and encountered not the terrifying presence of David Papillon but a spectral young woman, ‘silver and half-hooded’, who he chased often but never caught (why is this giving ‘Carry on Cursing’ vibes?). Oh, and there’s a magical well too.

There may be a part three to follow but I truly think there’s enough material here to turn this tale of cursed shoes and haunted paintings into a full length motion picture.

Notes

  1. This nickname strikes me as a little strange given he moved to Acrise Park in Kent following his marriage to Mary Keyser at the age of 26.

Sources

Ghosts and hauntings in and around Leicestershire by Andrew James Wright

Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail

Leicester Daily Post

Reynolds’s Newspaper

Leicester Chronicle

The Reservoir Part I

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Old cottages are nothing but hassle my ex had insisted, preferring a bland but energy efficient box on a new estate to anything that an estate agent could market as ‘chocolate box pretty’. I left him last year but he probably hasn’t turned away from his 85-inch television for long enough to notice yet.

How appropriate then that it was an infuriating drip in the bedroom that might just prove him right. It couldn’t be a leak, there hadn’t been any rain for ages. A bucket would have to be the temporary fix for now and at the pub later, I’d ask if anyone could recommend someone who could pop round and take a look.

An hour into my shift and the heat behind the bar was almost unbearable. It made worse still by the fact I seemed to be pulling cold pints for everyone in the village but myself. The talk at the tables was speculation about hosepipe bans and barbecue plans. All standard topics for discussion every time the country had a dry spell until I heard one group of older gentlemen talking about the nearby reservoir. I’d noticed myself on the drive over the causeway that the water levels had dropped and when one of them said, ‘‘The old village will be reappearing soon’, I couldn’t help but eavesdrop on their conversation.

‘Village? It was a couple of old cottages and a mill. Not bloody Brigadoon. I read some nonsense on Facebook the other day about people being able to hear the bell of a drowned church tolling below the surface. Flippin’ idiots could probably hear St Leonard’s up the road’.

‘There was that old bridge though, named after the nursery rhyme, remember?’

‘Kitty Fisher’s Bridge? That was named after a real person apparently. A local lass, threw herself in the brook they say, because she’d lost her lover. We were always warned not to swim there away from there as kids. They said she’d pull us beneath the water’.

‘I think I saw her once’, one of the men said softly, more as an admission to himself than the surrounding group. The others looked at him for a second before one of them broke the silence with a quip.

‘She’s been dead at least two hundred years, Mike. Even you weren’t around then’.

‘I think I saw her’, he repeated, bolder this time. ‘Stood on the banks of the reservoir. It was that heatwave of ‘76, and like a fool, I’d taken myself down there to fish. It weren’t much more than a puddle. I glanced up and there she was standing on the bank, about 50 foot away from me. Dripping wet, she was.  I was just about to shout to her, see if she was ok and she…disappeared. One second she was there and then the next. Well, she just wasn’t’.

His monologue was once again interrupted by the joker of the pack. ‘You’ve always had that effect on women, Mike’, followed by comments from the others about needing to take more water with it. Mike laughed along with the banter but the trace of a puzzled expression still lingered on his face. It was clear, to me at least, that he had been deadly serious about what he saw that summer and it was something he had been trying to make sense of ever since.

(Note: This story is semi-fiction. It’s inspired by a real place and its folklore but a lot of it also comes from my imagination. Anyway, part II to follow soon!)

Cursed Soles Part I

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Sometimes I find a story so intriguing that I have to spread my wings a little and go beyond the Staffordshire borders. As with most myths that have been centuries in the making, there is no one singular version of events. Almost all accounts agree however that something spooky was afoot at Papillon Hall and that a pair of brocade slippers were at the heart of the haunting.

Papillon Hall, post renovation when wings were added to create a butterfly effect

In most retellings, David Papillon, grandson of the man who built the hall, is cast as the villain of the piece. People said Old Pamp, as the locals nicknamed him, supposedly had supernatural powers and may even have been in league with Old Nick himself. Prior to his marriage to Mary Keyser in 1716, he’s said to have kept a Spanish mistress at Papillon. More of a prisoner than a partner, she was kept under lock and key and only allowed out onto the roof of the hall. It seems his impending marriage to Mary may have rendered la Señorita surplus to requirements and she’s said to have met with a mysterious death in the attic room she had been confined to.

Whood, Isaac; David Papillon (1691-1762), MP; Leicestershire County Council Museums Service; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/david-papillon-16911762-mp-80451

With her dying breath, the woman placed a curse upon the beautiful green brocade slippers she had worn during her lonely rooftop rambles. If they ever left the hall, its owner would meet with terrible misfortune because these boots were no longer made for walking. Old Pamp moved away to Kent and onto a successful career as a lawyer and politician. Subsequent owners who arrived at the hall were handed the deeds and advised that the cursed footwear must stay or else face the terrible consequences.

