This episode we have our traditional ‘find the company with the most tenuous spooky season tie in’ competition. We have listeners stories from Tracey, Kate and Kat and we head back to Whitby for the final time…possibly…to share stories of smugglers, occult artifacts and a swashbuckling ghost. Episode Shownotes Intro - 00:00:00 Paranormal Radar - 00:02:25 Tracey's Story - 00:22:00 Kat's Story - 00:33:48 Kate's Story - 00:37:29 The Gory Hand of Glory & The Swashbuckling Ghost - 00:46:31
Is there anybody here?
Can you hear me?
If you can hear me, knock once for yes.
I am Lil.
And I'm Fitz.
And you're listening to Knock Once For Yes. Halloween has just rolled around again. And if you've been with us for a while, you know what that means. Hello, birthday ween. Yes, our podcast birthday is upon us again. And this means we've been on the air for eight years.
eight and with that in mind right here at the top of the show we want to say thank you thank you to everyone who's listened to our creation thank you to everyone who's entrusted us with sharing your paranormal stories thank you to everyone who's left a review a like a subscribe and to those of you who got in touch to tell us that our little show has been in some way meaningful to you you don't know how many times those letters have inspired me to get out of bed and fight another day
And a huge, huge thank you to all of our Patreon and Ko-fi supporters, the wonderful souls who fund this show and make it possible. The travel, the tickets, the petrol, the research materials, the equipment, the hosting fees, all the many and varied costs of making these episodes in the admittedly rather in-depth and slightly awkward way that we go about making them.
The fact that we're heading towards a decade on the air is down to every single one of you. And we couldn't be more grateful, not to mention proud of the wonderful, caring community that you have all built around this little podcast. Tonight, we raise a glass to all of you folks out there, our supporters, and bid you a very happy Hello Birthdayween.
And we have some epic tales in store for you tonight to celebrate. So, Fitz, what have we got coming up on today's episode?
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.
It just wouldn't be Hallow Birthday, William, without our tenuous Halloween news story competition. But I'm afraid I didn't do very well on this occasion. I found a total of one story, whereas Fitz, I believe you found quite a few.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry. Any Hellier fans will get that one.
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.
Halloween rage.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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?
Well, the month of October, I think, but goodness knows why.
I have never encountered Halloween rage before.
No, that's not something I've come across before either. It does seem like they're lashing out at something that they haven't quite said. But now I really want to watch this programme. What was it again?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Well, to be honest, that's a bit of a relief after the vitriol of the first story.
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.
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.
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.
Call me cynical, but I can't help wondering if any of that survey was at all weighted in favour of normalising the idea that it's OK and perfectly reasonable to spend £100 on Halloween instead of £20 by certain retailers, maybe?
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Yeah, like, is there some kind of cut-off after 1918 that ghosts no longer appear that I'm not aware of?
Well, these estate agents, they clearly know more than us paranormal people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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?
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.
That's a movie I'd quite like to see. Can somebody write that, please? Any film writers out there that want to take that project on?
That does seem like it could be a really good Simon Pegg film.
Oh, yes.
We should pitch it.
Yes.
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.
A couple of years ago, I had my one and only paranormal experience to that point, except it wasn't. I had started watching Doctor Who again from the beginning and remembered how much I loved the first season's theme music. So I loaded it as my ringtone because I'm a huge giant nerd. One night I was working on something on my laptop in my bedroom.
After a while I needed to go into the next room for something and brought my phone along. And a few minutes later, I heard my ringtone. Odd, I thought. It's late. Who could be calling? I looked, and there was no except decline screen. No caller identified. No call. It was, as I said, late, so I was muzzly staring at my phone, trying to work it out, when the music stopped.
And suddenly, from my bedroom, I heard a weird, loud, really awful scraping, thumping sound. I froze. That went on for a couple of seconds. And just as I was starting to stop being paralysed and start on being truly scared, I heard a voice. A sort of female, but mostly demonic sort of voice say, Why do you come here now? If possible, I froze even frozener. I had no idea what to do. Do I answer?
What could I possibly say? I'd been in this apartment for a couple of years. I didn't just get here. Nothing's ever happened. Do I run? Where do I go? What on earth? And then I heard the Doctor reply, Who are you? We come in peace.
And I realised that I must have accidentally reopened the BritBox tab on my laptop, and my not-speedy internet on my ten-year-old laptop must have just finished loading Episode 18 of Doctor Who Season 2, Escape to Danger. And that's when I truly knew that I am not cut out for paranormal experiences.
And here we have the sequel to the open reach story about what happens if they don't get your broadband installed in time.
You actually couldn't have set that up if you tried. And that is the horror of living with 60 megabytes per second.
Indeed. The terror. But now for Tracy's actual paranormal experience, which he also shared with us.
My mum was one of 11 children who grew up on a farm in Newfoundland, Canada. I believe they had about 400 acres and running down one side of the property is a river and in the river are three small islands. I'll come back to them. When mum was in her early 20s, she and a couple of my aunts and a friend all moved to the US and that included the youngest in the family, my aunt Rita.
One day, when a bunch of them went to see a fortune teller, as Mum called her, the woman wouldn't let Aunt Rita in the room. She had too strong an aura, she said. I imagine that would have interfered with the readings. For a good chunk of her life, my aunt had vivid dreams, which came true. She had a dream predicting a car crash that she and my mother's twin had.
I think she also had a dream about their car being stolen. They were never clear enough to warn or prevent anything from happening but once the thing had happened it became very clear that they had been premonitions and they were never good things. One dream was of being at a friend's house to borrow black gloves.
This was in the 60s or 70s when you still wore gloves to church and you still wore all black to a funeral. And a couple of days later, one of my uncles passed away. The wildest story, though, was about the letter from my grandmother.
