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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
And this is not in any way to disparage York, as it's awesome and we really want to head up there ourselves. But surely they could have done an article about a haunted location in Manchester.
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It's not like they haven't got any of these loads, including some amazing places like Manchester Cathedral, Strangeways Prison and, of course, Wardley Hall, who some of you may remember from our Screaming Skulls episode.
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and i know this has been a bit long for a paranormal radar but bear with me the main event is coming i just have one more little story to cover first and this one comes from the literary trust who in partnership with the university of birmingham are having a writer spooky story set in birmingham event culminating in an exhibition of some of the best stories in december
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It is only open to residents of Birmingham, and that's Birmingham in the UK, just in case you weren't sure, so we know that only a minority of you will be able to enter, but we thought that it deserved as much publicity as it could get. The stories can be fact or fiction, and they recommend that stories be between 500 and 1500 words and be set in Birmingham.
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so if you're a budding spooky author do check it out and of course we'll put links on the website for you we know there's loads of you that are awesome writers out there so indeed on it we do know particularly there are some very specific very good writers that listen to the show so if you live in birmingham get in on this competition you're a shoe in So, we're finally there. The main course.
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The best, or perhaps more accurately, the most tenuous shameless Halloween tie-in we could find. And I say we, because after all of my searching, I didn't find it. Lil did. And I managed to somehow win despite my poor contribution. You did. So well done, Lil. I doff my hat to you because this one is a cracker. This story was actually published last year, but only on the 30th of October.
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So we wouldn't have had time to feature it in last year's episode. But it was so good that we couldn't not share this with you. So, dear listeners, prepare yourselves for this story from the Openreach blog, a blog for a UK internet infrastructure company. Most haunted village in Britain gets full fibre broadband in time for Halloween. Talk about tenuous.
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This story is literally what it says on the tin. Openreach have installed the infrastructure to allow residents of Pluckley and Kent not to get broadband, they already had that, but to upgrade to full fibre. Now, Pluckley is, according to the Guinness Book of Records, the most haunted village in Britain.
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We've discussed before on the show how we're not sure about how people can properly adjudicate this, but that's by the by. It's reputed to be Britain's most haunted village, so surely Openreach have found a couple of interesting local legends, or even a personal encounter or two to spice up their spooky Halloween blog.
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um not quite in their own words while ghosts of the screaming man red lady and a phantom horse-drawn carriage have been spooking people in pluckley for decades one thing no longer horrifying locals is slow broadband speeds
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
This episode, we have our traditional Find the Company with the most tenuous spooky season tie-in competition. We have listener stories from Tracy, Kate and Kat. And we head back to Whitby for the final time... Possibly, to share our stories of smugglers, occult artefacts and a swashbuckling ghost.
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and that's it that's spectacular for the rest of the article no other mention of anything spooky going on in Pluckley and I know I shouldn't expect much but come on at least give us a spooky story from a resident or a brief summary of one of the ghost stories
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
The headline reads like there was some kind of a supernatural apocalypse heading for Pluckley that could only be averted by the installation of the potential for residents to upgrade their broadband service.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Frantic labourers working around the clock to avert disaster, cloaked in grime and mud, being slipped the occasional cup of tea by anxious locals, silently praying that the crisis can be averted in time. Will they be able to stream horror films in high definition in every room of the house at once whilst making multiple video calls?
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Or will all be lost, doomed to an eternity of only 60 megabytes per second? One can only hope that the residents of Pluckley were able to upgrade their service in time.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
That does seem like it could be a really good Simon Pegg film.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Simon Pegg, Nick Frost. Who out there knows Simon Pegg? Get in touch. So having come to the end of that rather epic paranormal radar, it is now time for some listener stories. And this first one is from Tracy, who sent us not only a story, but also a paranormal blooper.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
And here we have the sequel to the open reach story about what happens if they don't get your broadband installed in time.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Indeed. The terror. But now for Tracy's actual paranormal experience, which he also shared with us.
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Yes, this paranormal radar, I have a veritable plethora of pings. It's lit up like a Christmas tree, or perhaps more aptly as a Halloween tree, which is something we do every year with spooky pumpkin fairy lights.
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So thank you, Tracy, for sharing that story. That was a really good story.
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That's quite all right. Yeah, that was like, we come across some of these stories like this where, and I get that frustration where she says, like, there's nothing that we could have done to prevent these things. Like we're made aware of them, but it's never with enough information or enough time to make a change.
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Regular listeners may remember that we like to find stories around Halloween where companies try and hijack the spooky season by finding the most tenuous links to their business to try and make spooky.
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And it makes me wonder if maybe that wasn't necessarily the case. It's just when you have a pleasant dream, you tend to wake up and think, oh, that was a pleasant dream. And you don't really remember it. It doesn't stick in your mind as being, that was important or scary or something I need to remember.
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That's kind of what I was wondering. But what I do know for sure is that I would love to hear more of Aunt Rita's stories.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
We've had the car leasing company sharing Britain's most haunted roads and a home removal company that shared a story on the spooky side of home removals and they normally start showing up in our social media from around the beginning of October.
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Yep, I can definitely second this. Tracy and I shared a couple of emails on this because I was in the process of recording my grandmother's story. And she, I don't know if you know your history, but she was part of Anders Army, which is Polish people that...
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basically had a long and terrible journey getting out of poland and through russia and to england during world war ii and it's an incredible story and like many people that lived through the second world war they didn't like to talk about it and she'd finally agreed to sort of sit down and tell her experience And I was like, great. Okay. I've got recording equipment. I'll go around, I'll do it.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
And I went around and I was recording her story. And the first problem was she had builders in doing renovations. So some of the recordings were terribly bad and we didn't quite finish. There was a few things that I wanted to ask more questions about. And obviously some recordings I wanted to redo because they sounded terrible and
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
and it was then that that which shall not be named occurred and sadly i lost my grandmother so i never really got to finish it and uh yeah it's been something that's prayed on my mind since then so i will second that like if if you have stories that you want to preserve for your children and grandchildren do it do it now yeah
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This year however it's been eerily quiet so I set out to hunt some down for myself and immediately found that it might be a little bit more of a challenge than I initially thought. You see, my Google foo isn't bad.
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In 2021, on some random morning, my girlfriend and I awoke from sleep and she told me about a dream she had. The dream involved my grandparents on my mother's side, who I was very close to. My grandad passed away in 2008, eight years before I met my girlfriend, and my grandma was in a care home and had dementia when we met, so I didn't think it wise to introduce them. She passed away in 2019.
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My girlfriend said, I was at some sort of seaside place. It definitely wasn't Blackpool. I saw your grandma and grandad. I looked at her confused and she continued, Your grandma approached me and took my arm. I looked around and we were at a market and I saw your grandad pottering about in the background. He had his hands behind his back and smiled and nodded.
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She didn't know this at the time, but that's how my grandad would wander about, with his hands behind his back, and he'd smile and nod if you weren't in speaking distance. She continued, Your grandma looked concerned and said, You need to make sure Catherine's alright. Look after her and make sure she's okay. I was all the more puzzled. What did you say to my grandma? I asked.
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My girlfriend just said, I said I would make sure you were okay. I wondered what my grandma could have meant because it wasn't just a regular dream. There were personal nuances my other half had never witnessed that happened in her dream. So was it a message?
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
two weeks after that dream my dad passed away and i'm convinced that's what my grandma meant when she asked my other half to look after me and make sure that i was okay
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Doing what we do, we often have to track down some piece of information or even just find out in what book or article it might be found, and we're narrowing down the parameters all the time. This time, though, it was the opposite. I needed to go broad, and the broader your search is, the more junk you get.
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It was. And I really love the fact that it just emphasised the fact that paranormal stories don't have to be scary. Like they can be comforting. They can be rewarding. They can be like a warm, spooky hug.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
yeah and a lot of the traditions that surround halloween and in many cultures as well like all saints day the next day is remembering family and making offerings to your ancestors and the people that we've lost and this story kind of just hit the nail on the head for that it was ancestors looking out for the people that they've left behind absolutely and i think that's beautiful
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
These stories aren't meant to stand out on their own as something you would search for directly. They're trying to blend in to the other spooky searches that people are doing around Halloween for general spooky stuff. I'm not sure what to call that either, but anyway, they aren't stories that it's easy to search for intentionally.
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um for obvious reasons okay well have a good spooky october and thank you to kate for sending in that story and i think you summed it up perfectly at the end there powerful and poignant is quite right
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
After quite a few frustrating attempts, I managed to come across a handful of stories, and then after a little refinement I hit the motherlode, which led me down a very rich vein of stories. The first is from the Guardian newspaper, and it's a review for the BBC Two show Hauntings.
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Yeah, when Lil said, you know, the chills went up on her arm, I sometimes wish that we could record video of our episodes. So you can see our faces when we listen to these, or when we read them for the first time, the amount of times we'll have got a story in and we'll read it and we're like... My God.
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Yeah, definitely. And you were quite right. I'm saying again, powerful and poignant. Like that was just such a touching story. But I love those ones where you have that. And I saw the person. I knew exactly what they looked like. And the person said to me, what did they look like? And then you point to a picture and go, it's them. I love those.
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They're some of my favorites when it's just like, yeah, there's no mistaking that. Like that is literally what I saw.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
And the feeling I got was that sort of like sunlight dappled glade with that sort of twinkly light and...
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
it just felt like such a warm beautiful comforting image like that's immediately what it conjured in my mind and i do need to step back again because when lil says she loves the woods i think she is literally part pixie like part fairy part cave woman like she is designed for living in the woods
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes our house does look a little bit like a forest.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
And speaking of which, if you have a story to share, please do get in touch to share it with us either through our website at notquantsvs.com or via email at contact at notquantsvs.com. But fear not, for this Hello Birthday Ween episode is far from over.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
So settle in with a nice cup of tea and maybe a biscuit if you're feeling extra fancy as we tell you about the gory hand of glory and the swashbuckling ghost.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
I very nearly dismissed it out of hand, as it doesn't seem like something Paranormal Radar worthy, but it turns out that The Guardian appear to have a highly advanced stealth Paranormal Radar story, to labour the metaphor. It was only because I thought I'd make a note of the show to watch later that I clicked on the link, and boy was I glad that I did.
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I don't know if the reviewer just didn't want the job, had a row with their editor, or was just a really, really bad choice for this review, but it is bad. And I don't mean that it's poorly written or that the reviewer clearly hadn't watched the show. They clearly had watched the show and they hated it.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
They hated it with the kind of passion that one would normally reserve for people who steal your lunch from the office fridge. You know you're in for a fun ride from the off with the title There is not a single spark of wit to this meaningless nonsense. One star. One star. No goblins. Indeed.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Quite, and the reviewer does not relent from there, with the subtitle declaring that the Enfield Poltergeist case is an atrocious topic, and the first paragraph is dedicated entirely to how much the reviewer hates October and wishes they could simply skip the entire stupid infuriating season entirely to avoid what they call Halloween rage.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
And a very old legend it is. The charm, though not the name, being recorded as early as 1440 at a coroner's court in Kent, where it was recorded that lighting a candle held in the hand of a dead man that has lain in the earth nine days and nine nights would render the occupants of any targeted property helpless to resist a robbing, stating...
