Hampshire and Isle of Wight Ghost Tales Read online

  To Paul and Jacqueline Eldridge

  Paul and Jacqueline first heard me tell stories in Southampton General Hospital, when one of their children was a patient there, back in the 1990s. Then, as their kids grew up, they came to many of my Halloween storytelling sessions. After the children were no longer children, and had flown the nest, Paul and Jacqueline, both builders, appeared like angels to help with a major problem I had with my house. Friends through storytelling – stories and practicality; I love that!

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to Rosie Sutcliffe, my walking companion, for helping me to explore many of the areas in this book. My competitive streak tells me that one day I’ll find a footpath that Rosie doesn’t already know, but it hasn’t happened yet!

  Thanks to Jenny Barnard for drawing my attention to the Minstead Cat people, and for many a walk, and a few drinks, shared with her and Roy.

  Thanks to Karl Bell for giving me food for thought about the nature of ghost stories.

  Thanks to Kath Watkins of www.jigfoot.com for sharing information about Alice Gillington and her time in the New Forest.

  Thanks to Chris Westcott, wild woodland woman of www.threecopse.co.uk for suggesting that I visit Deadwoman’s Gate. I am sorry that Chris is so lacking in appreciation of my wonderful bagpipe playing that she insists on threatening me with various lethal woodland implements when I play a sweet melody.

  Thanks to Scott Pritchard, caretaker extraordinaire, for a conversation about haunted school buildings. Thanks to Sheila Jemima for her story about Winkle Street.

  Thanks to my daughter, Ruth O’Leary, for her appropriately quirky internal illustrations and thank you to Katherine Soutar for her striking front cover.

  Thanks to Geoff the postie, Charlie the Cork Head, Jim Privett, and all the people I’ve listened to and talked with, in pubs and lanes and paths and places.

  Thank you, also, to ‘Old Nan’, who may, or may not, exist.

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 The Triple Killing of Kings

  2 Heads, Bodies and Legs

  3 The Apple Tree Man

  4 The Andover Pig

  5 Burnt House Lane

  6 The Groaning Tree

  7 Beware Chalk Pit

  8 Ghost Island

  9 Chute Causeway: Story Road

  10 Marrowbones Hill

  11 Deadwoman’s Gate

  12 Onion’s Curse

  13 Back to School

  14 Davey Jones’ Locker

  15 The Desolation of Francheville

  16 The Mistletoe Bride

  17 The Rat King

  18 The Titanic: A Cavalcade of Ghosts

  References

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  One evening I stood in the fifteenth-century Square Tower in Portsmouth – telling ghost stories. The Square Tower is in old Point, also known as Spice Island; the oldest part of Pompey and dripping with the salt water of maritime ghost stories. Point is where the ghost of murdered Commander Buster Crabbe flip flaps in his flippers and frogman suit along the foreshore; this is where you might wake up next to the corpse of an eighteenth-century sailor, his head bound up with a bloody handkerchief; this was the launching pad from where the wraith of a pregnant young woman who had sold her soul to the Devil for the sake of revenge, rocketed away in a screaming trajectory to the ship of her faithless and exploitative lover, from where she dragged him into the sea and down to hell.

  I told the story of Jack the Painter, the revolutionary who was strung up outside the dockyard gates, and whose body was gibbeted out on Blockhouse Point – whose ghost walks old Pompey with rattling bones and chattering teeth.

  When I’d finished, and the only people left in the tower were me and the chap waiting to lock up, there was a big bump from upstairs. The young man thought he’d better check the toilets again in case he locked anyone in for the night; he did so rather nervously, and then we both legged it. Ghost stories have that effect on you, and I was ready to believe that the ghost of Jack the Painter really was about to come clattering down the stairs and take a few bites out of my throat. I’d scared myself!