This was, again, in the 60s when long-distance calls were wildly expensive and people still wrote letters, telling them that cousins of hers had been out fishing on that river by the farm when a storm blew up and one of them was washed overboard and they couldn't find him. That night, Aunt Rita dreamed that the cousin's body had been washed up on one of the islands and
She wrote back to my grandmother to tell her exactly where, and her letter crossed with my grandmother's, which said that they had found the cousin, exactly where Aunt Rita dreamed.
So thank you, Tracy, for sharing that story. That was a really good story.
It was. But also, I have to say, before we do anything else, nerd unite, Tracy. Nerd unite. Thank you for the paranormal blooper. And wear that nerdery with pride. Anyway, sorry, Fitz.
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.
yeah and i completely get the symbolism that's coming through in these dreams more so now i know we've talked about this on the show before when we've done um premonitions themed episodes and this episode is dream themed isn't it like all the stories today are kind of around the theme of dreams which is very clever yes they are all on a dream theme dream theme but i know in the past when we've talked about premonitions i've been i've said things like you know well
what's the point because you can't change anything but i kind of understand more now about this the kind of vague symbolism that comes through like she was saying about the black gloves in hindsight it makes perfect sense but to just have the symbol the symbolism of black gloves in a dream like you wouldn't make the connection to a funeral but some of the paranormal experiments and um
adventures we've been going on recently that hopefully we'll talk about in upcoming episodes has led me to understand the kind of scraps of symbolism that you get through those kind of things more and how you don't make the connections until later but yeah and there was also a little positive thing that i wanted to mention as well like you say that that all the things were always negative
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.
I see what you mean. So, yeah, I mean, the number of times I've woken up from a dream and I thought, oh, wow, that was incredible. Like, you know, I need to tell Fitz about that. And then by the time you've had your coffee, it's gone. All of it's gone.
But unfortunately, the way our brains are wired, and this isn't just in dreams, this is in waking life as well as a kind of evolutionary thing, is we're primed to remember messages that are of danger or warnings or things that are going to keep us alive. We're primed to remember those above everything else.
Yeah.
So you're right, there may have been other elements to that dream. And they're unfortunately just the ones that kind of fall away as dreams do. And just the overarching messages, like the warning messages remained.
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.
me too and that does actually bring us on to another bit of the email that tracy sent us which i'll read with her permission because it was meaningful to us as well she says for years i planned to sit down with my mother and get recordings of her telling some of her stories but with one thing and another i just never did i lost her last april so now i never will i know there were so many more stories and i just don't remember the details and there's no one left to ask
So if you're listening and have planned to record talks with parents or grandparents or anyone, or even just ask questions you've always wanted the answers to, go do it. And I just wanted to read that because it's something that we've experienced ourselves. And I'm not just talking about paranormal stories.
Any stories, family stories, like she says, are answers to questions that you've always wanted to know about the family, about your history, about places that are, you know, those kind of vague, hazy memories from childhood that aren't quite fully formed yet.
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...
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.
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
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
Yeah, I know we always say in the show that your stories are the lifeblood of the show and how passionate we are about sharing people's stories and giving them the time and air and respect they deserve. But it's not just ghost stories. We really are just passionate about sharing people's stories in general, saving people's stories, recording them, retelling them.
I think in the past we would have been druidic bards. LAUGHTER I feel it's really important that it goes for ghost stories, folklore, family stories. It's so important to our culture that these don't live in a silo and that they do get to go on through the generations. But anyway, that's my little soapbox moment of passion over. Let's move on.
And thank you so much again to Tracy for sharing all of those stories with us and for the paranormal blooper, Nerds Unite. And it's time for another story now. And this one is from Kat.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
Thank you so much to Kat for sharing that story with us. And it's absolutely lovely story, that one.
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.
Yeah, and I definitely think that's quite an important message, especially around Halloween when, you know, not just content creators, but retailers and events organised, they're all trying to ramp up the fear factor and turning Halloween into this terrifying thing. But I think there's definitely space to be held for these kind of stories, these comforting stories.
Paranormal can just be meaningful. It doesn't have to be scary, right?
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
Well, before we move on to this episode's paranormal postcard, we have one more listener story for you. And this is a hello birthday ween treat for us because Kate has done a fantastic job of recording it herself, which means we get to sit back and listen. Take it away, Kate.
Hi, guys. I hope this finds you well in the spooky season that we are now in. I love it. I've experienced many things like yourselves, but this one I wanted to share with you. This happened in New Zealand when I lived in New Zealand a good 15 years ago now. So I hadn't been there very long and I moved into a villa with some friends.
In fact, I think it was literally the first few weeks I was there. And we had a normal evening at home after work and dinner and I went to bed. And then I woke up in the night. Well, I thought I woke up, but I was actually in a dream. But it was really real. I can't really explain how it worked. So basically I was asleep. And then...
I heard this voice saying, it's Sally, it's Sally, my name's Sally, it's Sally here, it's Sally, my name's Sally, over and over and over again. And in this dreamlike state, there was a woman towards my left periphery and she was going really small into the background, if you think like behind my head, and then she was coming in really strong and really fast.
physically near my face on the left side by my by my head and then she kept going away and as she was going sort of back and forth in my mind it was a bit like stranger things when they're that big bubble there was nothing else around and as she was moving backwards and then forwards close to me she was like in tandem with her it's sally it's sally it's me is it it's sally i'm here it's sally my name's sally
And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I was thinking, I don't know anyone called Sally. We've got no Sally in our family. I don't have a friend who's called Sally. And I didn't recognise this woman, and I could clearly see what she looked like. So sort of laying there in this sort of dream-like... I mean, I was asleep, but I felt I was awake because it was so real and so specific with the name.