Naturally, some scoffed at the idea of shoes with supernatural powers and sent them to be exhibited at London, France and a museum in Leicester. A series of car crashes, riding accidents, robberies, dead livestock and other disasters soon persuaded them otherwise. Charles Walker who used the house as a hunting box in the 1890s heeded the warnings and kept the slippers safely stored behind a locked iron grille above a fireplace. As an extra security measure it’s said he threw the key into a pond.

According to some accounts, when the hall was renovated by Sir Edward Lutyens in 1903, a woman’s skeleton was found inside one of the attic walls. As yet, I have found only anecdotal evidence of its existence. The shoes, however, are a different story…

Papillon Shoes (right foot) by Leicestershire Museum Collections on Sketchfab

The hall was requisitioned during the Second World War and used as a billet for American soldiers. When they departed, it was discovered that one of the slippers had disappeared and it was assumed it had been stolen for a souvenir. Fearing the consequences, owner Rupert Belville made an appeal in the US for its return and in 1949, the Leicester Evening Mail reported that it had mysteriously reappeared. It was not enough to prevent the greatest misfortune to befall Papillon Hall in its history however and just two years later the house was demolished.

The cursed brocade slippers of Papillon Hall make a great stand-alone story but I want to take things one step further. I’ve discovered alternative accounts, intriguing inconsistencies and spin-off stories, all of which I will share in part II soon.

Sources

Daily News (London) – Saturday 09 July 1949

Leicester Evening Mail – Wednesday 06 July 1949

Leicester Chronicle – Saturday 23 October 1948

Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail – Friday 27 December 1946

Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail – Friday 06 December 1946

Manchester Evening News – Thursday 17 November 1938

Leicester Daily Mercury – Friday 26 August 1932

Tales of Old Leicestershire, Marian Pipe

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 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 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 Wishing Stones

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It took me a while to find the wishing stone at Pye Green and it’s taken me even longer to write up what I found about the tale behind it on here. This story appeared in an old newspaper, told to the writer by a ‘greybeard’, one of the descendants of a family of Cannock Chase foresters, and I’ve taken the liberty of retelling it in my own words.


During the English Civil War, the Wishing Stone was the place where a young soldier and one of the daughters of the Cannock Chase foresters would meet. One day the soldier was called away to fight for the King at Worcester and left his lover with a promise to return. Every day that followed, she would wait at the stone for him and those passing her on the old packhorse route known as Blake St would hear her wishing for his return. Weeks passed by and one evening, when she didn’t return home, her father went looking for her. The local women suggested he try the stone and that’s where he found her, lips no longer wishing for her soldier to return but blue and still. The local women speculated whether it was the cold or a broken heart that took her in the end. When the soldier returned and asked where he could find her, ‘her body is in Cannock churchyard’ the local women replied, ‘but her soul is at the place we now call the Wishing Stone’.

Centuries later, if you stand at the stone and listen carefully, you can hear what sounds like a voice saying ‘I wish, I wish, I wish’. It might just be the wind blowing through the trees which surround the stone but the local women will tell you otherwise.

Newton Road Rail Station opened 1837. Closed 1945

Two summers ago, I went to find another wishing stone over Walsall way (yes, I really do need to work on writing stuff up sooner). It’s described as being by a stile in a field leading to Newton Road Old Station on the London and North Western Railway. Folklore says all true lovers who step on the stone will have whatever they wish for come true in twelve months and a day. According to the author of the article in the Walsall Advertiser, you would often find love sick couples loitering around the place but all I could see was cows. I think the stone is on the opposite side of the River Tame to where I was but I wasn’t willing to wade over, even for a wish. I am hoping to go back tomorrow however, as I want to find an aqueduct with a haunted patch of grass and the ruins of the priory alongside the eponymous Sand Well. Is it a wishing well though?

Cannock Chase Courier 21st September 1912

Walsall Advertiser 6th September 1913

The Highwayman’s Grave

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I love a tomb with a tale attached and the churchyard at Sandon delivered. An article in the Staffordshire Sentinel in December 1955, talks of, ‘a grave, said to be that of a highwayman who met his death at Sandon. Certainly the curious shape of a horse and rider on the gravestone would bear out this legend’. A misty winter’s morning, in the dead days of last December, provided the ideal conditions to seek it out and, as the fog swirled around our feet, we found it. Sadly, those curious shapes are now encrusted with lichen and much-weathered by the sixty-nine winters which have passed since the description in the Sentinel was published.

Six months on and I’m still trying to solve the mystery of the so-called highwayman’s headstone. A figure lays stricken on the floor, a man leaning over with his hand on their heart. Whether he’s trying to slay or save them isn’t obvious. To the right, two men stand look-out and at the back is a riderless horse. There’s a church in the carving but as it has a spire this can’t be Sandon, which does not. I’m describing it from a photo taken in 1965 ago which is in the Historic England collection. Unfortunately, their copyright rules don’t allow me to share it here for you to see yourself although I have contacted them to see if I can get permission.