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
they that sleep shall sleep and they that wake shall not move whatever thou do as bizarre as this sounds it would be easy to think that maybe the hand was just a very localised charm of the fifteenth century
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
But the legend actually persisted all the way into the early 20th century, was known all over England and France, and a variety of complex and arcane recipes for creating one were collected in underground occult grimoires.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
One of the most famous and most complete recordings of how to make a hand of glory comes from a grimoire known as Le Petit Albert, a collection of charms, cures and magical workings that was first published in France in 1688 and became very popular during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. It was reported to be based on the writings of St.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Albertus Magnus of Cologne, a celebrated thinker of the Middle Ages who studied and wrote on all kinds of natural sciences and philosophy, and whose interest in the esoteric garnered him a reputation amongst his contemporaries as a mighty sorcerer.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
However, it's thought to be unlikely that Lepeti Albert Grimoire has any real links to the work of Saint Albertus, or Albert the Great as he was also known, and it certainly has a less saintly reputation. Many such grimoires at the time were peddled clandestinely from village to village and were typically condemned by the Catholic Church.
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But it was quite common to cite famous figures as contributing to or inspiring these works as a way of gaining validity and increasing the value of their wares. Despite the contentious reputation though, much of the contents of La Pity Albert concern very practical everyday concerns of common folk.
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How to prosper at fishing, how to grow good grapes, how to make excellent vinegar, tame an angry horse, treat foot sprains, and an assortment of recipes for perfumes, onions and ointments galore.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
but there are also instructions for manifesting more unsavoury wishes, including tampering with the free will of others, how to fake items of value, including money, how to cause a room to appear filled with snakes and other terrifying images, and, of course, how to make a talisman that will allow you to rob a house by rendering all occupants unable to stir from their sleep.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Personally, I think Le Petit Albert's recipe for concocting the Hand of Glory charm is one of the less gory and slightly more practical versions. The instructions for would-be thieves go something like this. Firstly, procure the hand of a dead man who has hanged by a road.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Next, wrap it in a shroud, squeeze well, then place in an earthen vessel with vinegar, saltpeter, salt and black pepper for 15 days. Lastly, remove and dry thoroughly in the sun, or bake in an oven with fern and vervain. Not too complicated, for criminals with no qualms about robbing body parts from gallows, at least. Other versions, however, are far more fantastical and convoluted.
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Sorry, carry on. So, a good start. The review carries on, bouncing back and forth between unveiled sarcasm and outright vitriol for a bit, while simultaneously patting themselves on the back for seeing through the unconvincing hoax.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Some said that the hand had to be collected on a lunar eclipse, and only the specific hand that had committed a crime would work.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Others stated that the hand must be smoked with herbs and hay for a month, then hung on an oak tree for three nights, then laid at a crossroads, and then hung on a church door whilst the maker kept watch in the porch, and only if they managed to stay the whole night without getting spooked and running away would the charm work.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Anybody following these recipes must have been a very determined person indeed. What they all seem to agree on, however, is that the hand must either hold a candle or the fingers of the hand must be doused in fat and wax to become candles themselves. I'll leave it up to your imaginations where the fat for the candles is supposed to be obtained.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
In the latter variation, if any of the fingers refused to light, it was a warning to the thief that someone in the house was still awake, but once it was completely lit, the only thing that could put it out was milk or blood. Now, some great grisly folklore this may be, but none of this sounds in any way glorious, does it? So, where does the name the Hand of Glory come from?
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Well, curiously, it's said to stem from the French word for mandrake, a plant that has centuries of folklore surrounding it, dating all the way back to the Anglo-Saxons. The 10th century Old English herbarium describes Mandrake as large and glorious to see. You will recognise it because it shines at night like a lantern.
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The herbarium goes on to give detailed instructions for how to gather the Mandrake root. Necessary, so it says, because its power is so great and powerful that it wants to flee quickly when an impure person approaches it.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Later in history, complicated instructions for how to gather mandrake not only persisted, but evolved to the point where other people or animals had to be tricked into pulling up the mandrake as the plant cursed any who dared to pull up its roots, and the doomed gatherer would immediately drop dead upon extracting the plant from the earth.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
I can only imagine that this is where some of the screaming mandrake folklore of later centuries originated from. But so far, none of this seems to have much of a connection to a disembodied hand.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Mandrake is famous for its twisted roots looking a bit like a human figure, for those with a good imagination anyway, and by way of sympathetic magic, this may be the reason it was reported to cure all manner of ailments, including headaches, sleeplessness, gout, earache and nerve spasms amongst others, according to the Old English Herbarium.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Whilst they rightly point out that there are definitely some controversial issues surrounding the case, not least that the children involved did admit to faking at least some of the recorded activity,
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
but none of the purported magical healing benefits seem to be associated with the hand specifically. According to the Oxford University Press' Oxford reference, the first reference to a hand of glory in English involved keeping a piece of mandrake root as a charm to make coins multiply, and dates from 1707.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Here, the French word for mandrake, mandragoire, from a corruption of the Latin plant name mandragora, has been interpreted into English literally, ma meaning hand, de meaning of, and gloire meaning glory.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
But that still doesn't bring us to disembodied hands, and rather frustratingly, the closest we can get as to how the name of the herbal money-making charm made the leap to a dead man's hand is that according to folklore, mandrake plants were said to grow underneath gallows, which is exactly where you would find the main ingredient for the robbery version of the Hand of Glory charm.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
My first thought was that maybe the term had evolved over time and gone from describing a money charm to a criminal's charm as the folklore travelled and took on local flavour. But the money charm referenced by Oxford University Press dates to pretty much the same time as the first editions of Le Petit Albert were printed.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
And even more confusingly, this grimoire actually lists both charms, using the term the hand of glory for the disembodied hand in a manner that implies most people will have heard of it before, enlisting the good luck charm for gambling under a chapter titled Mandrakes.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
That charm is made from white briony root, also known as English mandrake, and sounds very much like our 1707 Hand of Glory money charm reference. Le Petit Albert doesn't just describe mandrakes as a plant ingredient, though. It also uses the term mandrake to describe small goblin-like creatures who could be tricked into a person's employ, or convinced to assist one in finding roadside treasure.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
I think even the most hardcore skeptics will allow that the study of paranormal activity is interesting for reasons surrounding our psychology and perception alone, even if there's nothing supernatural taking place. They sum up the article with, talking about the paranormal is always a waste of time. Well, we've wasted eight years then, haven't we? Quite.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
It even gives details of one character who claimed to keep a soothsaying mandrake in a jar, but they were discovered to be a fraud. The whole topic is very confusing, could likely fill an entire book itself, and still get me no closer to how the disembodied hand in the small glass case in Panet Park Museum got its name.
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Although I have now learned several recipes for charm making that involve watering things at sunrise with bat-infused cow whey, if I were so inclined. So every day's a school day, I guess. But it's time to move on now to other tales and other parts of Whitby, with just one more display of the Panit Park Museum that will take us on to our next destination, and a haunted house.
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And in fact, it was a display that we've already mentioned, the wonderfully named Cabinet of Miscellaneous Curiosities. But more accurately, we should call it Dr. Ripley's Cabinet of Curiosities.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
That does appear to accurately reflect their attitude, but does leave me wondering who this review is actually for. If you have no interest in the paranormal, you probably will have skipped it anyway, and I don't think that it will really change your mind if you do.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
All it really did for me was to make me wonder what on earth happened in their life to make them hate a bit of spooky fun, and what they did to upset their editor so much that they were picked to write this review. One star. Who hurt you?
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Just downhill from Whitby Museum, near the bottom of Westcliffe, between Panit Park and the Swing Bridge and Harbour, an unassuming late Georgian house sits right on the corner at the intersection of Brunswick Street, Baxtergate and Victoria Square.
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Hemmed in by historic buildings on all sides, with St Hilda's Catholic Church in front of it, the Church of St John the Evangelist to the side of it, the Old George Hotel behind it and Old Bagdale Hall on the opposite side of the road
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Dr Ripley's house, a squarish three-storey brick affair and the fourth house in a terraced row is certainly not the building you might have guessed to be haunted out of all the more obvious looking contenders surrounding it. But look a little bit closer and you might notice something odd.
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On the Baxter Gate side, the other three houses in the terrace all have two windows per floor, but the Ripley House only has one and a half.
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The other three houses have a front door on the ground floor on the right-hand side, but the Ripley house has three-quarters of a bricked-up door frame that looks like someone has taken a giant cutting implement and sliced away the last section of the building.
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The right-hand windows on the first and second floors are bricked up too, but the halves of the frames remain, cut straight down the middle, just like the door. Walking around to the other side of the building on Victoria Square, the original brickwork that makes up most of the house trails off in a raggedy edge at the further side.
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The soft, rounded brown and pink brickwork ending abruptly and jarringly with patches of bright square and obviously newer red brick filling in the gaps and forming what appears to be a replacement wall ending the run of terraces at the corner of the street. But what on earth would have caused anyone to chop off a whole section of their house?
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Well, according to James J. Brown, author of the original Ghost Walk of Whitby, it was all down to a particularly bothersome ghost. Brown tells of how the scientifically-minded Dr Ripley encountered quite the problem when, in 1870, his house began to be haunted by a ghost who would appear at one of the windows overlooking Brunswick Street.
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And if it wasn't bad enough just dealing with the dichotomy of having a spectre he didn't believe could exist haunting him, the ghost made things ten times worse by leaning out of the window and terrifying folk in the street by grimacing at them.
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The apparition's appearance at the window became so frequent that word got about the town and people started to gather outside the window to gawk, which just seemed to make the haunting worse. The ghost would almost appear to wait until it had attracted sufficient attention and then promptly disappear, drawing gasps of astonishment and horror from the assembled onlookers.
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Eventually, large crowds would wait outside the house, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Phantom, and the whole debacle just became too much for Dr Ripley. Now, in the 19th century, it wouldn't have been unusual to call in a priest to resolve a problem such as this. But Ripley's issue was that if he called in help to exercise the spirit, it would mean admitting its existence.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
I have never encountered Halloween rage before.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Maybe he truly couldn't reconcile the apparition with his staunch views on science. Or maybe he couldn't face more gossip and speculation after the debacle with Flint Jack. But, whatever his reasons, Dr. Ripley decided to deal with the ghost once and for all, by pulling down the part of his house where it was seen. So, does this tie in with what we can see of the building on the ground today?
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Well, yes. The story states that the ghost appeared at the window overlooking Baxter Gate, which would indeed be the end of the house where we can see that a chunk has been ripped off and rebuilt in obviously different materials, leaving two half windows and three quarters of a doorframe behind. Did Dr Ripley really tear down bits of his house because of a grimacing ghost?
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Or is that just a convenient story to explain the odd appearance of the house he used to live in?
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Andrew White, in his A History of Whitby, writes of the legend that it was a whole house at the corner of Baxtergate that was pulled down to put an end to the appearances of a ghost that had crowds gathering in the garden to catch a glimpse of it, and that the materials of this demolished house were reused to build a series of smaller ones. But what of the oddly truncated house we can see today?
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
For all we know, they could both be true. Maybe the terraced row of houses standing today were built of the reused materials from the original haunted house, and that haunting just transferred to the new buildings, leading to one owner taking the same drastic measures all over again.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
We may never know, but ask the ghost tour guides of Whitby, and they will tell you that those weird half-windows are the result of a man of science ending the reign of a frightful phantom who liked to terrify the onlookers of Brunswick Street.