And then all of a sudden... there was a scene and it felt like I was looking in on the scene of my friend Bill and children playing in the forest. Now, I know it wasn't just any forest because it's the exact place where I was looking in on him playing with children is a place in the forest where we live, which is Epping Forest in Essex. And I recognised the exact same spot.
So I was like, oh, that's a local, you know, area where, you know, I played as a child and, you know, I take my child there. So I was watching this scene of my friend Belle playing with children and that scene sort of dissipated and vanished and it was back to Sally again.
Now, I don't really, I can't remember how it ended, but I do remember that I went to sleep and I remember thinking in my head, like, I can't help you, I don't know what this means. And I woke up in the morning and And I remembered everything, and I was really eager to tell one of my housemates, Jo. So I told her everything, and then I was like, OK, I've got to contact Bill.
So I emailed Bill in the morning, and obviously because of the time difference, I didn't hear from him until the evening. I explained what had happened, and he said, my sister is called Sally. And I knew... I never met Sally. I'd never seen a photo of her either, but I knew she had passed away. And so he said... What does she look like?
And I explained, you know, from this visit, visitation dream or whatever you want to call it, what she looked like. And I said, please, can you send a photo? Bill's a really good friend of mine. And he sent me a photo. And let me tell you, when I opened up the email, I was literally aghast. I was so shocked. It was her. She had a blonde fringe and like a shoulder length, very straight cut hair.
She had really big, high cheekbones. And it was her. I said, that's the woman in the dream. That's the woman who was showing me. And then obviously I relayed the story to my friend Bill. So we came together and the conclusion that we came together with was that these children were Sally's children. And I feel that she used me...
I don't know why it was years and years later when I was living in New Zealand, but hey, these things happen like this. I feel she contacted me to show me of the picture, the vision of my friend Bill playing with her children in the forest, because Bill obviously looked after the children from time to time, obviously, because she had passed away.
And I believe that she had used me to tell me, to tell Bill that she could still, she could see them playing. She was still around. Because it was so powerful and profound and we were both so comforted by that and I felt so immensely... I'm more than happy. I was elated that I could pass this on.
You know, that Sally was able to contact me to tell her brother that she was in the forest when they were playing, that she was near and she could see them. And she was using me to give me that scene that I could pass on to Bill. I mean, it's just absolutely incredible, isn't it? So that was a very powerful and poignant experience that I had.
I hope you enjoy that because it meant so much to Bill personally.
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
Absolutely. And the chills that went up on my arms when Bill said my sister was called Sally. Just an incredible, incredible story. All the stories on today's episode have just been amazing. And this, again, is such a beautiful one.
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.
And some of them have us in tears, literally.
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.
They're some of my favorites when it's just like, yeah, there's no mistaking that. Like that is literally what I saw.
And I really enjoyed the fact that the scene they chose was the forest. The scene they chose to represent in the dream was playing in the forest. And I mean, that's just because I love the forest. I want to visit Epping Forest so badly. And I've always thought that it sounds like such a kind of magical, wonderful place.
I don't know if that's true because I've never visited, but there's certainly a lot of stories about Epping Forest. So I wonder if that was just... Probably just burned into their memory as a place of real joy, but also maybe a liminal place, maybe?
And the feeling I got was that sort of like sunlight dappled glade with that sort of twinkly light and...
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
And I bring quite a lot of the woods into our house on quite a regular basis.
Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes our house does look a little bit like a forest.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Certainly isn't.
Well, that is the end of the stories for today's episode. Some absolutely beautiful ones there. Thank you so much to everybody who shared their story with us today. They are the lifeblood of this show.
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.
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.
it's time for us to return to Whitby for the last time, for now at least, as we conclude our Whitby series by moving away from Bram Stoker's Dracula and exploring some of the other stories to be found in the town's ancient winding streets, which are simply bursting with ghosts, myths and legends.
And for our first stop, we're going to briefly revisit the other book I've referred to a few times in this series, The Whitby Witches by Robin Jarvis, and track down a famous and rather grisly artefact of folklore and legend that I had waited 20 years to see.
From the same car park up on West Cliff where we began our journey last episode, I walked away from the view over Whitby Harbour and East Cliff and headed away from Royal Crescent, down into the streets of West Cliff, along Crescent Avenue, up Gang Lane, crossing the road to St Hilda's Terrace to find a wrought iron gate set into a long stone wall over which the lush greenery of trees and bushes spilled forth.
The gate is painted blue, with gold accents picking out curlicues along the top, and a year, 1935, casts just above the latch. A blue plaque on one of the stone gate pillars reads Panet Park, home of Panet Art Gallery and Whitby Museum.
The park and gallery were the brainchild of Robert Elliot Panett, an alderman of Whitby, who wanted to create a place in the town where residents could enjoy fresh air, trees and flowers, whilst being sheltered from the often vicious sea winds that hold sway along the coast. He certainly succeeded.
The market garden land he purchased in 1902 was turned into a pretty oasis of calm, filled with a diverse array of plants, meandering footpaths and quaint archways. Just perfect for a mindful stroll, safe from the whipping coastal winds.
He also established a gallery within the park to house his art collection and, after Panett's death, a museum building was added to accommodate the collection of the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society. Ambling along through the grounds, however, it was not the most clement day for a stroll.
An icy drizzle chilled my bones and numbed my hands too much to even stop and take photographs, so I headed directly into the museum through its grand columned entrance at the top of a flight of steps and passed into the foggy warmth of the building, peeling off my sodden cagoule and imagining that I must be steaming, rather, like a hard galloped horse. I was excited for several reasons.