The inscriptions on the tomb are as follows:

To the Memory of
Ann the Wife of
BRYAN WARD
who departed this life
March 19th 1807
Aged 65 Years

BRYAN WARD
of Smallrice, Gent
who departed this life
February XX 1809
Aged 74

Anna Maria their daughter
died September 15th 1797

Something else is written below the inscriptions for both Ann and Bryan but was illegible even on the 1965 photo.

The All Saints parish register has the entries for Mr Brian Ward’s burial on 23rd February 1809 and five year old Anna Maria Ward’s burial on 15th September 1797. Neither has a note attached to suggest there was anything unusual or untoward about their deaths. I’m sure that had there been, the Vicar of Sandon would have included something as above the entry of Anna Maria’s is a record of the burial of Michael Tams supplemented to say he was drowned in the River Trent on the 25 Evening of December.

The burial record for Anne Maria Ward on 15th September 1797

What I can’t find in the Sandon register is a record of the burial of Ann Ward in 1807. In fact, I can’t find any record of her burial at all.

I’m starting to suspect that the curious carving at Sandon might depict the death of Ann Ward in someway but if she wasn’t buried beneath it here at All Saints, then where is she? Are we going to be able to solve the mystery and rewrite the local legend of The Highwayman’s Grave?

The Walking Dead of Weston

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Charlotte Sophia Burne, the first woman to become president of the Folklore Society, once said of Staffordshire, ‘It is comparatively an ordinary occurrence for this or that lately deceased person to ‘come again’ after death’.

I can’t help but wonder if she’d heard of the post-mortem wanderings of Preston Moore and his father in the village of Weston, near Stafford. A book called ‘Phantasms of the Living’, contains the following account from a Mrs J Bennett written in 1882 about the eerie events of 13th April 1860.

“My daughter Annie and I had been drinking tea with the late Mrs Smith and Miss Moore, and talking about their brother Preston being very ill and not expected to recover, and were returning home in the evening when between the little wicket which opens out of the Vicarage field and Mrs Newbould’s house, we met the identical man in face, form and figure, dressed as he was always wont; slouched hat, old frock coat, open in front, knee-breeches and gaiters, with a long stick. He passed so near us that we shrank aside to make way for him. As soon as we got to Mrs Newbould’s she exclaimed, ‘So Preston Moore is dead!’, when we both exclaimed, ‘Oh no, we have just seen him!’. We found, in fact, that he had died about half an hour before he appeared to us’.

Something wicked this way comes

Mrs Bennett was adamant that it could not have been a case of mistaken identity. According to her, ‘We cannot call to mind anyone at all resembling the individual in question; his appearance, dress and gait were utterly unlike anyone else residing in or about the neighbourhood’. More intriguing details emerged during psychical researcher Eleanor Sidgwick’s interview with Mrs Bennett. There was apparently something forbidding about Preston Moore and his sister Miss Moore was also considered odd. Preston may also have had a thing for Mrs Bennett. He once bought her pansies pinched from a neighbouring gentleman’s garden and another time, cauliflowers, also illegitimately acquired. Perhaps I should have saved this story for Valentines Day? ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, here are some vegetables, I’ve stolen for you. Violets are blue, roses are red, I’ll still be around, even after I’m dead’.

A lovely pub. We will definitely come again.

The story as it stands is strange enough but reader, there is a twist in this tale of a dead man walking. An article in the Staffordshire Advertiser in 1901 claims that Preston Moore was not the first of his family to ‘come again’ after his death. There was a legend in the local area that his father’s shade had roamed up and down the road between Stowe and Weston, until locals decided it had had enough exercise and it was time to exorcise this restless spirit. It was laid in a bottle and bricked up in the cellar of the Saracen’s Head Inn to remain there, ‘whilst holly and ivy are green’. It seems that during his life Mr Moore senior may have been the landlord at the inn making the real horror here the idea of being trapped in your workplace for eternity.

She wouldn’t let it lie!

Obviously my good friend Jacky and I went to investigate, by which I mean we popped into the pub for a coffee and pretended we’d found the bottle containing the spirit of Mr Moore on a shelf nearby where we sitting. I am convinced there’s more to be found out about the mysterious Moore family which may explain why the family seem to have been at the centre of village superstition. In the meantime, if you work at the pub, would you pop into the cellar and see if you can find where the old landlord lies? We should have asked but we didn’t have the bottle…

Sources

Staffordshire Folk and the Lore, Charlotte Sophia Burne

Phantasms of the Living, Edmund Gurney, FWH Myers and Frank Podmore

Staffordshire Advertiser 2nd March 1901

Staffordshire Advertiser 2nd March 1901