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It was called Hauntings and it was on BBC Two, so we'll have to catch up on iPlayer. So was that just about the Enfield? I believe it's a series and it covers different things each episode. The reviewer did have a bit of a grumble about some of the other things featured, but the initial hatred was purely for the first episode. Right, okay. Yeah, we'll have to give it a watch. Yeah, definitely.
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We'll return to this street, packed as it is with the historical buildings, before too long, to dive into the history and hauntings of a 16th century building just across the road. But first, I want to take you a little further down the narrow street of Baxtergate to hear more about Whitby's history of smuggling.
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And nothing brings to mind this checkered past more than a tiny squat little building on Baxter Gate, tucked away between a muddle of bigger buildings from a muddle of historical periods. Some tall and square with sash windows and four floors, some ornately decorated premises in Victorian red brick, others the modern, long and low buildings we're used to seeing on high streets around the country.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Even an 18th century chapel is thrown into the mix. But I would bet that the oldest building on this street is the quaint little place known as the Old Smuggler, or these days, the Smuggler's Café.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Yeah, keep tuned, listeners, because we will give it a watch and we'll let you know what we think and whether it was in fact a waste of time. How many stars or goblins we gave it.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
yes so following that reviewer's footsteps though perhaps not so stridently i found a couple of other stories around people being a bit miffed or unfazed at spooky season starting with an article from wales online called i hate halloween but this cardiff pop-up shop has changed everything
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Which sounds like the author has a similar distaste for all things spooky as the Guardian's TV and film reviewer, but fortunately we find out immediately in the first paragraph that the hate she holds for Halloween is simply a general lack of interest and she doesn't really have any problems with anyone who does enjoy it. Bit of an overblown headline then. Quite.
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The Saltersgate Inn is actually just outside Whitby, in the wild and epically beautiful landscape of the Yorkshire Moors. Of course, once smuggled goods had been clandestinely ferried away from the harbour, that wasn't the end of their journey.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
because it wasn't just Whitby folk who wanted to partake of the black market luxuries, and there was wealth to be made at neighbouring towns inland, such as the market town of Pickering. We've heard in previous episodes how isolated Whitby was from the rest of the country, due to being surrounded by extensive rolling moorland, which could be difficult and dangerous to traverse.
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So, roadside inns where weary travellers could find food, shelter and rested horses were crucial, which, since 1648, is exactly what the Saltersgate Inn did. But those same coaching inns could also serve as a very handy staging post for smugglers, if the landlord could be persuaded to participate, of course.
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And Saltersgate was in the perfect spot for just such a task, on the route directly from Whitby to Pickering, at a lonely high point of the moors, far away from the bustle of town and the watchful eyes of the excise officers. and it certainly is a lonely and desolate spot, surrounded by absolutely stunning landscape.
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We drove along Saltergate Bank on our explorations of the area, and I spent my time in the driver's seat clutching the steering wheel as we roller-coasted around steep hairpin bends and hanging out the window with my jaw gaping at the breathtaking scenery of the purple heather-covered moors.
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In fact, the Saltergate Inn stood just beyond one such hair-raising switchback, a road feature once known to locals rather fittingly as the Devil's Elbow. Although it's likely not the treacherous nature of the switchback that gave the bend an association with the Devil, but the legend connected to the famous landscape feature that it skirts around.
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Not that I'm not glad about there being less hate in the world but it does seem a bit silly to sensationalise even a tiny little story like this. In short, there's a little pop-up shop in St David's shopping centre in Cardiff called Halloweenland and the reporter had fun playing spooky dress-up and now they want to go to a Halloween party.
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Driving along this road, we were slightly confused when we came upon a well-kept roadside car park, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. There were no houses or businesses to be seen, nothing for miles in fact, so at first we couldn't make out what on earth it was there for. However, exactly opposite the car park and on the other side of the road is a feature people apparently travel miles to see.
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Its official name is the Hole of Horkham, but local legend calls it the Devil's Punchbowl. It's a pretty apt name, the Punchbowl part at least. From the vantage point opposite the car park, it looks like an ancient meteor has punched a crater in the side of the moor. The sides of the concave bowl scooping down into a natural amphitheater 400 feet deep and more than a half a mile across.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Of course, local legend loves to explain mysterious landscape features with all kinds of weird and wonderful tales, and this tremendous dent in the landscape has its very own slice of lore.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
The story goes that a giant by the name of Wade was responsible for creating the crater when he scooped up a great fistful of earth during an argument and hurled it in a rage, leaving a massive scar where the projectile impacted the moor. In fact, the Devil's Punchbowl is neither a crater or the work of a giant.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Instead, it's the result of a much more gentle-sounding but equally destructive process called spring-sapping. Over thousands of years, water welling up from the hillside gradually undermines the slopes below, slowly but surely eating away at the rocks and leaving the huge indentation we see today. And it's still nibbling away at those rocks even now.
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but that takes nothing away from the mystery and deep history of this stretch of moors. A quick look at Lil's beloved Ordnance Survey maps reveals layers of ancient history all around this area. A Bronze Age earthwork ominously named Gallows Dyke sits at the crest of the Punchbowl. On the opposite side of it, standing stones are marked on the map.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
And just a little further out are Cairns, Roman works and the remains of settlements, now all long swallowed up by the Peaty Moorland. And all around Saltergate there are tumuli, ancient burial mounds, some with fantastic names straight out of a fantasy novel, including the Three Tremblers and Mount Misery tumuli.
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With such deep history murmuring away beneath the stones of Saltergate, how could there not be ghosts up here? But we must pull ourselves back from these ancient tombs and return to the 17th century, at a time when the crown had just doubled the tax on salt, an extortionate increase, making an essential commodity for the local fishing trade cripplingly unaffordable.
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I guess a story called, I'm not really bothered about Halloween, but after I found a cool costume, I kind of want to wear it at a party, just wasn't going to bring in the readers.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
So what else could they do but turn to the black market?
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Quite. They get a little bit less aggressive as we go, though. In fact, balancing the scales, Wales Online even did another story to share that Halloween is now one in four Brits' favourite holiday.
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This comes from research done by the Disney Store, which surveyed 2000 adults in the UK and found that they're prepared to spend £100 on Halloween this year compared to only around £20 on previous years. Though being super cynical, I wonder if that says more about how crazily expensive everything has gotten recently rather than what people would be happy to spend. But I digress.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Before tales of smuggling and taxmen became embedded in the Saltersgate story, another older tale was told about a different kind of villain who infiltrated the safe haven of the Moorland Inn, the devil himself.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
This legend starts, fittingly enough, on a dark and stormy night, when any wind-blasted traveller crossing the moors would have been wise to seek shelter in the welcoming warmth of a cosy hostelry. Even supernatural beings of the underworld, who just happened to be in the neighbourhood.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
But before Beelzebub could take even a sip of his refreshing ale, his cover was blown by a priest who was also seeking respite within the sturdy walls of the coaching house, then known as the wagon and horses. The priest leapt into action, trying to oust the devil with an exorcism, but the devil had been quite looking forward to that ale actually and decided he wasn't going anywhere.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Enter once more the heroic landlord to save the day. Does anyone else get the sneaking suspicion that it was always the landlord relating these stories, and making sure their role as the defeater of evil wasn't forgotten? Hmm?
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Anyway, with much bravery and daring do, I'm sure, the landlord somehow managed to trap the devil in the fireplace of the inn with the smoke from a freshly lit peat fire, which meant, of course, that to keep the devil from escaping and wreaking revenge on his captors, they would have to keep that fire burning forever.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
I love when stories layer and evolve like this, and it's fascinating seeing the evolution of metaphor from actual devil to the most wicked, evil, mundane thing that 17th century people could dream up. Taxes. But this story does present a bit of a problem.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Halloween has been somewhat of a low-key affair in the UK in my lifetime, and we do now appear to be taking more inspiration from our friends across the pond and making it a bit more of an event, which as someone with a bit of a soft spot for all things spooky, I find quite lovely.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
If The Devil in the Fireplace is the original story, but the inn only opened in 1643 and the doubled salt tax happened around 1696, then that only leaves around half a century for the story to have evolved from devil to excise officer. In the words of the dread pirate Roberts, that doesn't leave much time for dilly-dallying. Of course, 50 years is still a decent stretch, so it is possible.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Or maybe there was an older inn on this same site before. I couldn't find any mention of one, but I couldn't find any historic England references for the Salters Gate either. There is, though, quite a lot of evidence in the immediate vicinity for Iron Age and Roman agricultural settlements and evidence of land use into the medieval. So who knows?
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Unfortunately, it does seem that whatever the generations of landlords were worried about releasing from the fireplace of the inn, whether that be devil, ghost or just plain old bad luck, in some way it did come to pass, for very sadly the inn stands no more.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
But if you do find yourself driving along Saltergate on a night when the full moon lights the devil's punchbowl with a silvery glow, maybe cast a quick glance across the moors as you pass the rubbled foundations where the inn stood for 370 years and see if you can spot the eerie figure of a little girl in a crinoline dress. And if you do, will you stop and ask her why she's crying?
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
or will you look nervously back in your rearview mirror until you reach civilization and now we will leave the desolate and haunted moors and head back to whitby one final time to visit a 16th century hall and tell you the story of the swashbuckling ghost
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
i wouldn't hazard to even mention it and following on from whales online we head over to the lad bible where we've dropped from hating on halloween to our old favorite i don't believe in all that rubbish but the author of this piece starts off with a version of our traditional favorite line before adding let's be honest we've all had that feeling that we're being watched or that we're not really alone too true lad bible too true
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Moving on in the article though, we quickly find that it's a thinly veiled advertisement for the TV series Help My House Is Haunted, which would have qualified for cashing in on Halloween, except for the fact that it's a spooky show, and therefore is a pretty legitimate thing to be talking about in spooky season.
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Hosts of the show, Barry Guy and Jane Harris, give Ladbible some helpful hints on working out if your house is haunted, which include the unexplained. Really helpful, guys. Thanks. But also the old favourites like temperature changes, strange noises and feeling like you're being watched.
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Now, Brown Bushel was quite the character. His story reads more like a fairy tale than real life, though the ending is certainly not the Disney version. Brown appears at first glance to have been dealt a very good hand at the time of his birth, at least financially.
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His father Nicholas, whilst the youngest of four sons of a wealthy local merchant, was prosperous enough to buy Bagdale Hall in 1596, and in 1601 married Dorothy Chumley, the daughter of Sir Henry Chumley, whose family were the most affluent in Whitby at the time.
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I very much doubt that the match was one that Dorothy chose herself, as she was only 14 when she was married to Nicholas, who was 36 years her elder, a fact that was quite rightfully lambasted in the diaries of Lady Margaret Hobie, the earliest known diary of a woman written in English.
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But, unhappy match aside, Nicholas and Dorothy would go on to have four surviving children, of which Brown was the eldest. Being the eldest son of a wealthy family, Brown is likely to have grown up expecting to inherit a substantial fortune along with Bagdale Hall. But he was, in fact, to inherit neither.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
His father's fortunes took somewhat of a downturn and he was forced to sell Bagdale Hall amongst other properties. Author of the paper Captain Brown Bushel, North Sea adventurer and pirate, Jack Binns, puts it very eloquently when he writes, When he died in his eighties in 1632, Nicholas Bushel might have been still regarded as a gentleman, but by then he had lost the means of one.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
In fact, we have a lot to thank the author of that particular paper for, as they did a fantastic job of trawling through the historical record and clearing up the many misconceptions about Brown Bushel that seem to have plagued his legacy. But we'll come to those later.