In all my previous trips to Whitby as a child and young adult, I had never managed to make it to this museum until now, and yet it formed such a vivid part of the story in Robin Jarvis's book, The Whitby Witches, that the desire to see it for myself had been bubbling away ferociously ever since. But also, I just love visiting museums, and I had high hopes for this one.
I don't know about you, but in recent years I've found some of the more modern museums a little... underwhelming in their ambience, to say the least. In fact, I visited a local one recently that I would be so bold as to describe as the pinnacle of soulless disappointment. A sterile, white, open space with fluorescent-lit interpretation boards squarely planted evenly along the walls.
One case containing a scant handful of number-labelled artefacts laying lifelessly on a flat grey cloth. Maybe I'm old-fashioned. Maybe I'm just idealistic. Maybe I like a bit more artistic chaos. But that isn't my idea of a museum. I want a museum to look like an explosion has occurred in the study of a slightly mad 18th century antiquarian.
And I'm in luck, because that's just about what Panic Park Museum delivers. In The Whitby Witches, the author describes the museum as jam-packed with curios and wonders. It was like some magnificent jumble sale of the imagination. And that description is spot on.
The lighting is soft, the dark wood of the cabinets in the parquet florm lends the whole building a warm, cosy glow, and the crowd of cases jammed tightly into every nook and cranny creates a maze of exhibits that one could happily get lost in for hours. Of course, there are fossils. So many fossils.
A whole corner of the museum is dedicated to fossils and geology, with case after case of Whitby's famous Jurassic ammonites, giant ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, frozen in stone, forever swimming motionlessly across the museum walls. There are cases full of exquisite, intricately carved black jet jewellery, Weird and wonderful implements and instruments whose purpose I would not like to guess.
A madcap selection of souvenirs collected by bygone explorers visiting exotic lands. The walls bristling with long hunting spears, machetes, sabres and bugles. To my delight, one cabinet containing an antique chest of drawers stuffed with small objects is simply labelled Cabinet of Miscellaneous Curiosities.
A model ship sits atop the chest, and on its edge purchase a frilly bonneted porcelain doll. I tried hard not to catch its creepily vacant stare as I passed by it, half expecting it to blink and swivel its head to look at me through those glazed blue eyes.
It would be remiss of me not to mention another miscellaneous curiosity that made it from the museum's collection right into the pages of Robin Jarvis's book, the most wonderfully named Dr Meriwether's Tempest Prognosticator.
Looking somewhere between a maypole, an Indian temple and a macabre Victorian merry-go-round, the prognosticator consists of a carousel of leeches in glass jars, with stoppers attached by long strings to an unnecessarily ornate and gilded circular frame topped with an orb, spire and bell.
The idea was that when a storm was on its way, the leeches would wriggle their way up to the top of the jars and dislodge the stoppers, which, attached by their long strings, would ring a bell and warn of the coming tempest. Apparently, it actually worked, and Dr Meriwether was sure that his invention would be employed by ships all over the world.
But sadly, the prognosticator just did not catch on. can't imagine why but of course i was itching to get to the main event and apparently so were many other visitors seeking gory treasure amongst the maze of display cases for it was the only object with its own signage a trail of posters leading the way to the museum's unlikely prize exhibit printed fingers pointing this way to the hand of glory
a name of much fanfare which rather belies the macabre reality. You might expect the famous object to have some kind of pride of place in the museum, but actually one of the museum's charms is that no one object can claim this accolade, all curios being equal in their cluttered distribution around the premises.
I was grateful for the signage, otherwise I think I could have circled around for ages just trying to find it, unassuming as it is. Just a small glass panelled box atop yet another antique cabinet, with a board behind it displaying a few information leaflets and postcards.
At first glance, the object in the box could be mistaken for an appendage chipped off a stone statue and then dipped in mud that had dried to a dusty-looking brown crust. But look closer and it becomes clear that the hand has wrinkles around the knuckles. Tattered bits of skin fraying around pale smooth fingernails and nubby bones protruding from the wrist.
This is a real disembodied hand with quite a legend attached to it. Having known what to expect, I didn't find myself too squeamish at first, taking in the leathery flesh sunken around the finger bones. But despite my preparation, I found my stomach giving a little lurch when I spotted the addition the museum have made to help visitors fully experience the artefact.
The hand is displayed on a circular glass or plastic stand, rather like a cake stand, and underneath there is a circular mirror reflecting the underside of the object, revealing grisly ribbons of shriveled muscle and tendon strung from wrist to palm to fingertips. What on earth could be the reason for the infamy of this gory object? Did it belong to someone famous? Someone revered, perhaps? Nope.
Very much the opposite. By its very nature, this hand likely belonged to a nameless criminal. And, in fact, it was criminals who made this object their tool of choice. as the protagonists Ben and Janet find out in The Whitby Witches from their indomitable carer, as the 92-year-old Aunt Alice tells them the tale behind the Hand of Glory.
It was believed in those times that this charm, if used properly, could put to sleep an entire household, so that a thief could ransack the place without anyone stirring. which gives us a clue as to the nefarious deeds afoot when later on in Robin Jarvis's story, the hand mysteriously goes missing from the museum.
In real life, however, the hand is still safely ensconced in its little glass box, but Aunt Alice's telling of the legend is true enough.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At first glance, it's the items on top of the cabinet that catch the eye when walking past the display, especially that porcelain doll. Legs crossed jauntily, and hands resting lightly in her lap, as though she might at any moment hop down from her perch and skitter off across the floor in a swish of skirts and tippy-tap of tiny feet. D'oh!
But the main event of this display is what's inside the cabinet. A mahogany chest of dark, polished wood, intricately decorated with carvings and housing a set of wide, vertically stacked drawers. Some of the drawers are pulled open to varying degrees, showing inside a diverse collection of fascinating little objects.