  But then ghost stories tell as much about us as they do about ghosts – whatever ghosts may be. Karl Bell, studying the ‘hauntology’ (Jacques Derrida’s glorious word to describe the way our assumptions, feelings and thoughts about the past and the future bleed into our perception of the immediate present) of Portsmouth, wrote about the relationship between people and their perceptions of ghosts; and it is clear how ghost stories adapt, morph and merge with the way our lives are structured and lived at any point in history. So Karl doesn’t just chase ghosts around Portsmouth, he looks at the historical and cultural backgrounds of the stories, and this is what illuminates our lives and history.

  Mind you, I’m attempting no such depth here, and given that my belated academic career culminated in a 2:2 in Geography, it’s probably just as well. I’m just telling tales. Aha – but then what assumptions am I unconsciously making? I’ll leave that for the reader to interpret.

  When I wrote Hampshire and Isle of Wight Folk Tales half the stories turned out to be ghost stories, including the story of Jack the Painter, so I can’t bung that one into this book! Similarly I can’t include some of the more famous Hampshire ghost stories, such as the midnight toilings of the ghost of the rector of Vernham Dean, or the various appearances of a blood-soaked Rufus the Red, or the hideous ghost of the executed child murderer, Michael Morey, on the Isle of Wight – as I have already told them – but Hampshire and the Island are stuffed with a lot more ghost stories than I included in that particular book.

  They’re urban, they’re rural, they’re maritime, they’re landlocked, they are good, bad, ugly and beautiful. They reflect the people. And before any keeper of the county’s folklore – one who would fossilise the fragments of communal memory and transmission into the proper and the improper, the correct and the incorrect – whacks me over the head with a dictionary of folklore, I confess that I have been guilty of applying my own imagination to these stories. Just a bit.

  Michael O’Leary

  2016

  1

  THE TRIPLE KILLING OF KINGS

  It’s not that I’m cynical about ghosts in a stereotypical way; I’m not someone who says, ‘Bah humbug’ and then, inevitably, gets visited by a spook. I’m perfectly aware that because so much is defined by our own perception, ‘reality’ can become quite a fluid concept.

  I am, however, a bit of an empiricist and when I search for the simplest rational explanation, according to the principles of Occam’s razor, I don’t think that I’m lessening the wonder of things; rather the opposite. Searching for a supernatural explanation is invariably something that lessens wonder; something that is almost banal. So, if bumps in the night are explained by the presence of a malignant poltergeist, rather than movements of the earth caused by the presence of mine shafts, or eddies and currents in the air caused by a change in the weather, there is less wonder, and a sort of self-centred arrogance that explains everything around human agency.

  So, when sitting comfortably in the front bar of the Junction Inn, Southampton, with Andrew telling me about ghostly experiences in the New Forest, I remained polite and seemingly interested, but internally I felt a bit of a cringe, the feeling that I’ve often had when people find out that I earn my living as a storyteller, and seem to think that I’ll therefore be interested in their ‘paranormal’ experiences. I’m glad I didn’t express my scepticism now, though, because Andrew’
s subsequent death would have given me a burden of guilt.

  Mind you, Andrew didn’t announce that he was going to tell me a ghost story; we began by just chatting about walks in the New Forest – and the fact that the New Forest is very old. Of course the Forest (locally it’s always just known as ‘the Forest’, in the same way that the Isle of Wight is just known as ‘the Island’) got its name from the Normans – and it is only new in the sense that William the Bastard, later to be known as William the Conqueror (though no doubt you have to be the one in order to be the other), made it his own personal hunting ground. It feels old, and some of the parts of the Forest that possess a particular feeling of archaism are not wooded – but are the open, boggy parts: the valley mires. The New Forest, and I do love its pre-Norman name ‘Ytene’, has 75 per cent of Europe’s valley mires, a specific kind of peat bog, although many a car-bound visitor doesn’t get to see them.

