Tag Archives: paranormal

The Final Curtain

Posted on by
Reply

My daughter is taking me to see the Phantom of the Opera as an early birthday treat next week. Now I’m not expecting to find a subterranean lair and lake beneath the Lichfield Garrick (although there is probably a secret tunnel on the basis every other building in the city seems to have one) but I am wondering if there are any local theatres where long dead actors or audience members still linger on?

I already know of one famously spooky scene up north, involving Les Dawson and a dressing room at the Sunderland Empire in 1989. Dawson supposedly saw the spectre of Sid James, who had died on stage there thirteen years prior, wearing a shroud and reflected in the mirror behind him. The experience troubled Dawson to the extent that he refused to ever return there and would not share the words that Sid’s spook spoke to him that day. Some say James’s distinctive laugh still echoes around the theatre. Sounds like they need to get a priest in to bless this playhouse.

What did Syd Little (and others) see here?

Percy Purdy was a former manager of the Wolverhampton Grand. Mr Purdy managed the theatre from the 1920s until his retirement in 1949 at the grand old age of 80. He lived on the top floor of the building and it seems he never left. Glasses rattle in the bar, furniture rearranges itself and invisible fingers tap away on computer keyboards. In November 1984, actor Victor Spinetti saw a figure cross the room and vanish through a wall whilst he was waiting for the start of the show. Staff believe all of this activity is the work of Percy although he is not the only ghost of the Grand. There’s also a grey lady who leaves the scent of lavender behind her and the story says that she died after falling from a box down into the orchestra pit. Syd Little is said to have had a terrifying experience in the gents up in the dress circle but would not revealed what had happened to him. According to an article in the Express and Star from 2003, the most haunted spot in the theatre had a wall built across it during a refurbishment in the late 1990s, onto which a signed photo of Ken Dodd was hung. Whether this has stopped the grey lady, or whatever it was what scared Syd, from walking I do not know. (The wall I mean, not the photo of Ken).

Regular readers will know that my idea of a paranormal investigation involves delving back into the archives to see if there are any nuggets of truth to these tales. Incredibly the fatal fall into the orchestra is not fictional although the story has become somewhat twisted over the years. In December 1905, the Birmingham Post reported that a check-taker named John Smith had tumbled into the pit from a top box whilst putting the covers on the balconies after a pantomime and was proclaimed dead from a fractured skull on his arrival at the Wolverhampton General Hospital.

Up in Stoke, the Regent is not even one hundred years old but has still managed to acquire two ghosts. The building was only transformed to a theatre in 1999 having originally being opened as a cinema seventy years prior. A girl haunts the stalls and an investigation in 2004 named her as Alice Gregory. Up on the balcony, the apparition of a man has been seen surveying the auditorium. Interestingly, a former manager of the Regent Cinema was Lawrence Gregory who passed away suddenly in 1933 at the age of just 41. On the day of his funeral the cortege passed the entrance to the cinema and was saluted by staff as it passed by. Could he be the man in the balcony, still standing watch over his place of work and is there any connection between Mr Gregory and the girl?

Lichfield Garrick Panto, 2017

I mentioned the Lichfield Garrick at the start, and it is there we shall return for our finale. Opened in 2003, its modern appearance might not strike you as somewhere spooky. However, I was messaged by a former employee who wanted to know if there were any stories about the site as several of her co-workers had experience strange things. I located details of an investigation carried out by the West Midlands Ghost Club who reported poltergeist activity, shadowy figures and the presence of woman in high heels and 1950s-style clothing on some steps near the stage. I am pleased to say this bit of Lichfield theatre lore also features the apparition of a celebrity. Radio WM DJ Malcolm Boyden once had an experience in the sound booth with the door of the room being flung open and the pile of papers on the table in front of him being thrown into the air.

Perhaps some folks really do carry on their roles after the final curtain has fallen?