Rocks, fossils, coins, jewellery, plaster casts, bits of plants, a pair of pince-nez glasses. I can only imagine what's inside the closed drawers.
The whole eccentric collection once belonged to a Dr Richard Ripley, a member of the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society, and who, according to Volume 7 of the Geological Curator, was in practice with his brother, the surgeon Mr John Ripley, in Whitby's Baxtergate in the first half of the 19th century.
Unfortunately, trying to dig up more information on Dr Ripley is difficult, because it seems that his unfortunate legacy is to be remembered not for his marvellous collection of curiosities and enthusiasm for geology and fossil collecting, but for his alleged association with a scoundrel named Flint Jack.
In the 19th century, geology and fossil collecting was all the rage, as was collecting prehistoric artefacts such as flint arrowheads and other tools napped or crafted by ancient hands. And professional men like the Doctors Ripley often purchased such items from local fossil and artefact hunters who knew all the best places to find such treasures.
Flint Jack seems to have started his career in the honest work of fossil collecting, and was apparently very good at it, until one of his customers asked him if he could reproduce a prehistoric flint arrowhead from his collection, and unfortunately, Flint Jack found that he could.
Seeing a surefire way to fund his developing drinking habit, Jack went on to become a prolific producer of fake ancient artefacts. passing them off as genuine relics all over the country and becoming known as the Prince of Counterfeiters.
The Times newspaper reported in 1867 that wherever geologists or archaeologists resided, or wherever a museum was established, there did Flint Jack assuredly pass off his forged fossils and antiquities. Of course, his name wasn't really Flint Jack.
When he was finally arrested for his crimes and held in Bedford Prison, his name was reported as either Edward Jackson of Slights, or John Wilson of Burlington, or Gerry Taylor of Billerydale, in addition to going by the various aliases of Old Antiquarian, Fossil Willie, Bones, Shirtless and Cockney Bill. truly a man of many names and dubious repute.
And the dubious repute part, Flint Jack tried unsuccessfully to smooth over by claiming association with learned professional men, respected collectors and geologists such as Dr Richard Ripley and his brother John. Flint Jack caused quite a stir by claiming to have at one time been in the employment of the doctors.
As you can imagine, in the 19th century, a man's word and good reputation was everything, and an association with the biggest historical fraudster in the country would have seriously tarnished that reputation. For their part, the doctor's Ripley claimed to have never directly employed Flint Jack.
Their only dealings with him to have been the occasional purchase of the odd fossil he'd collected, at the time when he was still making an honest living collecting genuine specimens, and would call at the Ripley's kitchen door to show off his finds after a day hunting along the shoreline and cliffs.
An anonymous witness wrote to the Moulton Messenger newspaper in 1866 to back up the claims of the Ripleys, stating, These were the days when Jack pursued an honest calling in the petrifactions with which the Whitby strata abound, and of the exact whereabouts of the numerous varieties no one knew better than himself.
There was certainly no evidence that the doctors had any dealings with Flint Jack's later fraudulent affairs, but as a man of science, having one's reputation called into question, however briefly, must have been extremely worrying and frustrating for Dr Ripley. And perhaps that could explain his rather extreme actions when his name hit the local headlines for a second time.
This time for his haunted house.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Or is that just a convenient story to explain the odd appearance of the house he used to live in?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The frontage is of large, uneven sandstone blocks set with mullion windows, which are accompanied on the lower floor with sets of wooden shutters painted a tarry black.
Although there is a second story to the building, and one upper window under the steeply sloped pantile roof, the building's ground level is below the current level of the street, giving it the appearance of having sunk into the ground over the hundreds of years it's been standing there, which, according to the date painted on the gold-lettered front sign, is the year 1401.
Even taking into account the lower ground level, the building is still diminutive compared to its neighbours. The height of both its store is only just coming level with the top of the ground floor window of the shop next door, an effect only heightened by the old smuggler's precarious looking chimney, which has obviously been lengthened at some point to match the height of the abutting building.
resulting in a comically long appendage that I am frankly astonished has survived several hundred years of storms and high winds. The far left of the building is cut right through the thick yellow sandstone in an archway leading to a gloomy passage.
It appears to go right through the front wall of the building, but in fact the passage goes all the way down one side of the old smuggler and onto a row of houses crammed in behind it, with the upper floor of the cafe extending above the dingy tunnel. There is a definite danger of banging your head here, if not on the low archway, then on one of the even lower beams supporting the building above.
To help people avoid the danger, the arch and beams are highlighted in bright white paint and someone has helpfully painted duck or grouse above the arch. I can't help imagining that this has something to do with the name of the low alleyway, which is declared on a small street sign tucked just into the entrance that reads Loggerhead's Yard.
Next to the archway, the worn, carved figure of what looks to be a man is mounted on the wall. The wood is dark with age and centuries of soot, the details so softened by wear that the face is almost indistinguishable, although details of a tunic and knee-high boots can be made out.
The hands are clutching a curved blade, rather reminiscent of a pirate's cutlass, and the whole effect gives the impression of something one might find carved on an old wooden pirate ship. And that may not be too far off, as according to local law, the wooden figure is believed to have come from a captured French smuggling vessel.
But that's only the beginning of the old inn's association with the trade of illegally imported goods. Whitby and its neighbouring coastal town Robin Hood's Bay were well known for their deeply rooted connections with illicit contraband up to the 1800s, and the town's remoteness and inaccessibility helped the trade flourish from the early 17th century.
At this time, heavy taxes were levered by the crown on goods such as rum, brandy, tobacco, tea and silk, and the only way many people could afford these luxuries was through the black market.
