Hampshire and Isle of Wight Ghost Tales

by Michael O'Leary

‘Then we’d get some cider and we’d pour it around the roots of the big tree in the middle of the orchard, that’s the one we used to call the Apple Tree Man.’

  ‘What was all that in aid of?’

  ‘To drive out the evil spirits, to make sure that when autumn came there’d be big juicy apples on the trees – to bring good luck to the orchard.’

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone does it anymore,’ I said, implicitly inviting Jim to make some comment about modern carelessness.

  ‘Well, if they was, they’d be doing it now, seeing as how it’s Twelfth Night.’

  My ignorance of that made me the example of modern carelessness, there never was any point trying to pander to Jim’s prejudices.

  ‘No one’s wassailed the orchard since the 1920s,’ continued Jim, ‘a lot of the men never came back from the first war, and the custom died out. So listen, nipper,’ – Jim called everyone younger than himself ‘nipper’, and given that he was ninety-six that was everyone, except for Mr Baker, who was a hundred and three and lived down in Wickham – ‘whatever you do tonight, don’t take a shortcut through the orchard, cos you’ll upset the Apple Tree Man. No one’s wassailed him for years, so he’ll be firky like; he’ll won’t like folk.’

  Now, I thought that Jim was joking – he was like that – he’d say something completely daft, often playing up to what he considered to be a townie’s stereotype of a country man, and keep a completely straight face.

  ‘Yeah, all right Jim,’ I said, ‘but you know that’s my shortcut home.’

  ‘I’m not joking, nipper, you’ll upset the Apple Tree Man.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said, looking for the sparkle in his eye.

  He erupted. ‘You nippers, you thinks you knows it all. Well, go on, go and find out for yourself!’ And off he went – humpety hump – down the lane.

  Oh Lord, I didn’t want to upset him. If I’d thought that he was serious, I would have taken the long way round, but he’d gone now, so I thought I couldn’t upset him any more than I had already; I might as well take the shortcut.

  So I did.

  I climbed over the gate and started to walk through the orchard.

  It was a neglected orchard; no one looked after it anymore, no one thinned out the branches, which were all twisty, tangled, and gnarly. There was a bit of a breeze kicking up, and the trees were creaking and groaning in the breeze. I felt that I was an alien, unwelcome visitor amidst complaining trees, and started to wish that I’d taken the long way round.

  Then I reached the big tree in the middle of the orchard, the Apple Tree Man. Apple trees are twisty and gnarly anyway, but this one was exceptionally so – and the whorls and knots on its trunk looked like ancient faces, faces with no great friendly intent.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said to myself, ‘just keep walking.’

  And then I had that feeling: the feeling that there was someone – or something – behind me, looking at me. I can’t describe the feeling; I’d better leave that to Coleridge:

  Like one, that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having once turned round walks on,

  And turns no more his head;

  Because he knows, a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread.

  … but I did turn my head again, because I felt a clap on my shoulder, and there, in the murky darkness, was a hand. Or was it the branch of a tree? I looked round and found myself staring straight into the face of the Apple Tree Man.

  There was a weight on my head, and a weight on my body.

  I was lying down.

  The cold from the ground was spreading into my body, into my bones. My limbs were heavy – like one of those dreams where you know you’re dreaming, but you can’t wake up, as if there’s something sitting on you and holding you down.

  Like being hag-ridden.

  And the Apple Tree Man was in my head – pips and twigs and seeds and sap and roots and trunk and branches and dry winter leaves.

  And I saw Sandy Lane, twisting its way down the edge of something – the world? – like a snake.

  … And there was a settlement, at the sharpest bend in the lane, where the archaeologists found the Mesolithic arrowheads, watched by Jim Privett, bemused by these daft townies, who dug into the ground with silly little trowels, and washed elf stones. But I saw the settlement, with smoke trailing up to the sky, and the old ones knapping flints that had been brought in from elsewhere.

  … and the lane kept on sinking into the ground, and shacks and hovels came and went by its deepening sides, and I tried to get up, or wake up, and I couldn’t fight my way out of it.