  Andrew had been walking that day in the area around White Moor, near Emery Down, and he probably superimposed his own depression onto the landscape. He had recently ‘been through a messy divorce’ – a phrase I put into inverted commas not just because it’s a cliché, though a perfectly effective one, but because Andrew tended to trot it out when apologising for his gloominess. It meant that he didn’t have to start explaining anything else; his own culpability for the divorce, details and feelings, guilt and betrayal, the way he missed his family – and probably the loss of a certain sort of male status. Things that might prove something of a dampener in a pub conversation.

  Andrew had been walking through an area of massive beech trees, many of which had dropped whole limbs after recent storms, and the lordly but battered beeches, the holly trees between them, the deer-scabbed stumps, the occasional gnarled old oaks, set a scene that was full of strange, primeval faces, twisted expressions and crooked fingers. He came to a sudden edge to both the trees and the leaf and beech-nut strewn forest floor, and found himself gazing out over a valley mire. He stopped there – he wasn’t wearing his wellies – and remarked to himself that you don’t have to be on Dartmoor to come across a Grimpen Mire. It was a bit like a 1960s Hammer horror film of The Hound of the Baskervilles; you’d imagine someone had been using dry ice to raise the low mist that was swirling over the peat bog. Out of that mist, in the centre of the bog, rising stark and white, was a large silver birch tree – large for a silver birch anyway. It was a beautiful scene, though not a bright and cheery one, and Andrew felt something that he found hard to describe to me: ‘Not exactly hostility, because I felt that I was meant to be there, but something that didn’t mean me any good.’

  ‘It gets a bit like that,’ I waffled, ‘parts of the Forest can be quite eerie …’

  ‘No, no,’ said Andrew, and I suddenly realised he was trying to describe something that was really quite important to him, ‘I was scared, really scared, but it wasn’t like being spooked out. I felt really glum, too. Then – I saw something …’

  Now, I work as a storyteller, and I’ve heard a lot of other professional storytellers. They have learned the techniques that make a story effective, when a pause or a sudden phrase can startle an audience; they wait for that polished, proudly produced combination of words to make its impact on the listeners, whilst they look at their audience in a meaningful and knowing manner. But in the end, the real power of storytelling doesn’t come out of prancing professionalism; when it all comes down to dust, as it will and as it must, the telling of a story is informed by the content of the story – and the extent to which the storyteller feels it in his, or her, bones.

  ‘Then – I saw something …’

  I went cold when he said that; the clinking glasses, the chatter, the laughter and banter faded away – I was completely focused on Andrew’s story – it was me standing at the tree line on the edge of White Moor, looking over the ground mist to a stark, white skeletal silver birch tree.

  ‘I saw a figure, standing by the tree, holding up both hands, and it looked like he had a knife in one hand, and a cord, or rope, or something, hanging from the other hand.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘I don’t know – the figure was there, and then it wasn’t there. It didn’t disappear – just it was there, and then it wasn’t.’

  I rather lamely said something about the mind and the eyes playing tricks – then realised that I was rather insulting him – so finished by saying something about ‘a good story’.

  It stuck with me, though; in fact the image insinuated itself into my mind to such an extent that, as I cycled home to Northam, my old riverside part of Southampton, along the wooden causeway that skirts the edge of the estuarine River Itchen, I kept seeing images of the figure standing in the estuary mud.

  Over the next few days it niggled at me. A cord and a knife. A peat bog. There was something familiar about it all. And I kept seeing the silver birch and the figure.

  It was Andrew who told me, though, and that was during the next time I bumped into him in the Junction. He’d been doing his research.

  ‘It’s the triple killing of kings.’

  Now, that was it. I remember reading about the Lindow Man – the body found in a bog in Cheshire. A few of these bodies had been found, preserved in bogs throughout Europe, and they were thought to be ritualistic killings – overkill, really; they’d had their throats cut, they’d received a blow to the head, and they’d been strangled. Triple killing.

