Folklore of Yorkshire

by Kai Roberts

  These cases became increasingly rare as the Enlightenment gathered pace through the eighteenth century and educated opinion turned firmly against the possibility of ghosts. Yet, much as the Reformation had failed to extinguish such belief two centuries earlier, it persisted amongst the majority of the population. Nonetheless, without a dominant religious or moral agenda which could provide a function for their existence, ghost traditions grew fractured, contradictory and confused. Moreover, the apparitions themselves became increasingly purposeless: they no longer manifested to seek absolution or intercession, nor to expose crimes or prevent injustice. Often, they simply haunted a specified location and terrified residents or travellers, but otherwise rarely had any influence over mortal affairs.

  A vast majority of the enigmatic headless horsemen and white ladies which fill up so many Victorian topography and folklore collections, seem to owe their existence to that stripping away of religious and moral function of ghosts which had been accomplished by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Yorkshire has no shortage of such spectres. The popularity of headless ghosts is especially puzzling and they are so abundant in the county that it would be a tedious, perhaps impossible, task to list them all. Suffice it to say, nearly every locality had such a ghost, which would walk or ride nightly for no obvious reason. However, they exist primarily as rumour legends, and few first-hand accounts of encounters with these apparitions exist.

  Some traditions were more colourful than others: a headless woman that haunted the road between Leven and Riston in East Yorkshire used to leap up behind horsemen and slap their ears, whilst at Stokesley, just such a ghost in burning clothes was said to walk from Lady Cross to Kirby Lane, then disappear with a shriek. At Low Hall in Yeadon another headless woman emerged from the oak panelling of a bedchamber and glided across it, white robe flowing behind her, to disappear into a concealed chamber by the fireplace. Yet another example haunted a barn at Dalton near Thirsk, and appeared carrying her head like a lantern, emitting light from its eyes, nostrils and mouth. There was a hole in the barn wall supposedly made by a horrified tramp as he tried to escape from this vision, and it was shown to visitors as a mark of the tradition’s authenticity.

  The tomb of Sir Richard Beaumont, whose headless phantom walks nearby. (Kai Roberts)

  The headless state of such ghosts is perplexing. Had the ghost represented a known individual who had been beheaded it would make sense, but decapitation was actually a rare mode of execution in English history, reserved for the aristocracy. Sometimes the condition of the ghost is associated with mere head injury, such as the headless apparition that haunts the foot of Colburn Nab in Staithes, identified with a girl whose skull was shattered by a falling rock from the cliff above. In other instances a vague tradition seems to have been invented to account for the appearance. For instance, natives of Linthwaite claimed that the headless horseman who rode the lanes in those parts was the ghost of a local chief who had been beheaded on orders of the king for his disloyalty, although the historical record is silent about such an individual.

  Perhaps more egregiously, the headless ghost of Sir Richard Beaumont, said to walk between Kirkheaton and Lepton near Huddersfield on the night of 5 July, was supposed to have been decapitated in a quarrel with a fellow highwayman over their spoils. This is despite the fact Sir Richard is known to have died in 1631 of natural causes and there is no evidence to suggest that he ever engaged in criminal activity. It seems likely that Sir Richard’s ghost was originally headless for some symbolic reason which was forgotten by subsequent generations, and the story about his death was appended when an explanation was demanded; or the phantom was once an anonymous headless ghost onto whom Sir Richard’s name was superimposed by later tradition.

  Conversely, when the apparition of an historical figure who actually was beheaded is seen, the condition of being headless was not observed! This is true of the ghost of Richard le Scrope, a medieval Archbishop of York, who was executed for treason by order of Henry IV on 29 May 1405 in a field outside the walls of the city. Locals believed that Scrope’s ghost occasionally appeared conducting his own phantom funeral, which processed from his former palace at Bishopthorpe to the scene of his execution. An apparition assumed to be Scrope on account of his attire was supposed to walk behind a floating coffin; his head was not only intact, but bent over the pages of a large book from which he read, although no sound issued from his mouth.