  … and the Waltham Blacks walked furtively down the lane. Poachers, their faces blackened with charcoal and gunpowder, walking towards the death of a gamekeeper and the drop at Tyburn.

  … and all those deaths that the lane led to … Peter Cluer of Clewer’s Hill and a chaotic fight, lonely suicides, the natural passing of lives; but lives so often shortened by their harshness.

  … and death himself, with his rags and his scythe, clattering down the lane in an ancient cart pulled by a skeletal horse, piling up the cart with corpses.

  … and the red eyes of death, staring out from under a raggedy hood, looking like the eyes of an albino badger – the badger that was dug up, baited, and clubbed to death, during the time that I lived there – and the bodies of his tormentors where piled on the cart.

  … and then there where the adulterous couples from Gosport and Fareham, who had found this secluded spot, and suffered the most terrible coitus interruptus when they’d seen Jim’s distorted face peering through the car window, a cloud of smoke emanating from the greasy old pipe clasped between his gums.

  … and then the tree was a leper, who had abandoned the ‘pest house’, and was alone, at the edge of the world.

  ‘Get up,’ said the leper.

  But I couldn’t, for I was younger than the date, and a computer programmer lived in Jim’s house, and a whole network of shimmering branches, roots, fairy rings: mycelium fizzled and crackled through and around Sandy Lane – and golfers were knocking balls about on both sides of the lane, and the land was dotted with livid green patches awash with nitrogen.

  ‘What’s to come?’ I managed to ask, my mouth full of cold and soil and frost.

  ‘Find out for yourself, I have my own problems, but this lane is mine.’

  I think I got up then, but I’m not clear about that. I think I stumbled past Basil Gamblin’s Pond – and for all I know the black cats were a’flying around on broomsticks – and somehow I was in my bed when I woke up halfway through the next day, covered in scratches and bruises.

  It was a few days later that I saw Jim. I was walking down the lane with Victor – both of us carrying our switching rods ready to spend an hour knocking the dew off the grass. Jim was leaning on a gatepost, puffing on his pipe.

  ‘I met the Apple Tree Man,’ I said.

  Jim gave me a pitying look.

  ‘I did, I fell on the ground and couldn’t get up.’

  ‘Can’t take your drink, nipper,’ said Jim.

  Victor laughed. ‘Lightweight,’ he said.

  ‘They’re all bloody mad round here,’ I thought, certain of my own sanity, and started looking forward to a good slice of lardy cake.

  4

  THE ANDOVER PIG

  Why is it that when someone chooses to believe in reincarnation, and then, further, believes that it is possible, somehow, to trace their former incarnations; those incarnations turn out to be ones that flatter the, possibly rather dull, current incarnation. It has to be Cleopatra, or Genghis Khan, or Queen Elizabeth I, or else a supposedly romantic villain like Dick Turpin, or a tragic figure like Anne Boleyn. Why is it never Edna or Fred, who never did nuffink much, or Ug, who was a bit further down the evolutionary ladder, and sadly perished when he fell into a bog whilst searching for tasty grubs?

  Then again, if life is a force, or energy, or a
spiritual whirligig – something that constantly spins around us like berries in a blender – why does the past incarnation have to be another human being? Why can’t it be a blob fish, or a spider, or a parasitic flatworm, or a dandelion, or a pig?

  It’s the same with ghosts. I suppose ghosts aren’t always the shades of people – they can be demons or some such – but if the ghost is the ghost of a formerly living being, then it tends to be the ghost of a human being.

  Except in Andover.

  In Andover there is the ghost of a pig, but it will only manifest itself during a violent thunderstorm. Now this ghost is mentioned in that wonderful WI publication It Happened in Hampshire, but I first heard about it at an Andover festival.

  I do get to tell stories at some strange events, and this was an event for bikers. I was telling stories to bikers’ children, rather than the bikers themselves, though they were, to be fair, an amiable bunch – whilst sober anyway.

  The festival was run by a local butcher – a highly motivated biker butcher – and it was called the Hogroast Festival. It centred on the spit-roasting of several pigs and the smell of crackling and cider is, to me, an aroma that should be bottled so that I can spray it under my armpits. I loathe the mass production and intensive factory farming of animals, so I have no wish to offend vegetarians, whose stance I respect, but pork crackling is, to me, bliss.