In Robin Hood's Bay, just a little further down the coast from Whitby, there was once a network of underground tunnels that burrowed under the town, supposedly connecting the shops, houses and inns and involving a good deal of the community in the very lucrative black market trade.
Legend has it that the tunnels were so extensive it was possible to leave the bay and reach the top of the village without ever seeing the light of day. Almost all of these tunnels are long gone, dismantled or blocked up, but it's still possible to see one of these underground routes in Robin Hood's Bay today.
A culvert called King's Beck Tunnel still runs some way under the town before re-emerging above ground, but be wary if you do visit, as the culvert does get cut off by the rising tide. Smuggling was a dangerous game.
A similar network of tunnels are rumoured to have run under Whitby, where the illegal import of goods did equally well, and, similarly, probably involved many members of the community.
The English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, who stayed in Whitby in 1859 and studied the town whilst writing her book Sylvia's Lovers, noted specifically that the black market was certainly not just the province of men, when she wrote... There was a clever way in which certain whippy women managed to bring in prohibited goods.
When a woman did give her mind to smuggling, she was full of resources and tricks and impudence, and energy more so than any man. Apparently, housewives would wear loose-fitting clothes that they could stuff full of contraband, transporting illicit goods under their dresses right under the noses of tax collectors.
Not as much is known about the Whitby Tunnels, but the strongest local lore places one such smuggling tunnel right underneath the Smuggler's Cafe. Of course, it wasn't called the Old Smuggler back then. That would have been a bit of a giveaway to the authorities.
It used to be called the Old Ship Launch Inn, and legend tells that a tunnel runs from underneath this 15th century building to the Station Inn, just a few hundred metres away on Station Square, which runs almost parallel to Baxtergate and faces the harbour on the upstream side of the swing bridge.
Looking at a map, the location certainly fits, but the station inn looks much more modern than that of the old smuggler. The upper floors are modelled in a Tudor half-timber style, but the neat, clean red brick makes me suspicious of its age. Frustratingly, I can't even find a historic England record for the building to give me a clue as to when it might have been built,
But of course, this doesn't mean that there hasn't been an inn on that exact site for many centuries. It's quite common to find inns that have been rebuilt several times over the years, always standing on the same spot, so I'm not ruling out the possibility of a secret smuggling tunnel just yet.
In fact, I found it quite difficult to find much information at all on the inns, which is most surprising for the old smuggler given its impressive age. But the one thing I did find was that it has a history of being haunted, and who could blame it when it's been hanging around for over 600 years? Unfortunately for us, though, the reference is tantalisingly brief.
It appears in the writings of Reverend George Young, another founding member of the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society, in his 1817 book, A History of Whitby and Strenshill Abbey. In it, he writes, "...it would be an endless task to detail all the absurd local traditions and all the haunted houses in the district."
An excellent house in Baxtergate stood long empty, as it had obtained the character of being visited by ghosts. It is now frequented by spirits of a different kind, having been converted into an inn. Local legend has long connected this reference to the Old Smuggler, although it's certainly not the only inn on Baxtergate.
It is, however, the only one that still seems to experience some ghostly activity today, But if the building was once so haunted that it was actually abandoned to stand empty, then the ghosts must have done a lot of mellowing in the intervening years, as the spooky activity that visitors most report these days is feeling a gentle push from an unseen hand.
Maybe the ghosts of the old smuggler realised that driving away patrons with poltergeisty temper tantrums, resulting in them being left alone for years, was just no fun at all, and decided to take a more relaxed approach to their hauntings in future. And it seems to have worked, because the old smuggler is still thriving after over half a millennia, resident ghosts and all.
At the other public house, famously associated with Whitby's smuggling trade, however, the local law is a bit more dramatic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So what else could they do but turn to the black market?
It didn't take much to convince the landlord of the inn on Saltergate, at that time known as the Wagon and Horses, to help stage the salt smuggling operation.
Legend says that the salt was packed into the very walls of the inn to keep it dry and hidden, but they needed some way of letting the crew transporting the illicit goods know if they were safe to approach or warn them to stay away if the dreaded excise officers decided to visit.
As the illegal trade was, of course, carried out under cover of darkness, this was simply achieved by the lighting of a lamp in one of the windows to warn smugglers of the presence of the excisemen. If there was no lamp in the window, then it was safe to approach.
Well, one night, a smuggling crew transporting salt across the moors from the harbour checked for the flickering of the warning light in the window of the whitewashed coaching inn and, happily, found that there was none to be seen.
Pleased that they wouldn't have to hide out on the dark, damp moorland awaiting the all-clear, and with the warming prospect of food and ale ahead of them, they bore their illicit cargo to the inn and safety. Or so they thought. But unbeknownst to them, unbeknownst to anyone in the inn either, an excise officer had, in fact, infiltrated the Salters Gate.
No candle was burning because no one was aware. But when the smugglers opened their precious cargo, the officer made himself known and the game was up. The crew were distraught. Getting caught smuggling came with a heavy penalty. The ultimate punishment, in fact. Death. Caught completely off guard, the crew thought their days were numbered until... Whack.
The landlord, feeling that there was nothing left to lose at this point, managed to creep up on the excise man and attack him from behind, felling him dead in one swift blow. But now they had to cover up their terrible crime, and they did so by interring the officer's body underneath the huge heavy slabs of the inn's fireplace.
Somewhere, they reckoned, nobody would think to look, especially if they always kept the fire burning. And so the landlord and the smugglers made a pact to carry the terrible deed to their own graves and to never, ever let the fire in the fireplace of the Saltersgate Inn go out.