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At the age of 22, Brown found himself in a very similar situation to his father, a gentleman in name but without a home or a weighty purse. He did still have a family connection to the Chumleys, which would become important to him a little later, but he had little else. So, like in many a fairy tale, he set out to make his own fame and fortune, and he did so by joining the military.
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Certainly not an unheard-of vocation for gentlemen of the time, but it was more common for them to treat it as a sort of rite of passage and to return home after a short period of soldiering and settle down doing something more staid and, well, reliably lucrative.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
But Brown didn't have that luxury, so the art of warfare became his chosen career, and it turns out that he was really rather good at it.
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helpfully they do also remember to remind people that it's not always a ghost and that they should also check for more mundane explanations for anything they experience as well good advice
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Although Brown claimed himself Church of England, unlike most of his peers, it seems that personal faith played little part in his military allegiance, fighting for both Catholic France and Protestant Holland at various points, and spending the early part of his career as a mercenary in Europe. But meanwhile, back in England, trouble was brewing.
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The wars of the three kingdoms and the English civil wars were imminent. Unrest was fermenting, nobles were choosing sides, cities declaring for crown or parliament, and even families were split by political decisions. On Brown's return to England, he found himself with a bucketful of military experience in a country that had long been at peace, but now was preparing for war.
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This experience was not to be overlooked by the parliamentary forces, and he was swiftly put in command of a 36-gun warship, the Martin. A command he was not to waste, for as soon as hostilities were declared, he engaged with royalist forces at the important seaport town of Portsmouth. Portsmouth town was defended by South Sea Castle and the harbour was blocked by Royalist naval forces.
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Brown wasted no time and launched a surprise night attack in small boats, seizing the ship, unblocking the harbour and opening the castle to assault. This successful action was to earn Brown a commendation from the House of Commons, but he didn't stop there. He needed to take that castle. It was a formidable challenge, with imposing stone walls 30 feet high, surrounded by a deep moat 15 feet wide.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
And here, dear listeners, is where the story starts getting really good. You might think that assaulting such a fortification would be a costly and perhaps even suicidal endeavour, and Brown was working with only one ship's crew, not a large land-based army. Losing too many men would not only make taking the castle next to impossible, but it would render his ship useless as well.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
It seems Ladbible aren't the only ones producing articles about how to tell if your house is haunted, as I also found one much more in line with our cashing in on spooky season theme, and this one comes from the Guild of Property Professionals, and is titled How Do I Know If My House Is Haunted?
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I don't know if he agonised over the decision, but he allocated his forces and undertook the risky mission of storming the castle. His hand-picked team stealthily approached the castle moat and swam across it undetected. Emerging from the gloomy water, no doubt sopping wet and chilled to the bone, they then needed to surmount the thirty-foot-high walls of sheer stonework.
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The climb must have been an impressive undertaking in itself, but scale the walls they did, and still without raising the alarm of the defending royalists. So far uncontested, they set about taking the castle. The stakes were high. Portsmouth was a vital seaport, and taking it for Parliament would be a heavy blow to Charles's forces.
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However, the loss of too many men would blunt the effectiveness of the parliamentary force in the area. But Brown had a cunning plan to avoid losing too many men. He didn't take any. Well, I say he didn't take any. He took one man with him, but he wasn't a soldier. He was a musician with a trumpet. Yes, sizing up the castle, and I must say it is a castle, not just a fortified house.
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It was built to defend against invasion from France and the Holy Roman Empire by Henry VIII. Brown thought to himself, yeah, I can take that, but I'd better take a trumpeter with me to signal the rest of the fellows back on my ship and let them know when I've done it.
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It may sound crazy, but Brown alone, aside from his companion and his trumpet, swam the moat, scaled the walls and took the castle without firing a shot. Brown must have either been incredibly charismatic or terribly imposing, or both, because after infiltrating the castle and catching the defenders with their pants down, they immediately surrendered.
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with the port open to parliamentary reinforcement by sea and South Sea Castle taken, as well as, I like to imagine, a healthy dose of fear of the man who could single-handedly capture the aforementioned castle, the Royalist forces remaining in defence of Portsmouth Town mutinied, leaving the town entirely in parliamentary hands.
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The capture of Portsmouth was possibly the most audacious of Brown Bushel's activities, but was by no means the last. From Portsmouth, he made his way to Scarborough and was reunited with his cousin Hugh Chumley.
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There is no named author for this one, so we don't know which of the trained and trustworthy independent estate agents came up with this article. But as we'll see in a moment, whoever published the article to their website, I don't think they did it alone. Anyway, the article begins, Halloween is known for its eerie tales, creepy ghouls and mysterious occurrences. Good start, good start.
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Whilst in Scarborough, Brown was put to work improving the defences of Scarborough Castle, and the artillery platform defending the entrance to the castle is still known as Bushel's Battery to this day.
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During this time, the Royalist forces make great gains in the North, including making raids into Whitby, no doubt flustering both Brown and Chumley, who obviously had both family and property there.
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Though fighting for the Roundheads, Chumley was apparently less than 100% on board with the Parliamentarian cause, having previously made his displeasure at the lack of willingness to negotiate with the King be known.
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Brown's cousin sent him to Hull to retrieve some possessions from the Chumley home, likely fearing that he might lose them otherwise in the tide of battles raging across the country, and Brown duly attended to the task. Unfortunately, however, when Brown arrived in Hull, he was met by Parliament's Governor Sir John Hotham, who placed him under arrest.
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You see, whilst Brown was undertaking the journey to Hull, Chumley had secretly made his way to York in order to pledge his allegiance to Queen Henrietta Maria and the Royalist forces. Only it obviously wasn't quite as secret a visit as he had intended, and Brown, related as he was to Chumley and sharing a command, was placed under scrutiny and arrest.
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In his paper, Captain Brown Bushel, North Sea Adventurer and Pirate, author Jack Binns is of the opinion that Brown was completely ignorant of Chumley's intention to defect. And it seems that Brown was also able to convince Sir John Hotham of this as well. Brown was released on the promise that he would retake Scarborough for Parliament, but he was to return to a very complicated situation.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Hugh Chumley was once again in York when Brown arrived at Scarborough, and commanding the garrison there instead was James Chumley, another of his relatives. But more importantly, James's second-in-command was Brown's younger brother, Henry Bushel. Instead of facing his cousin in battle, he was now in conflict with his own brother. Henry Bushel, though, appears to have been Brown's salvation.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Ostensibly now on the royalist side, Henry seems to have either had some doubts about the defection or was charmed by Brown into returning to the parliamentary fold, for he aided him in gaining access to the castle and securing it for the Roundheads. In the words of John Legard, Sir Hugh Chumley's captain prior to Hugh's change of allegiance...
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At twelve of the clock at night, the captain, Brown Bushel, with four more, was let in through the castle gate by his brother, who had prepared the soldiers, ready enough to revolt from that side they liked not, with beer and tobacco. He, acquainting the soldiers with his intentions, they promised to stick to him. The sergeant who commanded the guard was laid hold on.
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The gunners were next surprised, but swore fidelity. There was nothing left now but to get the tower, a place of great strength where the captain was lodged, and where all the ammunition and provisions for the castle were laid.
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For the effecting whereof, the sergeant was caused to knock at the gate and tell the keeper of the magazine, who came to know what was the matter, that there was an alarm in the town and the soldiers must be furnished with powder and shot. credit being given here unto and the gate opened bushell entered with his soldiers commanded delivery of the keys and thereby became master of the castle
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overcoming the final obstacle of the tower with just this simple subterfuge brown quite literally had the keys to the castle he hadn't needed to swim a moat or scale a wall this time his access had been almost as simple as walking through an open door between henry's preparation and brown's deception another castle fell to brown bushel without a single shot being fired
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
And it goes on to cover strange noises and temperature changes, as well as reminding you that not everything is paranormal like the Ladbible one. But it also adds flickering lights, seeing if your animals behave strangely, and checking out the history of your house. Is a random estate agent blog actually giving better advice than the paranormal professionals?
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
On hearing of this development, Hugh Chumley rushed back from York and sent a message to Brown requesting to meet at Scarborough's main gate the following morning, to which Brown agreed. Whether he knew it or not at the time, this meeting was to be a choice that would seal his fate. Through appeals rather than threats, Hugh was able to grudgingly swing Brown's support from Parliament to the King.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
He opened up the gate and handed the keys and the city over to the Royalists. The Parliamentarian army was already on the way to reinforce Scarborough, and finding it once again in Royalist hands, they assaulted it by land and by sea. Chumley and Bushell were able to repel these assaults, but rather than immediately take up with the Cavalier forces, Bushell set out for Hull.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Seemingly feeling a strong moral sense of responsibility as he had promised to recapture Scarborough from the Royalists to avoid captivity after being arrested on his previous visit to Hull, he set sail directly and surrendered himself.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
John Hotham, the parliamentarian governor who had arrested and then released Brown, was impressed enough with his honesty that he put Brown in one of the first groups of prisoners of war exchanged by the opposing forces to be returned to their own sides. So he was free and back with Chumley in very short order.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
After this, Brown campaigned with Chumley's army for a time, acquitting himself well on the battlefield and earning himself the captaincy of a warship, the Cavendish. If he distinguished himself well enough on land, he was to become a very terror on the sea.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Where once the London newspapers had delighted in the tales of his daring exploits as a roundhead, they now disparaged him bitterly as a perfidious pirate. He was to spend several years roving the British coasts, preying on merchant vessels in incredible numbers. Of all the royalist buccaneers, Brown Bushel's name was the best known and most feared.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Of all his exploits during this time, it's actually one of his losses that's the most memorable. On the 15th of July 1645, the Cavendish was intercepted and boarded. The Roundheads had captured their quarry at last. Except, Brown Bushel was able to make a characteristically daring escape.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Along with around a dozen of his crew, Brown jumped through a gunport on the opposite side of the ship and swam undetected the one and a half miles to shore. The First Civil War was to end around a year later, following the capture of King Charles I in June of 1646, and it's at this point that the story surrounding Brown Bushel becomes a little muddy.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Several sources state that Brown begged the pardon of Parliament and was awarded the captaincy of a vessel in the parliamentary fleet, only to turn traitor once again at the outbreak of the Second Civil War in 1648, handing over his latest vessel to Royalist control.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
This has earned him the reputation of a flip-flopping scoundrel, but fortunately, author Jack Binns comes to the rescue of Brown-Bushall's character.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
clearing up the many myths and misconceptions about this point in Bushell's life that seem to have occurred, as we've found in many other historical cases, from various authors over the centuries getting names and dates wrong, plagiarising others' incorrect work, sometimes seeming to just make things up completely, and compounding and expounding the misinformation in each retelling.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
They also suggest getting a medium in, having your own paranormal investigation, and of course, checking with your estate agent. Who are you going to call? Estate agents. I'm not sure that's got the same ring to it, does it? I don't know. I quite like it.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
In reality, Brown Bushel never returned to Parliament service. In fact, unlike many other Royalists, he didn't even seek a pardon following the end of the First Civil War. He remained a privateer and took refuge in French ports or at Jersey until the outbreak of the Second Civil War, when he returned to British waters, still flying the royal flag.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
This time, though, his luck was not to last and Brown Bushel was caught by the Roundheads. In one final act of daring he escaped his captors but a handsome reward was offered for his apprehension and five days later he was back in custody. Fearing another escape he was held in close confinement at Windsor Castle.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
He was to remain imprisoned for nearly three years, but his trial at Westminster lasted only one day. The verdict? Guilty. His sentence? Death. Brown's execution was set to take place only four days later on Saturday 29th March 1651, the eighth anniversary of his meeting with Hugh Chumley at Scarborough's Gate, his surrender of Scarborough to the King and his betrayal of Parliament.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
five o'clock on that fateful day brown bushel was brought from the tower of london to the place of his execution he smiled at the people that had gathered to witness his demise and addressed them saying that he had served parliament until his conscience had bid him join the king's forces and that he wished he had done so from the start of the war
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Asking the executioner if the block before him was the very same that his king had laid his head upon, he was pleased to find that it was one and the same, as was the executioner's axe.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
He doffed his cloak and doublet, pulled a cap from his pocket, placed it upon his head and handed the axeman twenty shillings, apologising that he had no other money to give and saying that he wished it had been more. There was then a bizarrely tender moment between executioner and condemned, as Brown asked him, How shall I lie?