  I was admiring a Screaming Eagle motorcycle, belonging to a local road rat, being particularly impressed by the bottle opener that was built into the side panel. The owner was doing that thing that I can really find rather irritating – ‘You think you know about stories, well let me tell you a few things …’ – which I often get from taxi drivers and aged folk singers, so when he started on about a ghostly pig that manifested itself over Andover during thunderstorms, I naturally assumed that he was taking the piss.

  But later on I read about it in the WI publication, and then was also told that there was a mention of it in Karen Maitland’s The Vanishing Witch, so I looked into it further.

  Who was it who revealed the whole story to me? I think it was that woman who must have been a reincarnation of Old Nan, the wise woman, who used to live in a rickety-rackety wooden hut on the edge of Harewood Forest, close to the banks of the River Test, a place not so far from Andover.

  It was in Harewood Forest that King Edgar the Peaceful (who was far from peaceful) took the opportunity of a wild boar hunt to run his friend Ethelwold through with a spear, because he wanted to steal Ethelwold’s wife, Elfrida. However, if you want to know that story you’ll have to read Hampshire and Isle of Wight Folk Tales by that renowned historian Michael O’Leary. It was after Edgar’s marriage to Elfrida that the events of our story take place.

  Now, when a hunter chased the boar, he wasn’t embarking on an easy quest. Wild boars are formidable quarry, and can turn on the hunter with lethal tusks and teeth, all backed up by massive weight and force. When a fox hunter dons the funny clothes and, cutting a dashing figure, gallops across the fields in pursuit of Reynard, it is unlikely that the fox will turn round and savage the hunter. The wild boar, however, now that’s something else.

  Edgar had been pursuing a particularly fearsome boar through the depths of Harewood Forest, and the weather changed during the hunt. The air became prickly and charged with static, and the sky grew darker with the distant rumbling of thunder. Now, when hunting the boar the hunter doesn’t rely on hounds to do the dirty business for him, he has to position himself, dismount, and face the beast whilst brandishing his boar spear. Usually there will be several hunters doing this, but Edgar found himself separated from the others and, as he valued his reputation for being a proper, macho sort of a king, he thought that he’d face the mighty boar alone.

  When the enraged boar, it’s great jaws foam-flecked, came thundering out of the trees, it was brought down by a lunge that was both lucky and skilful. The spear was thrust deep down the boar’s throat and the great beast lay twitching and shuddering on the forest floor. Edgar drew his horn ready to summon the others, but then there was a flash of lightning, an almighty rumble of thunder, and a shuffling and grunting sound, followed by an overwhelming stench. A wild boar has a strong smell, of course, and this contained elements of boar musk, but the overwhelming sense of it was the sweet, rotting stench of death.

  Edgar readied himself for another attack, but without his former sense of confidence. This time he felt a fear that threatened to engulf him; the sound of the creature, grunting and shuffling, was more like the sound of human feet than the passage of a wild boar. The sound turned and started to move away, and Edgar followed the clear track that it left behind.

  He entered a clearing, and in the clearing was the hut and kiln of a charcoal burner.

  Charcoal burners – those solitaries of the forest who live out their lives in the deep, dark woods. The other people. Those around whom people skirted – both contemptuous and afraid.

  The king strode into the clearing. The charcoal burner, seeing the royal figure, fell to his knees and muttered. The wind whipped up and there was another clap of thunder.

  ‘Where is it?’ roared the king.

  ‘Where – where is what, My Lord?’

  ‘The boar, you fool, where is it?’

  ‘’Tis no boar, My Lord, ’tis mine.’

  ‘I’ll have your head,’ bellowed the king, and, ignoring the kneeling charcoal burner, he strode up to the hut. The first drops of rain came whirling down through the wind as the king hammered on the door. There was a shuffling and grunting from inside, but no sign of the door opening. So, as a vivid streak of lightning forked across the sky and the rain tore down, the king kicked the door open.