Sources:

West Midlands Ghost Club/ Our Haunted Midlands on X

Wolverhampton Express and Star, Wednesday, 7 November 1984

Wolverhampton Express and Star, Thursday, 30 October 1997

Wolverhampton Express and Star Saturday, 26 July 2003

Birmingham Daily Post Saturday, 30 December 1905

The Era, Saturday, 6 January 1906

Staffordshire Sentinel, Sunday, 21 March 2004

Staffordshire Sentinel Saturday, 15 July 1933

The Seance in Stafford

Posted on by
Reply

In the autumn of 1933, ghost hunter Elliott O’Donnell wrote to the Rector of Stafford asking if he could be connected to any houses in or near the county town where paranormal activity had been reported in the hope he could spend Halloween night at one of them. After discounting Weston Hall, a decision which would literally come back to haunt him, and an unnamed place near Penkridge, he was put in touch with the residents of property at Rickerscote on the outskirts of Stafford.

Accompanying him was author and army officer, Wilfred Byford-Jones who recorded the adventure in his book ‘Midland Leaves’. He describes the house as, ‘a pleasing old structure with nothing eerie about it’. However, the mistress of the hall revealed that she, along with her husband and several friends, had seen the spirit of an old woman dressed in black in the sitting room and out on the lawns on several occasions. As luck would have it, they were holding a seance that very evening to try and connect with this shady lady.

After dinner, the two men returned to Rickerscote to find four people sat around a large log fire in the sitting room. O’Donnell joined the circle but the Quaestor preferred to observe only and settled himself in a dark corner. To begin, the participants placed their fingers on the table and chanted the words to hymns. In the hour that followed, the group sat in silence as the wind howled in the chimney and the rain lashed against the windows, the tension punctuated by the ticking of an old grandfather clock.

Quaestor began to feel sleepy until an ear-piercing scream came from one of the male guests. He began to gibber and sway with the mistress of the house joining in moments later. Neither said anything that made any sense. The woman then began to whimper for several minutes. As she fell back into her chair a hiss came from her husband.

‘There she is’. He seemed to stare at something before continuing. ‘It is the old lady I have seen before in this room and on the lawn’.

Two other guests also claimed they could see her. Quaestor followed their gaze but could see nothing, ghost or otherwise. Even when someone suggested that the spirit was stood near to him, tending to a bird in a cage, he could see nothing. Nor could he feel the pocket of cold air the others claimed to.

The seance continued until midnight struck on the old grandfather clock. Those gathered revealed the uninvited guest had a name. Miss L____ E_____ J______, a former resident who had loved the house and hoped the person she passed it onto in her will would live there. This wish was not fulfilled and presumably was the reason her presence remained. The two visitors left around 12.30am and the following morning, O’Donnell recorded his own version of events.

“A sudden feeling came over me that there was a presence of some kind just behind a lady on my right. I asked her if she was concious of it. She said, ‘Yes I know it is there. It is a lady in black. She came in through the closed window, crossed the floor to the door, then came to me’.

Quaestor’s own account differs somewhat. “I can only say that I am baffled, having seen nothing and heard nothing that could not be explained by natural phenomena.”

Acton Trussell, the final resting place of Miss L___ E___ J____

I suspect the events at the house on that Halloween night were down to mass hysteria rather than a haunting. However, after much reflection, I’ve decided not to share the precise location of the house just in case its former resident really did return to her Rickerscote home and the current residents would rather not know about it.

I myself shall be returning to the subplot involving Weston Hall another day. It’s one of my favourite haunted houses in all of Staffordshire but I’m much more likely to indulge in scones instead of a seance when sat around the fireplace here.

Weston Hall

Sources:

Midland Leaves, Quaestor aka Wilfred

Staffordshire Advertiser, Saturday, 9 June 1917

The Phantom Fan of Bescot Stadium

Posted on by
Reply

With the new season kicking off this weekend it seems somewhat synchronous to have found a story of a spectre wandering around the stands of Walsall FC. Back in 1996, staff at the Bescot Stadium reported seeing a boy wearing old fashioned clothes more in keeping with the styles of the early twentieth century than the approaching millennium. No comments about the sartorial elegance of Saddlers fans, or lack of, please. I share a house with two of them.

