Tag Archives: ghost-story

The Indelible Stain

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Around eighteen months ago, I was contacted by someone looking for the house his grandparents lived in at Woodhouses near Burntwood for a while. What I thought was a fairly routine family history enquiry quickly developed into one of the most chilling tales I have ever been told.

I held off sharing it for sometime, mindful that current residents may prefer not to know that their home was the scene of a horrific murder in 1899 and, if the story is to be believed, a subsequent haunting. After carrying out more research however, I am happy that the house no longer stands,

My correspondent’s grandparents, let’s call them Mr and Mrs H, moved there in the 1920s as a young couple hoping to make it a family home. There was a large dark stain on the kitchen floor which they weren’t able to shift but other than that it was ideal. It was soon after they’d moved in that the noises started. At first, it was just creaks at first and then louder noises, as if someone was moving furniture around downstairs. On one occasion, Mr H got up to look for an intruder but finding no-one concluded the noises had been caused by the cat moving around.

Woodhouses Lane

One night the feline was fussing at the bedroom door to go out. Mrs H got out of bed intending to go downstairs and let it out of the back door but when she got to the landing she saw her. A woman walking up the stairs towards her, looking as solid as you or I, but covered in blood and clutching a wound on her throat.

Mrs H screamed and then passed out. When she came around she told her husband what she’d seen but he dismissed it as her imagination. However, she knew what she saw and every night afterwards she’d lie in bed hearing the steps creak, knowing it was the ‘wounded woman’ as she called her, making her way up the stairs. She was so terrified to get up at night that even when she needed the bathroom she’d stay in bed, which eventually ended up with her getting a UTI. After this she decided she couldn’t go on as she was and persuaded her husband to move house. The couple moved to St Michaels Rd in Lichfield, and when Mrs H told her new neighbours about her experience at Woodhouses she learned about the terrible events which had taken place at her former home.

A blacksmith, with a history of petty crime and brawling in the street had married a woman called Emily Wright of Leomansley. Throughout their marriage he was violent towards her and on one occasion Emily had to run from the house in just her nightdress to escape him. Eventually, she kicked him out and he stayed away for sometime. However, when he stopped paying money for their four children, Emily reported him to the authorities. One morning, as Emily and the children came downstairs, he entered the kitchen of the house at Woodhouses. Emily tried to push past him but he hit her over the head with a rock tied up in a scarf. As she lay on the floor, stunned from the blow, he picked up a carving knife and hacked at her throat. The indelible stain that Mr and Mrs H had seen when they first moved in had been Emily’s blood.

Their eldest son ran for help but by the time anyone arrived at the house, Emily was dead. In the meantime, the murderer walked towards Lichfield where he handed himself in at the police station. In custody, he tried to take his own life but failed. The following day, despite being under supervision, he lay down on his prison bed, crossed his arms over his chest, and died of ‘natural causes’, according to the inquest.

As if this story was not horrifying enough, the parish registers of Christ Church in Burntwood record entries for the burials of both on the same day. If Emily refused to rest in peace beneath the same churchyard soil as the man who took away her life, then who could blame her?

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!)