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Anyway, I continued on my search and found another estate agent blog, which had also published an article on how to tell if your house was haunted. This time from Hamilton Stiller. They have an office in Park Lane. Very posh. And they too have decided to take advantage of Halloween to advertise their business. Their article begins, Hang on a second. I've heard that somewhere before.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Whereupon the executioner replied, I will show you, sir, and demonstrated the kneeling position that Brown should adopt, then handed him a scarf to place upon the block before resting his neck upon it. Brown then kneeled as he had been shown, uttering his final words, Lord Jesus, receive my soul, before raising his right hand to signal his readiness.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
At this signal, the executioner sent him to the next world with a single stroke. I struggled a little to come up with a fitting epitaph for the formidable figure of Brown Bushel, and so here again Jack Binns comes to my rescue for his final paragraph, which I think cannot be exceeded. He writes... Captain Brown Bushel was one of nature's born adventurers.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
He was a compulsive man of action, a maid of the stuff of schoolboy's heroes. He was a miniature version of the dashing Prince Rupert, bold, arrogant, rash and fearless. He lived in times of extraordinary danger and he relished them. Bushel regarded himself as a gentleman because he was the eldest son and heir of a gentleman.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
As such, he would not make his living like his Bushel cousins and Newton in-laws in trade. As the son and heir of an impoverished gentleman, however, he had no estate to support him in the lifestyle that his status required. Without a rich patron or a profession of his own, there was little he could do except become a professional soldier.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
He was too proud to live under his sister's roof and eat his brother-in-law's bread. Unlike his more famous Whitby contemporary, the navigator and great explorer Luke Fox, Brown Bushel did not have even the experience and skills of a seaman to recommend him. War alone gave him an acceptable opportunity for self-advancement and self-expression.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
He died as violently and as courageously as he had lived. Historians might exhaust themselves and their readers in endless arguments about why Englishmen fought the civil wars, but Brown-Bushall's principal motive was that he enjoyed them.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
And that, dear listener, is the end of this year's Hello Birthday Ween episode. Thank you so much for listening, for sharing your stories, for your likes, reviews and shares, and for supporting us on Patreon and Ko-fi. We literally couldn't do this without your support.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
We're running a bit low on paranormal stories, so if you've had an experience that you'd be happy to share, then please do get in touch either through our website or via email at contact at notquantsvs.com. We hope that you've enjoyed the episode and that you'll join us again next time for some more spooky stories and haunted history on NotQuantsVS.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Not only is it a similar article, it is the same article. They've even used the same stock pictures. Something tells me that both of these places might possibly hire someone else to write their blogs for them. None of these stories so far really piqued my interest, though. They were the side salad. OK, I guess, but not the reason anyone goes out to a restaurant.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
I needed my main course, so I kept looking. There was one that nearly made it, and that comes from the Manchester Evening News. This story was itself reporting on a Halloween tie-in from an unoccupied housing insurance company, the Alan Boswell Group, who carried out research to find out Britain's most haunted city. And what criteria did they use, you might ask?
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Apparently, they used the number of paranormal reports. Okay, good. Makes sense. The number of cemeteries. What? Yeah. Not sure if that's relevant. Maybe. Not sure. The number of vacant properties. Huh? These are getting a bit more tenuous. And also the number of houses built before 1918. Double what?
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
Yeah, like, is there some kind of cut-off after 1918 that ghosts no longer appear that I'm not aware of?
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
It would seem so. Though I am pretty sure that there isn't a cut-off after 1918, as we've seen and heard quite a few haunted places built after then, and in fact we live in one. Anyway, rant over, for now. So, whereabouts did Manchester come on this top 10 haunted cities list? I'll give you a second. Have a guess. Whatever you're thinking, I'm almost certain that you're wrong.
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The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost
They didn't come anywhere. They're not on the list. Manchester Evening News published an article about what to do in Manchester on Halloween and suggested that people went to York instead. York! Not that there's anything... We love York, but it's not in Manchester. Indeed. To add insult to injury, York only came second, or more correctly third, as Bradford and Aberdeen took joint first place.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
I mean, there was a light close by, but at the time it switched off. So, yeah, weird. But yeah, definitely that description really rang a bell for me.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
I'm normally quite relaxed about these sorts of things. But yeah, that was a little bit unnerving. I won't mind admitting to that.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
In 2008, I moved into a new house. It wasn't a house with any kind of history as far as I know. It was a 1970s-ish terraced house in Wallsend, six or so miles outside of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Wallsend is named as such because it's the location of the Roman fort, which was the last fort at the eastern end of Hadrian's Wall.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
It was at a noticeably reduced price, and when my girlfriend and I spoke with the estate agent, it became clear why the price was less than expected. The owner was a man with two daughters, and his wife had just died of cancer. He couldn't afford to pay his mortgage, so he needed to sell, even for under market value.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Otherwise, he'd default on his payments and would have it taken off him and receive no money at all. When I first moved in, the place seemed to have some kind of atmosphere. I felt unwelcome at times in my new home. I regularly felt watched. One weekend, I was sat in the living room watching TV alone.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The staircase was behind the wall upon which the TV was mounted, so looking at the TV I could see a doorway off to the left which led to the staircase and the front door of the house. The door was open and as I watched telly I saw the light come on at the bottom of the stairs, clearly turned on by my girlfriend who was upstairs.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
I heard her come down the stairs, but she didn't appear at the bottom. What are you doing? I said out loud. I got no response, but the light went out. Just as I was about to stand up and go and find out what she was doing, I happened to glance to my left, the opposite direction to the bottom of the stairs.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
and saw that in the back garden, my girlfriend was stood talking to our neighbour over the back garden fence. So, when the light came on, someone clearly descended the staircase and the light was switched off. I was in the house alone.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Yeah, we were talking before this story about the amount of activity that centered around the staircase in our house. So that kind of ties in. But this one was actually me going down the staircase and something happening nearby.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
So I was upstairs in the studio working and I could hear Lil, you know, pottering about working, doing things, going into her room from like her office, walking on the landing into the bedroom and just general doing things in a room noises. And that carried on as I walked downstairs and I went into the kitchen and there was Lil making her lunch or a cup of coffee or something.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
And I was like, you're here. And I was like, yes, a lot of it. And I had to canter with because I was listening to you doing things upstairs whilst I was upstairs. And then on my way downstairs, you were still doing it. And you can't have passed me on the stairs without me noticing. So something weird happened.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Because I heard you come upstairs and do things. Yeah. And I hadn't, basically.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Because, yeah, you were downstairs doing something. And I heard you come upstairs. I heard you walk into the office, then into the bedroom and do things. Yeah.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
I think that's actually the reason I went downstairs because I was making like a slow cooker meal and I thought I'm not going to do that while Lil's in the kitchen because we're going to get in each other's way.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
So I waited until I heard her come upstairs before I went down to carry on doing what I needed to do. But when I went down, she was there. So yeah, that was weird.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Yeah, we've actually got an interesting story about that. We'll have to tell you about that at some point.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Our Paranormal Radar story this episode is brought to us by Sky News, who asked the question, would you buy a six-acre island near Plymouth with a private beach and 15 ghosts? And we say, do you even need to ask? Drake's Island, named for Sir Francis Drake, lies a mere 600 yards from Plymouth.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
I will of course put a link in the show notes to the How Haunted podcast, so do check it out. And our last story of the day comes from uncanny and gothic fiction author Katie McCall, who got in touch with us to share this real ghostly encounter from her childhood that inspired a lifelong fascination with the supernatural.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
It became a fortified defence against the French and Spanish fleets in 1549 and continued its role in defending the southern coast for several hundred years and through both world wars, all the way until 1963 when the War Office finally vacated it. The island houses a barracks and other buildings from the Napoleonic era and even artillery batteries including several 18th century cannons.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
And thank you to Katie for sharing that story with us. And you can tell she's an author because I had the perfect mental image of that ghost, arms outstretched, floating across the field at sort of super speed, because we've seen things that are like that as well, that happen like they're fast forward.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Definitely. I'm certainly going to imagine that next time we drive past a field. And that will be like tomorrow because we're surrounded by fields.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Indeed. And you obviously lived in quite an interesting area because being near Lindisfarne as well, I really need to visit Lindisfarne. I've never been.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
We weren't even that far away when we were at Whitby. No. It leads us almost back to the Whitby thing, because this is not within a quick walk, but it's close by.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Of that, I have absolutely no doubt. It looks amazing. So thank you again to Katie for sharing that story. And if you would like to check out some of Katie's work, she recommends that you visit her on either Instagram or threads at Katie McCall underscore author. And we will, of course, be putting links on the show notes on the website so that you can check it out straight from there.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Well, that may have been the last listener story of this episode, but it's by no means the end of the show, for we are about to embark on a spooky adventure through the ancient streets of Whitby, turning up all kinds of stories, myths and legends. So grab a hot drink and a cozy blanket to keep you warm against any unearthly chills and join us as we go on the Trail of Dracula.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Last episode we left you high on the East Cliff amidst the ruins of Whitby Abbey, looking out at the landscape of the town and harbour beyond, framed by the archway of the Abbey's crumbling west front, as a bright sunny day fades to the gloaming of a spring evening. Today we'll pick up the next chapter of our explorations, but this time we begin high up on the West Cliff,
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
on a brand new, but distinctly less bright and sunny day.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