  A similar nebulousness prevails in the case of white ladies. Numerous sites in the county are haunted by white ladies who seem to walk for the most ill-defined reasons. The remains of a fortified manor house at Hall Garth in Wetherby were thought to be frequented by such an apparition, connected with some unspoken tragedy in a family who had once dwelt there. Similarly, the vicinity of a cliff just outside Barwick-in-Elmet was haunted by a female phantom dressed in white, who appeared to wash her garments in the beck near Ass Bridge. She was supposed to be the spirit of a woman murdered at Parlington but no further information was given and it is unclear whether such a crime ever took place.

  Some folklorists have suggested that white ladies are actually a degraded relic of fairy belief, and are not so much spectres but genius loci whose original tradition evolved into something more appropriate for the age. It is certainly true that such apparitions tend to haunt archetypally liminal sites of the sort often associated with fairies; for instance, watery places and bridges as can be seen in the case of the Barwick ‘cliff lady’. White ladies are also regularly linked with ancient ruins and earthworks; perhaps most famously in the example of the White Lady of Skipsea Castle, in which the shade of a beautiful young woman wearing a white robe mournfully wanders the remains of a Norman motte-and-bailey castle. Another white lady haunts Danes Dyke, a two-mile long defensive earthwork of Iron-Age provenance near Flamborough.

  It was also during the eighteenth century that the motif of evil men and tragic death became strongly associated with ghosts. As the folklorist Gillian Bennett observes, whilst the dead no longer seemed to return for any purpose, the popular dislike of ambiguity meant that such phenomena required a cause. Bennett writes, ‘If their actions after death have no logic, it follows that any rationale must be found in events before their death. The havoc they wreak after their death therefore gets explained by the havoc of their life or dying. Either they are assumed to have had a malice so intense that it cannot die, or they are assumed to have had a death so cruel that the death itself cannot die and goes on being re-enacted somehow.’

  This is best exemplified in the haunting of Calverley Hall near Bradford, scene of one of the most infamous tragedies in the history of the county. Sir Walter Calverley, owner of the hall in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, had married Philippa Brook, the daughter of Lord Cobham; but whilst Philippa was a virtuous woman, Sir Walter was a wild and dissolute man. On 23 April 1604, heavily in debt to his creditors and possessed by a drunken rage, Sir Walter attempted to murder his wife and succeeded in killing two of his children. He was caught as he attempted to flee on horseback and after refusing to plead at his trial, he was sentenced to ‘peine forte et dure’ – a form of torture-cum-execution in which heavy stones were piled on the defendant’s chest until he either entered a plea or expired from suffocation.

  The earthworks at Skipsea Castle, haunted by a white lady. (Kai Roberts)

  Sir Walter persisted in his refusal to cooperate and towards the end was said to have cried to a faithful servant who had remained by his side, ‘Them that love Sir Walter, pile on! pile on!’ His apparition is said to have endlessly repeated those words as he wandered the lane which runs to Calverly Hall. Alternatively, his ghost rode a headless steed and took great delight in hunting down unwary travellers, until he became such a menace that the local community had him exorcised. Meanwhile, inside the hall, a permanent bloodstain is supposed to discolour the woodwork in the chamber where the murder was committed, a stain which no amount of scrubbing can remove – another
common motif in ghost lore of this kind.

  Sometimes the sin need not be as mortal as murder. The man who built Swinsty Hall in Washburndale made his fortune by looting the houses of dead men in London during the Great Plague of 1665, and locals believed his apparition could be seen obsessively washing coins in the Greenwell at Timble in an attempt to disinfect them. The headless ghost of Sir Josceline Percy was believed to drive four headless horses around the streets of Beverley night after night, for the crime of once entering Beverley Minster on horseback. Even mere eccentricity became enough to justify supernatural immortality. As the folklorist Christina Hole notes, it reflected ‘the popular inability to believe that so strong a personality could really have suffered the common fate of death.’