  What lurched out wasn’t a boar, though it had a boar’s head. It had two legs, and a rotting body comprised of a terrible mixture of body pieces. It grasped the king’s head in great calloused hands and, as a bolt of lightning struck the charcoal kiln, twisted it and tore it off.

  The creature shuffled back into the hut, followed by the charcoal burner, and snuffled around a little bit. The smoke-blackened, wrinkled charcoal burner looked down at the creature as it moved around the hut. It was little more than a bag of flesh and bones; bits of body fixed together – bits of this, that and the other. Higgledy-piggledy-wiggledy. A brain animated by a spark of fire from a charcoal kiln; or fluxed into awareness and motion by an organism usually associated with rot and decay; or convulsed by lightning, the body jerked into a semblance of life.

  A creature made from the bones of unwary travellers, mixed with the remains of the inbred foresters and charcoal burners who had died deep in the forest and remained unburied, with no funerary words said over the corpses. And the creatures of the forest: the great boar, the brown bear, old Brock the badger.

  The charcoal burner dragged the body of the king by its legs into the hut and set to work.

  The thing that finally arrived back at the king’s hunting lodge was a parody of the king; surely taller, with a terrible smell. But then the king was pretty much a parody of himself anyway – a loudmouthed swaggering braggart. Possibly, Queen Elfrida, back at the court in Winchester, wouldn’t be so much more disgusted by this composite of corpses entering her bed, than by the real king; but she was saved any unpleasantness, because he died that night, choking on a fish bone. They were quick to shove him in his coffin, where the mixture of vapours caused the body to explode before burial.

  As for the queen, the next in line to the throne was Edward, Edgar’s first son before his marriage to Elfrida, so she travelled down to Corfe Castle in Dorset and murdered him, thus ensuring that her son Ethelred should become king, though he wasn’t really ready.

  Long after that time the modern town of Andover appeared; a town oddly disassociated from its surroundings, as if parts of a larger city had been plonked down into the countryside. The town has swallowed up the area of the haunting, but the haunting continues, and why not? During a thunderstorm a crackling, luminous, levitating, ghostly pig
is said to appear, and then disappear with the next flash of lightning. Many residents of Andover claim to have seen it, especially, for some reason, since the 1960s. In the 1930s the ladies of the WI, in It Happened in Hampshire, wrote that it first appeared during a thunderstorm, and is only seen on New Year’s Eve, but maybe it’s grown more active since then. I wouldn’t know, people always recount stories differently.

  More scary, I think, is the other ghost, or possibly something still living, or half alive, that is sometimes heard grunting or snuffling in nearby Harewood Forest. Best not go there at night.

  So now, if I find myself at a hog roast, gazing at the pig rotating on a spit, I tend to feel that this is an undignified way for a beast to end its days. Maybe if we’d faced the danger and excitement of the hunt it would be different. The animal, however, hadn’t been factory farmed, the biker butcher was conscientious with his sourcing, and it wasn’t being presented to us as fragments wrapped in cellophane, leaving the consumer unaware of its sentient origin. However, if all the animals we used and killed came back to haunt us – then there really would be no rest for the wicked.

  5

  BURNT HOUSE LANE

  Burnt House Lane in Bransgore isn’t the only lane in the country with that singular name – there are two more in Hampshire and a couple on the Isle of Wight, let alone all the others throughout England. People who live next to, or near, one of England’s Burnt House Lanes will have their own explanation for the name, and, being unaware that there are so many other Burnt House Lanes, will be certain that their own personal explanation is correct. Often this is the story of a house fire and a sad death, sometimes a murder and an arson, and not infrequently, a haunting.

  I wonder, though, if the ubiquity of the name is due to the past presence of brick kilns; certainly I know that quite a few of them did have brick kilns next to the lane.

  At one time England was dotted with brick kilns – strange conical chimneys where bricks made from the local clay were fired, something that, strangely, was brought home to me in airspace above India. I remember the time I was flying into Amritsar, in the Indian Punjab, and as I peered out of the window of the Turkmenistan Airways jet, as it bumpily circled the old city, I was looking for a glimpse of the Golden Temple. I was struck by a feeling of déjà vu, which had nothing to do with the temple, but something to do with scores of strangely shaped buildings emitting plumes of smoke.