But they believed that if they did, the ghost of the excise officer would rise up from his untimely grave and take revenge for his murder, cursing the inn and bringing ill fortune to the villages all around. Legend tells that they and generations of landlords that came after did exactly that, and that the fire in the Saltersgate Inn burned for over 200 years, keeping the vengeful ghost at bay.
But despite their work to keep that particular ghost contained, rumours of other hauntings within the inn have emerged over the years. In recent decades, staff have reported seeing objects inexplicably fly through the air, including one employee in the 1970s, who saw a bowl float right past her.
Doors were found to lock and unlock themselves when the building was empty except for a single perplexed member of staff and pub regulars told of seeing apparitions walk through the walls. Maybe the strangest sighting, though, came from a local who was surprised one day to see, out of the inn's window, a child alone on the moors.
The fact that they were all alone was a bit concerning in itself, but there was also something not quite right about the scene. The girl was wearing odd clothes, an old-fashioned crinoline dress, and she was crying. Concern at her distress overcame the witness and they started outside towards the obviously upset child, but as they reached the gate... The figure simply disappeared.
Years later, the witness happened to mention it to a landlady of the inn, and astonishingly she revealed that she had seen the exact same thing out on the moors some twenty years earlier. So, haunted the inn may be, but none of these ghosts seem like the vengeful spirit of a murdered exciseman.
So, did the landlords of the Salters Gate successfully keep the angry spirit from returning with their 200-year fire? Well, although we have reports from staff as recently as 2001 that the landlords of the inn were still maintaining the tradition of the fire, in 2007 the inn fell on hard times and went out of business. Standing closed and empty for over a year, the legendary fire finally gone out.
The inn was bought by a local builder in 2008 who intended to refit and reopen the place, but from that point on, the building was beset by problem after problem. The recession hit and the new owner could no longer fund the project, so the inn stood empty. The protective fire reduced to nothing but cold ash.
It was sold again, this time with planning permission for a hotel and restaurant expansion, but this project too was doomed to financial ruin, and so the inn stood empty, by now looking very much worse for wear, whitewash peeling from the walls and the windows where the warning lantern may once have shone boarded shut.
The final attempt to save the inn was a purchase in 2016, but even this failed. And very sadly, in 2018, the shell of the by now derelict inn was demolished. The ghost of the murdered excise officer may not have come back to haunt the inn in the spectral form the smugglers expected, but the Salters Gate did seem to have a pall of ill fortune cast over it.
ever since the premises closed and the fire went out. But there's actually more to this story, because go back a little further in history and we find that the much-hated exciseman wasn't the first evil to be reputedly trapped in the fireplace of the inn.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
We return to the corner of Victoria Square and Brunswick Street, where on one side of the slightly offset crossroads sits Dr Ripley's mysteriously truncated house, and on the other, where Victoria Square passes Spring Hill, sits Bagdale Hall.
At first glance, the building seems strangely out of place, looking much like a country estate that had somehow lost its way and ended up in the centre of a town. I suppose that's simply because in urban areas we're used to the march of time and progress eventually flattening places like these.
But somehow, Bagdale Hall has managed to survive since being built in either 1516 or 1530, depending on whether you choose to believe the hall's website or the blue commemorative plaque attached to the front of the building.
Apparently, the appearance of the hall has changed significantly over the years, particularly after extensive renovations in 1882, but you still get a sense of its Tudor roots, from the great rounded and worn sandstone blocks of its walls, the stone dormer windows in a steeply pitched roof with an impressive array of chimneys and the massive joists protruding from the end walls.
The day we visit is a gloomy one, and the leaded glass of the windows seem to absorb the darkness of the overcast skies to make it look as though it's pitch dark inside. The tiny diamond-shaped panes scatter the lights from the headlamps of passing cars, making the windows along the side of the building spark and glitter momentarily.
and in a lower front window, the warm yellow shapes of some lamps manage to glow through the darkness. But otherwise, the odd reflections of the mullion windows avert any clear glimpses into the interior, instead casting odd shapes and shadows within the glass.
If the hall looks impressive from the front, then it looks even more the classic country pile upon rounding the corner of Spring Hill, where it becomes evident that one wing of the T-shaped building sprawls off halfway up the street.
In fact, this was only a fraction of the property's original extent, as at the time of building it was surrounded by acres of green fields at least half a mile upriver that formed the hall's estate. and much of the town grew up around the building over the preceding centuries.
An orb-topped stone gateway into a courtyard in the right angle of the building offers a tantalising peek into what may lay beyond, with at least a dozen rooms apparent from the windows just on this side of the wing alone, whilst behind the crook of the front wall is a curious feature that wouldn't look out of place on Disney's Haunted Mansion ride.
It's hard to tell if the lichen-encrusted stonework is actually part of the gabled-end wall, or if it is simply resting up against it. But the carved double arch, standing about the height of two gravestones side by side, and not looking a million miles away from such a thing...
bears two intricately carved heads, leering from the stone in full 3D, their necks craning right out of a picture-frame-like oval in the stone, their faces set in stern grimaces. On one hand, I half expect them to jerk to life and start singing a jaunty song, and on the other, they rather remind me of Dr Ripley's ghost, poking its head out the window and leering down at passers-by.
I can't help but wonder what the story is behind these two carvings. But then Bagdale Hall is a place full of mystery, swashbuckling stories and, of course, ghosts. Stories about the hauntings within the walls of Bagdale Hall have been emerging for decades, if not centuries.
Staff and servants over the years have related hearing disembodied footsteps all over the house, but especially on the wide wooden central staircase, where the creak of ghostly footsteps tread with some regularity.