It has changed hands a couple of times since 1963, first being used as a youth adventure training centre from 1964 until 1989, which sounds super cool. It was then bought by a businessman that wanted to turn it into a hotel complex. It was most recently bought for £6 million in 2018, with the aim of opening the island up as both a museum and a hotel.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
One of the lodging houses, No. 6 Royal Crescent, a cream and salmon painted townhouse with a little balcony and views directly out to sea, has a circular blue plaque fixed on the wall to the right of the front door, at the top of a short flight of steps. In the UK, these so-called blue plaques are a mark of historical significance –
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
And this one reads, Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, stayed here 1890 to 1896. And of course, because it's Whitby, embossed underneath is a small golden ammonite. The lodging house is part of what should have been the crowning jewel in the Victorian holiday development on Westcliff, sitting as it does in a row of similar houses occupying the prime spot.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
with unrivalled views out to sea, gardens and promenades at its feet, and the Westcliff Saloon and Theatre just across the road, which would have been a fresh new construction at the time of Stoker's first visit.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
On an aerial map of the town, you can see that Royal Crescent is aptly named, the road arcing 180 degrees around a manicured lawn planted with flowerbeds and scattered with benches for taking in the view whilst getting a healthy lungful of sea air.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
But from the ground, we can see that the crescent is oddly lopsided, with only 90 degrees of its arc filled in with the guesthouses that sprang up during the town's rise to fame as a 19th century holiday hotspot, and the other half unsatisfyingly empty.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
but it seems that the renovation costs are more than the current owner is able to invest in the site, as he has suggested a figure of £25 million will be required to complete his vision. He has, therefore, put the site back on the market. There is no guide price that I can currently find, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was now a little north of the £6 million paid in 2018.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Although the development of holiday accommodation had begun on the West Cliff as early as the 1840s, it really took off when railway mogul George Hudson set his sights on the area. And, with his money and attention on the project, soon the East Crescent and Terrace, the Esplanade, North Terrace and the Grand Royal Hotel sprang into being.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The so-called Railway King, true to his name, added even more impetus to the scheme by carving a small railway line into the cliff face to make it easier to ferry building materials up the steep incline, which was, and still is, named Khyber Pass, after the famous mountain pass in Pakistan that was a vital part of the ancient Silk Road trade route.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
But the railway king's reign was cut short when his goals outstretched his means, and he was discovered to have been fudging his finances, owing money that he couldn't repay. He fled abroad for a while to escape his creditors, but was arrested in 1865 and served time in prison for fraud. The railway king's empire fell, and Whitby's Royal Crescent was never finished.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
And this is how Bram Stoker would have found the West Cliff in 1890, with its lopsided, unfinished Royal Crescent, but with a freshly built crop of lodging houses, pretty clifftop gardens made for leisurely strolls, and epic views over the historic town. There's a popular story that back in 1890, when Stoker made his first visit to Whitby, the landlady of No.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
6 Royal Crescent didn't like her patrons hanging around the house all day, and so sent them off to explore the town. I don't know if this is true or not, but explore Bram Stoker did, taking in all the elements of the West Cliff and the town and harbour below and working them, and a good deal of local lore and legend, into his novels.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Although the landscape of Dracula takes place across multiple locations, which we experience through the collection of letters, diary entries and newspaper cuttings that make up the book, the scenes that take place in Whitby are so evocative. And a big part of that is because, visiting Whitby today, the landscape is not much changed.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Although of course the signs of 21st century life are plain to see, and some landmarks might have been updated or renovated, nearly all the elements he described are still here for us to experience today, and it's possible to follow the adventures of our protagonists through the Whitby landscape almost step by step.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
One diary entry in the book that encapsulates so many of the featured locations is the scene where Mina Murray, our brave and yet gentle Victorian heroine, suffers the terror of seeing her best friend attacked by the malevolent Count and makes a midnight dash all the way across town in the depths of night to try and rescue her from his clutches.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Happily for us, her journey on that fateful night happens to hit upon not only many of the places featured in other important scenes in the novel, but also the real haunted hotspots of the town. Whether by accident or design, Stoker plotted a route that passes through the sights of some of Whitby's best ghost stories.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
So, let us now join Mina as she wakes suddenly in the dark bedroom of the lodging house that she shares with her friend Lucy, only to find the young woman missing. Suspecting that her friend is sleepwalking again, Mina rushes out into the night to find her and bring her back to safety, as she writes in this chapter of her journal.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Sadly, even without the £25 million for the renovations, Drake's Island is a little out of our budget, as I would love to get my hands on it. Not only is it a really cool little island, but it is also, apparently, really haunted.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The story claims that there are 15 ghosts on the island, and after looking at a few articles, I found that number repeated several times, but I haven't managed to find out exactly how that figure was reached. There does though seem to be a lot of paranormal activity reported there.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Directly below the Cook Monument is Whitby Beach and it was from here that one local gentleman encountered the White Wraith at the turn of the century in 1905. At the time the witness was a young man, part of a group of Boy Scouts who were enjoying a campfire on the beach below the part of West Cliff on which the Cook Monument stands.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
It was evening but had been a fine day with no rain or mist or bad weather to speak of so the group were surprised when they looked up and saw a misty white figure at the top of the cliff.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
clearly discernible as the shape of a person but with no defining features the figure proceeded to float down the cliff face and the youths ran to the spot where they predicted it would land on the beach eager to see what manner of being this was but the moment before the feet should have hit the sand the figure disappeared
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Author of the Whitby ghost book, Paul McDermott, was told of a similar encounter during a chance conversation with a visitor who had holidayed in Whitby some years before. Only this witness's experience took place 75 years after the scouts had encountered the White Wraith.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
This time, the misty figure appeared in front of the eyes of a baffled man and woman who were walking their dog on the beach just as they passed under the Cook Monument. As before, it was a clear day, with no mist or fog to explain the apparition that floated down the face of West Cliff, once again vanishing the moment before it touched down on the beach.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The woman turned to her partner in amazement wondering if he had seen it too. It seemed he must have as he was busy speeding away from whatever it was as fast as possible and he resolutely refused to discuss what he had seen.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
No one seems to know who or what the White Wraith is, or what its connection to the Cook Monument might be, possibly nothing at all, as these cliffs are ancient and have been settled for thousands of years, so who knows what secrets and stories they hold.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
But our next story probably does have links to a more recent time in history and takes us just a few paces along the cliff to that other famous monument occupying a rather uncomfortable place in the annals of Whitby's history. A large archway, his placement perfectly frames the dramatic view of the Abbey and St Mary's Church on the rugged East Cliff.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
I found a story from Plymouth Live in 2021 when they spoke to the steward of the island who recounted a few of the experiences that people have had, as well as some handy hints if you would like to experience them for yourself.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The activity is reported to range from uneasy feelings and sounds like whistling and coughing, even including voices from within a shuttered-up building, to more physical encounters with people being touched and having things tug on their clothing.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Tourist maps will eagerly tell you that the creepy looking little tunnel cut through the side of Khyber Pass is a hideout of Count Dracula. Somewhere he lures his victims who scream as they meet their fate. Hence the name, the Screaming Tunnel. It does look rather creepy. It's a claustrophobically narrow, stone-lined channel that cuts right through the cliff.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The shine of the rain-slick flagstones does nothing to alleviate the inky black shadows within, and tendrils of ivy hang from the ceiling and archway, swaying wetly in the breeze. In fact, though, this is not a hideout of the Count. It's actually another legacy of George Hudson, the railway king, who built it as a shortcut to the harbour below for the transport of building materials.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Once this is known, it becomes quite obvious that it looks exactly like a railway tunnel, just on a miniature scale. Today, it's a footpath that forms a shortcut into the town, down a steep flight of steps. It actually doesn't feature in Dracula at all, but despite the misplaced name, it is haunted.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
I even wonder if our old friend Graham the bum-pinching ghost that I talked about way back in some of our earlier episodes has found his way onto the island as some people have experienced having their bottoms pinched and their bra straps pinged.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Being such a useful shortcut up the cliff straight to the hotels and holiday lodgings, the tunnel has often been used by visitors returning to their accommodation after an evening in the town. But locals know that it's not somewhere you want to be after dusk.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Many residents report feeling an eerie presence when walking through the tunnel and still more tell of witnessing a dark shadowy shape appearing from nowhere and briefly blocking out the light at the end before vanishing. Maybe the spookiest story though comes from a couple who were holidaying in Whitby and used the tunnel as a shortcut to and from their hotel a few times during their stay.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
On one occasion, the woman of the couple experienced exactly what so many witnesses before her had done. She noticed the dark figure of a man at the end of the passage and was startled because she knew that no one had entered the cut-through ahead of them.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
When she mentioned it to her husband he brushed it off and said that it must just be another pedestrian who had come up the steps on the other side, changed their mind and started back down again. But when they emerged out on the other side there was no one else to be seen anywhere and certainly no one descending the steps on the other side.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The next time they used the shortcut, the husband chuckled when he felt his wife grab his hand as they passed through the tunnel. He had no fear of the tunnel, shadowy figures or otherwise, but he supposed she must still be feeling frightened from her previous experience if she felt the need for this physical reassurance.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
So he tried to make light of the situation, asking if she saw any spooky dark figures today. He stopped chuckling when he heard his wife's voice behind him in the darkness say, Pardon, I didn't hear you. In fact, she was several paces behind him and definitely not close enough to have been in physical contact with him. So who or what had just been holding his hand?