  ‘Well, you like stories,’ said Andrew, ‘it’s there in the old stories – you only have to look at Wikipedia. There are stories about Merlin prophesying his own death; it’s in old Irish stories, Norse stories about Odin – the lot. The king is no good anymore, because the crops have failed, or there have been disasters, or something, and he pays the price: he gets the chop three times.’

  ‘Well, you never said you saw all that.’

  ‘No, but the figure with the cord and the knife; he’s the killer. I know it, I’ve been back.’

  Andrew had been back to White Moor several times. He’d seen the figure again.

  I began to feel a bit impatient. It was interesting enough at first; but now it was getting obsessive.

  ‘Well, it’s a good thing you’re not a king, then,’ I said, ‘I don’t s’pose you’d let the harvest fail.’

  ‘Aren’t I?’

  I didn’t know what he meant by that.

  Mind you, the Forest did kill kings. The death of Rufus is the classic example. The Rufus Stone, near Canterton Glen in the Forest, is said to mark the spot where Rufus the Red, son and heir to William the Conqueror, was killed by an arrow fired by Walter Tyrrell. This was passed off as a hunting accident, but was probably an assassination. However, there are lots of stories and theories that have grown up about it being some sort of a sacrificial killing – Rufus having to atone for poor harvests. It’s something that I’d been interested in, and I’d read that historians tended to think that the killing didn’t take place at Canterton Glen at all, but near Beaulieu, a place many miles south of the Rufus Stone. My own theory, entirely unsupported by any evidence, is that the historical story had superimposed itself onto something much older – a story of death and sacrifice. To me, Canterton Glen, in spite of the A31 dual carriageway that thunders through it, has always seemed an eerie place; and Canterton, Cantwaratun in Old English, means farm of the Kentish men, and Kentish men doesn’t necessarily mean men from Kent; it means the ‘other’ people, the strange ones. Of course, Canterton Glen isn’t White Moor, but they both have that feeling about them, and they’re not so far apart.

  I continued to be haunted by the story, although I rather dreaded seeing Andrew again; because he’d gotten so monomaniacal about it all – and I wondered a little bit if he’d actually looked up all this stuff about the triple killing of kings before he’d supposedly seen the ghost on White Moor.

  I must admit, though, I went there myself. It was just part of a walk – I didn’t particularly intend to check it out. Honest. I saw a silver birch in t
he valley mire – it wasn’t quite as central as I’d imagined, but probably I was just looking from a different angle. I didn’t see any figure, though, but I did feel something. That great writer about the countryside, Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, once wrote about a feeling of hostility that sometimes, just sometimes, can be felt from the Forest – but then given Andrew’s story, it was hardly surprising that I should feel it on the edge of White Moor.

  In the end, though, Andrew’s death had nothing to do with valley mires, or White Moor, or Iron Age rituals.

  It was awful to hear about it. I’d cycled to the Junction, down the wooden causeway by the river, thinking about another king. Sir Henry Englefield wrote, in 1805, about King Canute sitting on his throne in the ‘black and oozy bed of the Itchen at Northam’ to show his courtiers that no one had the power to gainsay the word of God and hold back the tide; though another story said he buried his enemies up to their necks there, and watched them drown as the tide came in.

  Anyway, it was Tracy at the pub who told me about Andrew’s death.

  ‘He was killed outright,’ she said. ‘I think he was going to Bournemouth or somewhere; he skidded off the road and hit a tree.’

  ‘Anyone else involved?’

  ‘No – they think he had a heart attack, so then he crashed, and then the car caught fire. Three things made pretty sure he was gone.’

  ‘Where did this happen?’

  ‘On the A31 – where it goes through the Forest – you know, near the sign to the Rufus Stone.’

  Of course, as I cycled home, with a few pints inside me that had been consumed in a somewhat maudlin fashion, there should have been no problem with the Itchen causeway – it wasn’t as if it was White Moor, or Canterton Glen, or anywhere in the Forest.

  But I didn’t fancy it. The tide was out, and I didn’t want to look at all that mud. I ignored the causeway, and took the longer route home along the road.