  Calverley Hall in West Yorkshire, where the ghost of murderous Sir Walter still walks. (Kai Roberts)

  It was not just the sinners who were thought to return: often the sinned against suffered a similar fate in death and as we have seen with headless ghosts and white ladies, such was the connection in the popular mind between tragedy and subsequent hauntings that all manner of apocryphal traditions were devised to account for a phantom’s appearance, or they were often conflated with other popular local legends. For instance, the White Lady of Skipsea Castle is frequently said to embody the wife of the castle’s builder, Drogo de Bevere, who fought at the Battle of Hastings with William the Conqueror. For his loyalty he was gifted the lands of Holderness, along with the hand of William’s niece in marriage. However, their match was not successful and Drogo is said to have poisoned the unfortunate girl before fleeing back to Normandy.

  Arguing against the genuine identification of the White Lady of Skipsea Castle as the unfortunate Lady de Bevere is the suspicion that the tradition of her murder is apocryphal and may be entirely fictitious. This is compounded by the curious but undeniable fact that historical phantoms were never seen until the late seventeenth century, and then did not appear in any great number until the nineteenth. The ghosts of the medieval and early modern period are always those of the recently dead; spirits from the distant past are not recorded until the advent of compulsory education and particularly the teaching of history. This may explain why ghosts are so associated with major conflicts which left a deep scar on the psyche of the region – or more prosaically, were well known from the history books.

  In Yorkshire, this invariably means the Reformation or the English Civil Wars. A phantom known as the White Lass of North Kilvington once haunted Borrowby Bridge over the Spittlebeck, and was identified with the daughter of the Meynells. Tradition asserted that the girl had been raped and murdered by Henry VIII’s commissioners, when her staunchly Catholic family had refused to cooperate with the confiscation of monastic assets. Meanwhile, the headless woman that haunts a bedchamber at Watton Abbey is supposed to be the ghost of a former Royalist owner, murdered in that room by Roundhead irregulars as they looted the area following the Parliamentarian victory at Marston Moor. The story claims they beheaded her, but we have already seen how deceptive that motif can be.

  Similarly, there is perhaps no reason beyond the romanticising power of tradition why the ghostly ladies believed to haunt Nappa Hall in Wensleydale and Manor Lodge in Sheffield should be identified with Mary, Queen of Scots. The unfortunate cousin of Elizabeth I passed only two nights at Nappa Hall as a guest of the Metcalfe family, whilst she was imprisoned at nearby Castle Bolton between July 1568 and January 1569. Although a maid some two centuries later claimed to have seen a spectre answering Mary’s description at Nappa Hall, she was not executed until 1587 at Fotheringay Castle in Northamptonshire and there seems little reason why her ghost should return to that hall in particular. Equally, she only spent brief periods at Manor Lodge between 1570 and 1584, whilst moving between various properties as a prisoner of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Still, her ghost is rumoured to haunt the roof of the Turret House – the only surviving part of the building.

  Nappa Hall in Wensleydale, haunted by the ghost of Mary Queen of Scots? (Kai Roberts)

  The connection between unnatural, tragic death and hauntings was so firmly established in the collective psyche that Mary was an inevitable candidate for post-mortem return, no matter how tenuous her connection with a property might have been. However, it was not just unnatural death which guaranteed such a fate: improper burial had similar consequences. These traditions doubtless had the dual effect of attributing a comprehensible cause to uncanny phenomena and reinforcing social taboos in eighteenth-century England. As criminals and suicides were those most commonly denied Christian burial, the implication was that such acts would result in a fate worse than mere physical death, as their souls would be refused access to Heaven and forced to wander the earth disconsolately until the Day of Judgement.

  Belief that the spirits of suicides would walk after death was so ingrained in early modern society, that the corpses of individuals who had taken their own life were often pinned down in their graves and buried at crossroads to confuse their risen souls. An eighteenth-century Calderdale tradition held that following the suicide of Miller Lee of Mayroyd Mill in Hebden Bridge, his body was interred without ceremony at Four Lane Ends on the edge of Midgley Moor. However, his restless spirit proved such a menace to travellers passing by the crossroads, that his corpse was exhumed and reburied in a prehistoric cairn located on a more remote part of the moor, where his spectre could wander without causing disruption. Local folklore asserts that this Bronze-Age burial mound has been known as Miller’s Grave ever since.