The chilling sounds of children playing has been reported just after midnight, emanating from dark, empty rooms, as well as unexplained noises from the kitchen and the sounds of crashing coming from the china cabinet. Over the years, the hall changed ownership and eventually went out of private residence and into service as a hotel. But the noises continued.
the sound of bells ringing in the kitchen long after things like servants' bells had ceased being used, the phantom crashing from the china cabinet, apparently continuing even after the cabinet itself had been moved to a different location. Many of the reports from staff were related to an owner who took over the hall in 1914, a retired headmaster called Percy Shaw Jeffery.
During his ownership, one visiting local photographer had the fright of his life when he witnessed a piece of crockery inexplicably fly from a cabinet and, turning to look in the direction of the stairs, saw the ephemeral figure of a woman in white dissolve right before his eyes.
When a maid of Shaw Jefferies told him that a duster had flown out of her hand towards the kitchen while she had been cleaning the library, he simply replied, that things like that happen quite often at Bagdale Hall. And if that sounds rather nonchalant, then it's probably because Shaw Jeffery was no stranger to the world of the strange and supernatural.
Not only did he actually write a book on it, penning the title Whitby Law and Legend in 1923, but he also had a connection to a very famous paranormal case indeed, the haunting of Borley Rectory.
Long before he retired from his career as a headmaster and took up residence in Whitby, Percy Shaw Geoffrey became among the first of the witnesses of the strange happenings at Borley Rectory, during visits there to stay with his college friend Harry, or Henry as he was better known, who was the son of Reverend Ball, rector of the parish of Borley.
Percy and his friend the Rector's son both reportedly had a multitude of inexplicable experiences at the home. In an article titled The Mysteries of Borley Rectory that he wrote for the Cape Times in later years, Percy wrote...
The rectory was a comparatively new building, but it was generally believed that it was built on the foundations of an old convent, which accounted for the ghostly nun, who or which I saw several times. The ghostly coach and four I heard sweep down the much too narrow lane beside the rectory so often that I used to sleep through the noise, and a variety of disconcerting incidents happened.
And Percy went into even more detail about his visits in a letter to investigator Harry Price after reading Price's book about the supernatural happenings at the rectory. Dear Mr Price, I have just been reading your book about Borley Rectory. I'm very interested because Harry Bull and I were born in the same year, 1862.
We went to Oxford together and in the long vacations I used to go and stay with him at Borley. I had lots of small adventures at the rectory, stones falling about, my boots found on top of the wardrobe, etc., and I saw the nun several times and often heard the coach go clattering by.
But the big adventure that would have been worth your while recording was one time when I missed a big French dictionary which I had been regularly using for some days. Nobody could find it. But one night, I was awakened by a big bump on the floor, and there was the dictionary, with its back a good deal knocked about, sprawling on the floor. My bedroom door was locked.
With all these paranormal adventures occurring in his youth, maybe it's no wonder Percy Shaw Jeffrey was a little nonchalant about a mysteriously animated duster. But Percy wasn't the only owner of Bagdale Hall to experience the unexplained, and the reports of strange activity continued even into the post-war years when the hall became a hotel.
A waitress working at Bagdale was surprised one night when the chef asked her why no one was attending to a gentleman in the dining room. Perplexed, the waitress asked the chef, ''What gentleman?'' Looking again, the chef was shocked to discover that she was correct. The dining room where he was certain he had seen a man seated only moments before was empty.
In recent years, another maid had quite the scare whilst changing the sheets in one of the hotel's bedrooms. Hearing noise behind her, she jumped around, startled, only to come face to face with a ghostly figure in old-fashioned clothes.
So frightened that she had to look away from the figure, yet more shock awaited her, as she looked back to the bed to discover that the sheets she had just laid out there had mysteriously vanished.
According to Paul McDermott's book Whitby Ghosts and Legends, the then current caretakers of Bagdale Hall not only accepted the poltergeist activity occurred, but shared with the author that they named the poltergeist Geoffrey.
Now, nowhere in his book does McDermott mention the intriguing former owner of Percy Shaw Jeffery, but surely the caretakers choosing the same name as the former owner for their poltergeist is too much of a coincidence. Sadly, we are not enlightened as to whether they plucked the name out of thin air, or whether they attribute the odd events to the spirit of the former owner.
After all, having had such an interest in the paranormal in life, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine that he might enjoy coming back to haunt his old home. Percy Shaw Jeffrey isn't the most famous resident of Bagdale Hall, nor is he the most popular contender for the cause of the hauntings.
No, that title goes to a much earlier resident, to whom the sightings of another apparition is attributed, a rather grisly apparition whose headless form is seen roaming around the upper floors and perambulating the stairs. And this spectre is thought to belong to the swashbuckling adventurer, Brown Bushel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is perhaps no wonder that a man as indomitable in life as Brown Bushel wouldn't let a little thing like death get in his way, and it seems to have taken the lack of a corporeal body for Brown to have finally settled down and returned to a life, well, existence anyway, rooted in one spot, his ancestral home of Bagdale Hall.
And despite his years away from the place, and his many adventures over land and sea, it turns out there was something anchoring him to the hall after all, that just may have called his spirit back there. And rather wonderfully, it was our old friend Percy Short Geoffrey that found it. In 1916, only a couple of years after he took ownership of Bagdale Hall,
Percy found six oak panels in the roof loft that, when reassembled and cleaned, revealed the painted portraits of a young man and his bride, dated on the back to 1663, along with the subject's ages. From the age and dates, Percy was certain that these were the portraits of Brown Bushel and his wife. Could this be what ties Bushel's ghost to the hall?
With the paintings having been expertly restored, these days Bushell's likeness is in the care of the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society at Panit Park Museum, rather neatly landing us right back where we started our journey today, and hopefully providing Brown Bushell...
never one to cool his heels in one spot for too long, with another grand new adventure in a different place, even if it is from beyond the grave.
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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