Accompanying the apparition of the lad was a series of strange events which included lights being turned on, doors being opened and things being pushed off shelves in an empty building. The commercial director at the time, Roy Whalley, had his own experience when he was sorting through post in the office and heard a crackling sound accompanied by disembodied voices, as if a radio had been switched on.

Bescot Stadium 2007
By John M, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12948600

After the story on the apparition appeared in the Walsall Observer, a pensioner from the Birchills area of the town made contact with the paper to say he didn’t believe in ghosts but did remember a tragic incident near the club’s original ground at Fellows Park, about half a mile away from Bescot, involving a group of lads loitering near ground to try and get in for free. His recollection was correct. In March 1933, an inquest was held on the body of a boy who was hit by a train and thrown against a wall at Wallows Lane Bridge.

Fellows Park 1982 by Steve Daniels, CC BY-SA 2.0,

Whoever the phantom fan was, he seems to have been sent off by the prayers of the club chaplain, as there have been no sightings of him since. It has made me wonder which other local stadiums might have supernatural stories to tell. Do any spirits wander Wolverhampton’s ground or is The Hawthorns haunted? Are there any fans at Villa Park lingering long after the final whistle has blown? I’d love to hear any tales you might have to tell about the boo-tiful game.

Sources

Walsall Observer, Friday, 18 October 1996

Staffordshire Advertiser, Saturday, 11 March 1933

The Ruins of Bellamour

Posted on by
Reply

Perhaps it’s the feeling in the air that autumn is about to arrive, but I’m in the mood for a good old gothic ghost story (although frankly, when aren’t I?). When writing about haunted houses I am often faced with a dilemma between the desire to share a really good story and the guilt that the people living there may not share the same enthusiasm.

The ruins of Bellamour Old Hall. Built by Herbert Aston in 1638
(c) Staffordshire County Council

Fortunately, in this instance, I have no qualms, as the location for today’s tale was demolished in the 1960s. Well, sort of. Part of Bellamour Old Hall in Colton still stands as ruins, rumoured to be cursed after attempts to raze it to the ground were met with a series of accidents and mishaps. The hex on the house was said to have been placed by former owner Lady Mary Blount, who later built a new Bellamour Hall alongside it for her son. The journal of a Miss Mary Bagot of Blithfield mentions that a stash of treasure was supposedly hidden somewhere amongst the stones of the old house. Are these two legends linked in some way?

Bellamour New Hall c.1830. The old house can be seen just behind.

The new Bellamour Hall is also no more. It was taken down in the 1920s and sold off piecemeal. When the two halls were still standing, the old one seems to have been used as a residence for senior servants on the estate. George Morrall, head gardener, lived there with his family in the late 19th century. Later, his son Harry succeeded him in the role and spoke to a local newspaper about the spooky side of his former home.

Harry Morrall explained that his twin sister Charlotte was born at the Old Hall. Presumably, as her twin brother, he must have been born there too, and a check in the Colton parish registers confirms that in July 1882, both Harry and Charlotte Morrall were born at Bellamour. It was on the evening of 15th September 1905 that Miss Morrall woke to see what she described as someone in flowing black robes with a beautiful face beckoning to her. Exactly a year later she saw the same thing and between visitations she sometimes heard footsteps walking the floorboards of the old hall.

Although he never witnessed the apparition himself, Mr Morrall did hear the phantom pacing the corridors. On one occasion, he saw the door latch to his room lift up as if someone was about to enter but, when he shouted, the presumed paranormal intruder changed its mind and left. The twins found out from another member of the Bagot family that a man had supposedly been murdered there in 1698, his widow becoming a nun.

Possibly related to the haunting of the old hall are reports of cries emanating from a nearby meadow. Intriguingly, this seems to be near to the site where the stone foundations of a medieval chapel lie beneath the lawn. Bones and the carving of a stone head with a grotesque human face were also found here by the Reverend Parker c.1921. Then, there’s a message I was sent a few years ago by someone who was left unsettled by a dream about a Victorian boy standing facing the boundary wall surrounding the Bellamour estate and hearing the word ‘angry’ as she awoke at 3.33 am.