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The story, which I will of course link in the show notes as usual, also features a couple of photos taken by paranormal investigators and staff on the island, including one that they have termed the White Lady. I would be interested to hear what you all think of it. I have double-checked, and they are still offering visits for paranormal investigators.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Of course, these days, lighthouses have electric lights and are often automated. But this lighthouse's ghost hails from the days that the life-saving signal needed to be lit and tended by hand.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
So, if you would like to visit the 15 ghosts of Drake's Island for yourself, you can do so. And, as I mentioned earlier, the steward had some helpful hints to encourage the island's spooks to make an appearance. First, don't forget to greet them on your arrival. And second, wear a lot of perfume.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
And one day, as dusk was beginning to creep in and the pelting rain of an incoming storm already blurred the darkening skies, the West Lighthouse's keeper hurried towards the tower, knowing lives would depend on his signal that night. The tempest grew and he battled his way through rains sent horizontal by swelling winds and
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
By the time he reached the base of the lighthouse steps, his clothes were soaked and dripping as he toiled up those 81 steps with grim determination, leaving a watery trail behind him. He got the lamp lit, as his duty demanded, and started to head back down the steps to find a warm fire and dry clothes.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
But, tired and distracted as he was, he didn't notice how slick the steps were from the rain he had shed all the way up them. and before he had time to realise the slippery danger, his feet went out from under him, and down he fell, finding his fateful end on the cold steps of the lighthouse's staircase.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
It's claimed that witnesses have seen the apparition of the unfortunate lighthouse keeper hurrying towards the tower just as he did on that fateful stormy night. Some say they have seen him doggedly making his last journey up the steps to light the lamp, forever replaying his last crucial but deadly task.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
This is the version of the story told in many guidebooks and town trails, but ask the local ghost tour guides who have been stomping these streets for years, or consult their books at least, and they tell a slightly different version.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
According to Paul McDermott's The Whitby Ghost Book and James J. Brown's The Original Ghost Walk of Whitby, the real story came from a young girl who visited the lighthouse with her mother in the 1950s. The pair were climbing the long winding staircase when the girl stopped in her tracks at seeing the prostrate form of a severely ill or injured man lying across the stairs halfway up.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
He was wearing seaman's clothes and she could clearly see that he had only one arm. She was absolutely baffled when her mother simply urged her on up the stairs, expecting of course for her parent to rush to the man's aid, but she quickly realised that no one else but her could see him.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Paul McDermott writes that he came across this story when he read a letter published in the Whitby Gazette written by this very girl, only now an adult, describing her strange experience in the lighthouse.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
He adds that he looked into this further and was actually able to discover there was in previous years a one-armed man who worked at the lighthouse and sadly suffered a heart attack and died right in the middle of the long staircase.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
James J. Brown notes in his retelling that when the girl explained to her mother why she had stopped on the stairs and what she had seen, the mother realised straight away that what her daughter witnessed was not of the living, as she personally knew of the one-armed keeper, who had tragically died on those stairs some years before. Which version of this, if any, is true, we may never know.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Apparently, some of the island's disembodied residents can't get enough of the smell, and they will pay particular attention to anyone wearing it. And the stronger, the better.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
But stories like this, more often than not, grow from a grain of truth. So if you're ever passing by Whitby's West Pier, when the skies are heavy with storm, keep an eye out for a dark huddled figure hurrying towards the lighthouse at the end of the pier, and maybe glance up at the white lantern room in case any shadowy figures are moving around up there.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
But now we must leave the promenade and follow Mina past the bandstand and the fish market towards the Red Swing Bridge.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
I think with the number of listeners we have, that might be a slightly unreasonable ask, but you would all be welcome if we got it.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Turning onto the market square today from Sandgate, the area bustles with shoppers, tramping over smooth, well-worn cobblestones that look like they have a few hundred years' worth of stories to tell. Customers of a nearby cafe are seated around an area paved with wide, heavy flagstones, enjoying their drinks in the shadow of the 18th century town hall.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
At the centre of the square, a rectangular building perches atop four sturdy masonry corner blocks and a series of more delicate stone columns, leaving the undercroft open on all sides to create a covered area for market traders. Or, as today, a gaggle of high-vis jacketed schoolchildren eating their sandwiches.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Above the undercroft, a pretty Venetian window is set into the warm yellow stone under a gable roof, and atop the roof sits a white clock turret, capped with a gilded dome and weathervane. It all looks very quaint in the daylight,
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
But I wonder what kind of atmosphere this place would have after dark, when footsteps would echo loudly on the cobblestones, and the town hall, crouched over its leg-like columns, would cast a heavy shadow across the square. I feel like it would be very easy to see dark figures flit between those columns from the corner of your eye.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
But in fact, the ghostly encounter one man had here in the 1950s was rather more tangible. The local gentleman involved was at that time employed in a job whose title is likely to elicit stifled giggles these days, namely that of knocker-upper. And no, it's probably not what you think.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
He was employed by the railway company, and his job was to walk the streets of Whitby with a long pole, tapping on the upstairs bedroom windows of employees to wake them up in time for work. A job that necessitated being out and about before everyone else, when the streets were still dark, empty and quiet.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
One morning he was going about his task, turning from the market square onto Church Street, when he noticed a man wearing a billowing black cape who seemed to be speeding towards him.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Before the railway employee even had time to think, the unexplained figure was nearly upon him in a swirl of black cloak, and the unfortunate local was knocked right off his feet by what felt like a tremendous blast of air.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The impact, if that is indeed what it was, didn't alter the caped stranger's trajectory one jot, and the figure swept on towards Sandgate, where, to the witness's shock, he vanished into thin air.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
And this isn't the only resident ghost of the area either, as one local ghost tour guide was to discover, to his surprise, when he was unexpectedly given a brand new ghost story to add to his collection by several patrons of his tour.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
James J. Brown describes in his book The Original Ghost Walk of Whitby how he used to end his tours of an evening outside a blind alley known as Sounder's Yard, which was just off the market square, and a few paces from an 18th century pub called the Black Horse Inn.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
At the end of one tour, one of his patrons approached and told him that the group had been followed for the whole tour by the spirit of a man wearing a flat cap. and he informed the guide there could be found a picture of this man in the Black Horse pub.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
And this person is wearing like a red top. There's not even a smear. It's like two distinct things.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The tour guide had heard this kind of thing before, and whilst he didn't discount it, he didn't think much more of it, until something even stranger happened at the end of a ghost walk with a different group some months later.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
On this occasion the tour guide was finishing up the walk in front of Sander's yard as usual and was rather taken aback by the unexpectedly enthusiastic round of applause that he received. Unsure what had been deserving of such a lively response his bafflement was soon answered when a patron approached him and asked How did you do that? Do what? replied the confused guide.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The patron explained that the group had seen an old man wearing a flat cap walk out of the shadows at the end of the tour and stand behind the guide as though listening to his speech. Then, just as the guide was wrapping up, the figure vanished into thin air before everyone's eyes.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The delighted crowd had just assumed it was a theatrical effect, added to give the tour a spooky flourish, and erupted into appreciative applause. but of course the guide had seen nothing of what they had witnessed and had no idea what they were talking about. Except that whatever had occurred, he had had nothing to do with it.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
If that hadn't rattled and befuddled the tour guide quite enough for one night, the patron, having congratulated him on achieving the best special effect he'd ever seen, had one more bomb to drop when he asked, ''Did you put a picture of that man in the cap behind the bar of the Black Horse pub on purpose?''
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The guide can only gape and wonder over the irony that his ghost tour may have been attended by an actual ghost, and he missed it completely.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
And you can see why they've called it the White Ladies.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Shortly before ten o'clock, the stillness of the air grew quite oppressive, and the silence was so marked that the bleating of a sheep inland or the barking of a dog in the town was distinctly heard. and the band on the pier, with its lively French air, was like a discord in the great harmony of nature's silence.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
A little after midnight came a strange sound from over the sea, and high overhead the air began to carry a strange, faint, hollow booming.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
This scene has become so famous not only because it is a superb example of gothic horror writing but also because of the tantalising fact that much of it is true. In 1885 there really was a great storm that lashed Whitby's shores and there really was a schooner that miraculously made the safety of the harbour during the tempest only to wreck on Collier's hope.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Well, it's time now for our first listener story, and this one is from Kat.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Stoker even bases the cargo of his Demeter on that of the real-life Dimitri, which was carrying a ballast of silver sand. Although Bram added to this a number of wooden boxes of earth, or mould, as it is sometimes described, from the Count's homeland.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The real Dimitri was from Narva which is in modern day Estonia but back in the 19th century the ship really was referred to as a Russian schooner or brigantine and although it was not in fact steered by the hand of a dead man its dramatic entry into port and subsequent wreck was still shocking to local onlookers and would have been the talk of the town for a long time.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
In fact, it was still fresh in the memories of locals when Bram Stoker was doing his explorations and research, and he was told all about the event during his conversations with Whitby residents. And with overtones of foreboding baked into the real-life event, it's small wonder it ended up finding a place on the pages of Stoker's novel.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
We found these accounts of the real event on Heritage Gateway's Historic England research records. Severe Gale, Whitby A storm of great violence visited the north-east coast on Saturday, accompanied by torrents of rain. About an hour after the stranding of the Mary and Agnes, another vessel was sighted a few miles out, flying signals of distress.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The gale was then at its height, and the sea even more dangerous than before. Another lifeboat, the Harriet Portith, was got out. A little excitement prevailed among the thousands of people on shore, for it seemed certain that if the vessel was cast upon the rocks, she would be immediately dashed to pieces and the crew drowned.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The craft, however, steered straight for the port, and by good seamanship got into the harbour safely. Two pilots were in waiting, and at once gave instruction to those on board, but meanwhile the captain, not realising the necessity of keeping on her steerage, allowed her to fall off and lowered sail, thus causing the vessel to swing towards the sand on the east side of the harbour.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
On seeing this danger the anchor was dropped, but they found no hold and she drifted into Collier's hope and struck the ground. She was purported to be the schooner Dmitri of Narva, Russia, Captain Siki with a crew of seven hands, ballasted with silver sand.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
During the night of Saturday the men worked incessantly upon her that her masts went by the board, and on Sunday morning she lay high and dry, a broken and complete wreck, firmly embedded in the sand.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Throughout Dracula, the Count assumes many forms, including those of a bat, of mist, and, as we see here, of a large black dog. Some of these forms are based on vampire folklore and legend, but the dog harkens back to a legend that's deeply entrenched, not just throughout Yorkshire, but across many areas of England. From county to county, details change, the law, the description and the name.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
In other towns, we may call it Old Padfoot, Guy Trash or Shuck, but here in Whitby, it's called the Barguest. In times past, just the mention of this harbinger of doom would be enough to send a shudder down people's spines. For sighting one of these huge black beasts with their infernal flaming red eyes was almost always a portent of ill fortune.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
In the shipping and fishing town of Whitby, the apparition was said to appear pacing up and down the shore during stormy weather, and was seen as an omen of doom for anyone taking to the sea that day, a sure sign to keep vessels safely in harbour and feet firmly on dry land. Interestingly, Stoker flipped this legend around to fit his story,
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
In local lore, the Barghest portended a great storm, but in his novel, the storm was the omen preceding the calamitous arrival of the beast. You could say that Stoker's novel helped to immortalise the legend of the Barghest. But then, to be honest, it was doing pretty well on its own anyway.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Sightings of the creature are said to date back at least as far as Saxon England, with a mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and still persist to this day. In fact, a particularly curious encounter with the brute is documented just a few miles up the coast from Whitby at Kettle Ness Point. a landmark mentioned by Mina Murray in her diary entries in Dracula.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
It took place in the 1950s and was documented in a book called To Anger the Devil, a biography of Reverend Dr Donald Armand, a clergyman of the Church of England and an exorcist. The riverend had apparently received a letter from a schoolmaster who had been out with two friends at the desolate windswept point of Kettle Nest Nab where the rocky promontory juts out into the sea.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
In his letter the schoolmaster wrote that he and his friends were shocked and horrified to witness a huge hound appear out of thin air on the misty shore. Describing the beast as bigger than any mortal dog, they stood frozen in terror as it silently began to move towards them, and then suddenly and inexplicably vanished.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The group discussed feeling an overwhelming sense of evil, leading to the schoolmaster contacting the reverend to ask if he would visit the area and consider performing an exorcism. Reverend Omand was apparently only too happy to oblige. He had actually visited Kettle Nest before as a youth, and on that visit had felt what he thought of as an ominous atmosphere.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