  Miller’s Grave in Calderdale, a prehistoric tumulus haunted by a suicide. (Kai Roberts)

  The Busby Stoop near Thirsk, haunted by a gibbeted highwayman. (Kai Roberts)

  The association between criminals and unhallowed burial did not have quite the same antiquity as suicides, and seems to be a very characteristic product of the eighteenth century. Although the use of gibbeting of a criminal’s corpse after execution had been used informally since the previous century, it did not become common practice until it was officially authorised by an Act of Parliament in 1751, and remained widespread until it was outlawed in 1832. As the criminal’s body was left to rot where it hung, in rural areas gibbets were often sited at crossroads to prevent their ghosts from walking and such traditions lingered long after the practice was discontinued. A pub known as the Busby Stoop, near Thirsk, was built on the former site of a gibbet, and it is still believed to be haunted by the restless spirit of Thomas Busby, a highwayman who was once gibbeted there. On bright moonlit nights, it is said that he can be seen leering from the window of the hostelry.

  Of course, the innocent sometimes also suffered the ignominy of unconsecrated burial. Knaresborough vicarage was wracked by the sound of sobbing and icy gusts of wind through the corridors, until renovations uncovered human bones concealed beneath the floorboards. The remains were reinterred in consecrated ground and the trouble ceased. Likewise, a cottage at Barmby Moor occupied by two antiquaries was disturbed by untraceable footsteps and doors opening of their own accord – phenomena quickly attributed to a human skull the scholars had found in the churchyard. The relic had apparently been unearthed and cast aside by a gravedigger, so the pair had taken it for their private museum. Once reburied, the peace of their cottage was restored.

  Battlefields also represented prime locations for spectral return. Not only were they the scenes of many tragic deaths, but often following the combat, the slain were left to rot on the ground or else deposited in unconsecrated mass graves. The Battle of Marston Moor, fought between the Royalists and Parliamentarians on 2 July 1644 during the English Civil Wars, was one of the largest conflicts ever enacted on British soil, in which over 4,000 soldiers were killed. The site of the confrontation is also one of the first recorded instances of a battlefield ghost: a headless cavalry officer covered in blood, who is said to ride frantically back and forth, searching for the action. The apparition was most commonly seen around Moor Lane, where some of the fiercest fighting took p
lace and where a monument to those killed now stands.

  Marston Moor, haunted by a victim of the Civil War conflict? (Kai Roberts)

  As these examples suggest, as the centuries wore on, ghosts went from primarily haunting people to haunting places. In medieval and early modern narratives, the exact location at which a ghost was encountered was rarely considered important and nor was it necessarily bound by it. However, by the eighteenth and nineteenth century, apparitions were nearly all fixed in space: whether it be the site of a terrible tragedy, unconsecrated burial or just one of those liminal points so often associated with the supernatural. As a feature of this development, the concept of the ‘haunted house’ grew increasingly prominent. Whilst ghosts may have appeared in buildings previously, they were typically a transient phenomena; the idea of the irredeemably haunted house, whose ghost disturbed generations of residents, was a later product and arguably one fostered by the emergence of Gothic literature in the late 1700s.

  Interestingly, the ghosts that began to haunt houses in this period were more often felt or heard rather than seen, and whilst they were undoubtedly regarded as the spirit of some individual who had probably once lived there, they were not always identified with any specific person. Grassington Old Hall, for instance, was widely reckoned to be haunted and locals avoided passing that way at night, but the manifestations rarely amounted to much more than unearthly noises and the patter of disembodied feet on the staircase. Similarly, the peace at Easington Hall in Holderness (now demolished) was often shattered by rushing noises and the swish of a dress on the stairs, whilst a groaning, bellowing noise sometimes sounded from the cellar. Raydale House, near Semerwater, was particularly disturbed by a ‘noisy spirit’ known as ‘Auld ‘Opper’, which used to rap on various items of furniture and knock furiously at the door.