I believe stones from the old hall were used when building the boundary wall at Bellamour

One final story dates back to around the time of the attempted demolition of the old hall. In 1963, the owner invited a psychic from Birmingham to visit and she claimed to have picked up on a lady with a cross around her neck and a man carrying a Bible. Underwhelmingly, she also claimed to have seen ‘lots of trees around’. Wait, I’m getting the word…..’cobblers’.

I’m looking forward to digging into these tales of hidden treasure, crying bones, beckoning nuns and phantom footsteps to see if any truth is buried within them. Watch this space for more about Bellamour…

Sources

https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=95a0691d-b349-4845-82f6-2d81e4b93893&resourceID=19191

Links With the Past, Sophy Louisa Bagot

Staffordshire Advertiser, Saturday, 25 May 1929

Rugeley Times, Saturday, 30 January 1982

Lichfield Mercury, Friday, 20 August 1943

Lichfield Mercury, Friday, 21 September 1923

http://coltonhistorysociety.org.uk/

Cursed Soles Part II

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
1

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

The Burial of Charles Blood

Posted on by
Reply

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

The Funeral

Posted on by
2

I’ve long contemplated the idea of writing semi-fiction, taking inspiration from the legends and folklore I love and bringing in elements of my own story telling and experiences. Would it work though, I’ve wondered? Well, I’ve finally concluded that there is only one way to find out….

This is my first attempt. Please be gentle with me.

In 1974, a group of children were spooked by the sight of a figure in white rising from a grave in the churchyard of St James, Aldon on their way home from youth club. There was no indication of which grave it was in the newspaper report which had intrigued Felicity Murray and when she arrived at Aldon church on a warm July afternoon in 2021, she found no clues. The cemetery contained the usual assortment of Victorian tombs, any one of which could have been a contender for those strange events explained away as a trick of the light fifty years prior.

After taking a few photographs of the carvings on the church doorway, Felicity took a moment to sit in the sunshine on the bench outside.  On hearing the sound of horses’ hooves, she looked up from her phone and the message she was sending and noticed a funeral cortege approaching the church gates. The two black horses adorned with blue and white plumes and ribbons and pulling a Victorian hearse made for a fine sight but feeling uncomfortable as an uninvited onlooker, Felicity decided to leave the churchyard before the mourners began to get out of their cars. As she slipped out of the gate, Felicity muttered an awkward apology to the female undertaker but received no acknowledgement.

Felicity’s own car was parked just around the corner and as she pulled out of the space, she thought she’d take another look at the horses as she drove past the church. Yet on turning the corner, the horses were no-where to be seen. Neither was the hearse, the undertaker, the mourners’ cars. Nothing was there to indicate the presence of a funeral and the church doors remained shut. Getting back to her car had taken just minutes and even with the greatest efficiency, there was surely no way everyone was already inside.

As a bemused Felicity drove home, she tried to rationalise the experience. Perhaps the church had been a stop off on someone’s last journey and their final destination had been elsewhere? Maybe she’d catch up with cortege a little further up the road. Even the idea that she’d witnessed something paranormal, perhaps the replaying of a past funeral or a time slip crossed her mind but no. Despite the vintage touch of the horse-drawn hearse, every other element had been indisputably contemporary, especially the female undertaker. Distracted by her thoughts, Felicity didn’t notice the cyclist as she pulled out of a junction until it was too late.

The funeral of Jack Sharp took place at St James, Aldon on a warm July afternoon. He was brought to the church in a hearse pulled by two black horses, each adorned with blue and white plumes and ribbons, the colours of his favourite football team. On arriving, the undertaker thought for a brief moment that she’d seen a woman sitting outside the church door but concluded that it must have been a trick of the light.

The Walking Dead of Weston

Posted on by
Reply

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