He felt vindicated in this when he later heard reports of the bar guest being seen in the area and even more so when he read Bram Stoker's Dracula and realised the Count's form as a black dog was inspired by the Yorkshire Coast's bar guest. In fact, he even became convinced that Stoker must have visited Thethilness and witnessed the apparition for himself.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Amand obligingly headed out to Kettle Nest by train, and after meeting up with the schoolmaster, the pair headed out to the rocky nab, arriving just as night was falling. The shore rapidly becoming cloaked in darkness, the scene well and truly set for a frightening encounter with the legendary creature. Both men were alert and expectant. Oman choked.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
All we need now is for Dracula to come bounding ashore in the form of a great black dog. He probably intended to break the building tension with some humour, but instead his words seemed to have the effect of summoning the beast itself, and as Oman felt the schoolmaster grip his arm in sudden fear, he looked up to see a huge black hound heading straight towards them.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The reverend described it as being bigger than any of the canine species known to man, fitting with so many accounts of Shuck and the Barghest that often compare the size of the creature to that of a calf or even a small horse. The schoolmaster, understandably, lost his nerve and rushed back to the car. But Oman stood his ground, uncorked his bottle of holy water and proceeded with his exorcism.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
recounting that as he spoke the last words of the rites the apparition disappeared and the heaviness went out of the atmosphere he declared that the menace of kettleness was ended but unfortunately the schoolmaster never recovered from the shock and went on to suffer a breakdown Of course, this makes a great story, especially for a self-proclaimed exorcist recounting his life's work.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
But is there any truth to it? And did the Reverend really end the terror of the Kettle Ness Shore? Well, we should probably bear in mind that this account comes from a man who also claims to have exorcised Loch Ness and the Bermuda Triangle. But that doesn't discount the Barghest legend itself. And when we look into it a bit further, it gets very strange and maybe a little sad.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Coming up, we have a haunted island on the paranormal radar. We have listener stories from Kat, Rob and Katie. And we proudly bring you the second episode of our Whitby adventures in which we discover ghosts, legends and history galore as we return to the cliffs of Whitby on the trail of Dracula. And if you want to skip ahead to any of these segments, there will be timestamps in the show notes.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
It's time to leave Tate Hill Sands behind us now and follow the route taken by both the Black Dog of the Dimitri and Mina to our next location, the churchyard at the top of the cliff. And to do so, we need to ascend the famous 199 steps. an absolutely iconic landmark, no one is exactly sure just how old the 199 steps are.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The first written mention of them dates back to 1370, but they are very likely older, leading as they do up to the Church of St Mary's, which was built in the 12th century, and of course Whitby Abbey, founded in the 7th century.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The original steps were made of wood and were described as being brightly painted but these are long gone now having been replaced with stone in 1774 and it's this stone staircase that Mina would have encountered on the last stage of her frantic dash to Lucy's side.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The staircase is wide, wide enough for four or five people abreast, and 19th century writers indicate that even in Bram Stoker's time, this width was necessary to accommodate a high volume of foot traffic. In 1835, Sir George Head described this common scene on the church steps.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
these steps may be seen every sunday covered from top to bottom with old and young parents at the decline of life children at its commencement both together surmounting the arduous ascent and wending their way up to the sacred edifice For many years St Mary's, the Norman church at the top of the cliff, was the only parish church for several miles, serving many of the surrounding villages.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
And even as the years went on and chapels started springing up around the area to fulfil the needs of a growing population, the parishioners still generally owed allegiance to the Mother Church of St Mary's and would therefore have to travel the distance to Whitby and traverse the 199 steps to be baptised, married or indeed buried.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
We stand at the bottom of the staircase, the steps worn smooth from hundreds of years of use, wide, shallow grooves carved into the stone at the far edges by a million feet that chose the path nearest the thin iron handrail. On the right-hand side, as we stand at the bottom of the steps looking up, a broad, cobbled ramp follows the staircase's ascent, and this is known as the donkey track,
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
and is a route well used by our hooved friends throughout the years, many of them in more recent decades on their way to give donkey rides on the beach to holidaying children. Buildings and houses run all the way up to, and seemingly into, the side of the steps and donkey track.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
the cobbled ramp wrapping around the corner of a three-storey whitewashed building bearing the sign Abbey Steps Tea Rooms, whose lower windows are almost swallowed up in a turn of the track.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Further up the donkey track is a cottage whose front door opens directly onto the steep cobbled slope, which I can only imagine must be quite a challenge in ice and snow and definitely a house for a hardy soul. As we begin to climb above the town we can see over the left-hand railing the steps down to Tate Hill Sands from whence we just came.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Beyond the pier running along a shelf at the base of the cliff above Collier's Hope lies Henrietta Street where a famous kipper smokehouse called Fortune's Kippers has been in business since 1872. and whose somewhat overpowering smell has been hailed as part of the Whitby experience for decades. Henrietta Street stretches along the base of the cliff for a while until it peters out suddenly.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
A ramp branches off from here, forking to either the base of East Pier or a drop-off straight into the sea. whilst a grassy ledge known by the Old Norse name of the Haggleith, meaning sloping area of land on the cliff, continues the trajectory of Henrietta Street for a little way further along the cliff shelf.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
This area was once much larger and filled with houses and businesses, but several serious landslips, including one in 1787 and one in 1871, sent several buildings crashing down the cliff. The once respectable area was eventually abandoned due to this danger and became the haunt of the poorest of society and the town's ne'er-do-wells.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
There was also danger from above for dwellers of the Haggleith, the area sitting as it does directly beneath the graveyard of St Mary's Church, where coastal erosion nibbles away at the cliff, and severe weather such as ice or heavy rain occasionally opens up the ground to send the bones of buried parishioners hurtling down onto the buildings below.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
This still happens today, with one of the most recent occurrences in January of 2013. Although the rector at the time reassured everyone that the bones would of course be collected and respectfully reinterred, and noted that, as the graveyard has been closed for burials since the mid-19th century, no one need be concerned about anything too, um, fresh tumbling down the cliff.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
And thank you to Kat for sharing that story. And I must say Kat, as you described in that sort of second to last paragraph about the splodgy black figure that kind of grew taller until it turned into a looming black figure. I've seen something extremely similar to that. In my mind, I was imagining what I saw as you described it.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
According to the old fishermen of the village, St Mary's Graveyard was not a good place to be on the night following the funeral of a man of the sea.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
But if you were to venture out on such a night, you might just hear the sound of horses' hooves clattering across the abbey plain, the sound growing closer and louder until you can hear the creak of wheels and jangle of harnesses as a carriage bears directly towards the church, no obstacles seeming to halt its progress.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
From out of the blackness, six horses emerge, all of them a coal black that seems darker than the night itself, and behind them, cloaked in a velvet pall, a driver steers them towards a freshly filled grave. In their wake, a line of skeletal figures forms a train of mourners, and reaching their intended target, the ghastly spectacle starts to circle the grave.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Once, twice, they make their ghoulish dance, growing faster and more frantic with each pass, until, on the third circuit, the soul of the deceased sailor rises up from his grave and steps on to the phantom carriage. Their task complete, the horses thunder off, the carriage clattering down the 199 steps and all along the haggleith.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
then plunging straight into the waves of the North Sea, the ocean depths reclaiming the soul who had spent his life's work sailing upon it. In some versions of this story, the carriage contains a skeletal crew. In others, there's no driver at all. In still others, the horses are headless, lending an even spookier twist to the tale.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
But many think that there may be a more practical reason behind this particular legend, and that is smugglers. It wouldn't be a seaside town, after all, without a history of smuggling, and Whitby was certainly no exception.
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
basically i was sat at the bottom of the stairs and those of you that follow the show will know a little bit about the radio experiment so normally we'll be blindfolded and we're listening to a radio tuned between stations so kind of like a sort of spirit box estes method but not switching between stations just tuned to white noise effectively
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Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Many people think that the legend of the Bargeist coach was invented by smugglers who thought the tale was a fantastic way to keep people away from their illicit activities, because the coffin of a sailor fresh off a boat would make a very handy place to stash illegal wares that could be dug up later away from the beady eyes of the authorities.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
In fact, some even say that certain bands of smugglers went as far as to enact the Bargeist coach haunting, donning fearsome and grisly costumes and even painting their horses to sell the legend and maintain their cover. But did they invent the story entirely? Or did they employ an existing legend to suit their nefarious purposes?
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
We may never know, but I certainly wouldn't want to be in St Mary's graveyard in the dark of night and hear the jangle of harnesses and the clatter of hooves heading towards me.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
But this time we thought we would try doing it whilst looking into a black mirror.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Mina describes in her journal that the seat they so often frequented was set upon a gravestone laid flat like a slab, which bore the words, The fact that they were sitting on a grave didn't seem to perturb them in the slightest, however.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
I think Victorian ladies must have been made of sterner stuff than they're typically given credit for because they weren't put off their favourite spot, even after Mina witnessed something looming malevolently over Lucy on the seat during her sleepwalking adventure.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Well, I think it kind of went well. Quite a lot of things happened. I was getting a lot of responses. And that was one of the things I saw in the mirror. I could kind of see the stairwell reflected behind me. But bear in mind, it was very dark. Um, but I could see the top of the stairs and it just looked like something just kind of appeared out of the floor.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
I could understand this, perhaps, but when their friend Old Mr. Swales was found sprawled across the very same seat with a broken neck, I think that might have been the point where I gave up on the favoured spot, no matter how spectacular the view was. But did that dissuade Mina and Lucy? No.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
The very same day that Mr. Swales was found dead upon it, as Mina writes, with a look of fear and horror on his face that the men said made them shudder, they were back at the seat, standing on it to get a better view of the funeral proceedings of the Dead Sea Captain of the Demeter. If Bram Stoker is to be believed, those Victorians certainly seem to take death in their stride.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
No wonder the era is so inextricably linked with Gothic horror. These days it seems impossible to tell which seat might have been Mina and Lucy's favourite spot. The clifftop is set with several benches just on the edge of the graveyard overlooking the harbour and town.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
And on the day we visit, we sadly can't visit them all to take a proper look, or see if any of them are set on flattened gravestones, because most of them are roped off. A safety precaution due to recent bad weather making the edge of the cliff a risky place to be.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
And for this same reason, I'm not sure we can know if the seat Bram Stoker had in mind when he wrote Dracula even still exists, or whether it's fallen victim to the crumbling cliff edge over the years. And what of all the ghosts and legends we've encountered today throughout Whitby's maze of ancient streets? Do they still exist, or have they too fallen victim to the ravages of time?
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
stoker's character the old salt mr swales thinks they belong to an earlier time stating when mina quizzes him about the ghost of whitby abbey them things be all wore out mind i don't say that there never was but i do say there wasn't in my time
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Well, I think Mr. Swales would have a hard time convincing ghost tour guide James J. Brown that Whitby's ghosts are all wore out, as he would one visitor to St. Mary's Churchyard who had a very odd experience in 1995.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Like there was, um, almost like there was a lift or like those stage lifts where somebody can appear on a stage in the theater from out of the floor. It just kind of slowly grew until it looked like a figure that must've been a good seven feet tall.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
And that brings us to the end of this episode of Knock Once VS. Thank you to everybody that shared their stories. And don't forget, if you have a story, please do get in touch through our website, knockoncevs.com. As always, thank you so much to our patrons and coffee supporters. Your support is the only thing that allows us to keep producing this show.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
And if you have a podcast and would like your editing done, don't forget that I do run an audio post-production company. So please do get in touch at narrativeaudio.com. We hope that you've enjoyed this episode and that you'll join us again next time for some more spooky stories and haunted history on another Knock Once for Yes.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
in a black cloak that or it was just a very indistinct outline but yeah basically as cat described just like this tall hooded type of thing no features no hands no feet just this kind of robe yeah that's how you described it to me yeah and i was a little bit uncomfortable when i saw it a little bit you were freaking out
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
But before we get stuck into all of that, we would like to say a huge thank you to our latest patron, Connie Martin.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
Yeah, I mean, you still have to be fairly close to it for it to give you a reading. Otherwise, I think the only other places were around electrical sockets. Where you'd expect. Things like that. Where you'd normally expect to have some kind of electromagnetic radiation from large power sources.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
It does seem that a lot of the things we experience in the house are centred around that area. Definitely. Not all of them, but quite a lot of it is. And again, you might say, is that affecting us and causing us to experience things? But Not to say that this rules it out. No. But the thing that makes me think that that's possibly not the case is we tend to be somewhere else.
Knock Once For Yes
Whitby: On the trail of Dracula
And looking at that area when we experience things.