Hampshire and Isle of Wight Ghost Tales

by Michael O'Leary

  ‘What are those?’ I asked my Punjabi companions.

  ‘Brick kilns.’

  Well – of course – these were buildings so ubiquitous they were hardly worth noticing. But I couldn’t work out why I felt such a sense of déjà vu – until, that is, I remembered a painting displayed in Southampton Art Gallery – a painting that took as its viewpoint an imagined aerial position – a picture of a rapidly expanding Southampton painted by Phillip Brannon in 1856 – and it is dotted with brick kilns, just like Amritsar was as I looked out of the plane window.

  Anyhow, Burnt House Lane in Bransgore used to have a brick kiln, and in It Happened in Hampshire Beddington and Christy wrote, in 1936, of a little boy who used to be seen running up the road, ‘crying bitterly, but never allowing himself to be touched. He always disappeared in some bushes in the pool of a disused brickyard, near where, it is said, a wicked couple lived who drowned their children because they could not afford to keep them!’

  Ah – the wicked couple.

  But then Bransgore, and particularly adjoining Thorney Hill, was a place for the marginalised – it was also well known as the home of New Forest Gypsies – and brick kiln workers, like charcoal burners, had always had a touch of the ‘other’ about them; they still do in India. If the boy had drowned in the pond, in a ghastly accident, isn’t it easy to imagine the suspicions of the more comfortably off, suspicions partly motivated by an unconscious feeling of guilt, blaming the parents and compounding their misery.

  And he’s not the only child haunting Burnt House Lane. There’s the little Gipsy girl, who suffered terrible burns when her pinny caught fire. Alice Gillington wrote about her. Gillington was an early twentieth-century collector of Gypsy songs and folklore, and also a writer of the kind of story poems popular at the time, and her description of the girl’s death, in a Country Life article, is rather shocking in its unexpected lack of sentimentality – with its prosaic details – the baby not letting go in time, the girl’s sister never having the chance to say goodbye:

  As we went our way up the road, Lily was telling me about her little sister, Rosy, who was burned to death last year. It all happened so suddenly; there was no time to help her. The mother was out with her flower baskets and the children were at play at home. Rosy was making ‘fags’ out of pieces of paper, ‘to smoke’ the child said. All at once, as she was holding her papers at the fire, a bit of one of them got ablaze and dropped onto her pinny. Lily had the baby in her arms at the moment, and the baby wouldn’t let go so that she could undo Rosy’s pinafore in time. Rosy had screamed that the fire was going to her head, and rushed out into the garden. A neighbour, hearing the screams, ran out to the child, wouldn’t let her indoors for fear her whole cottage would catch alight, but laid her down on the stone doorstep and threw a sack over her. But that didn’t put the fire out. Then she threw something else over her and at last quenched the blaze. But the fire had done its work; and when the father came home from his labour and the mother from her flower-hawking, nothing could be done for Rosy. She was terribly burnt and died shortly after, in hospital.

  ‘Did you say good-bye to her?’

  ‘No I didn’t. They took her away d’rectly mother came ’ome, and I never saw her no more.’

  And then – there’s an adult ghost in the lane – but he’s just a shade – ‘a vapour thing’ – that ‘swiffles’ across the road. Alice Gillington wrote about him too, when describing the fear of a local woman:

  She was afraid to pass the sand-pit, that deep sand-pit fringed with firs, because of ‘that there vapour thing,’ that ‘swiffled’ across the road between the sand-pit and the Seven Firs. What the story was, no one knew, or no one cared to tell. Foresters never give you a direct answer if they can avoid it, especially to a stranger. Even in the simplest matters this particular caution and superstition shows itself in evasive looks and lying answers. The gipsies, on the contrary, will tell you straight that there has always been ‘something to be seen’ thereabouts. One or two of them have seen the man in black in the half-light of a winter’s morning, when they were coming out of a by-lane with a holly cart.

  I was fascinated by this anecdote, so I thought I’d ask Geoff about it, because Geoff knows a thing or two about the Forest.

  I’d like to describe Geoff in a way that would depict him as a romantic denizen of the New Forest; to say that he was a New Forest commoner, or that he was a New Forest Romani, or that his ancestors had lived in the depths of the Forest for generations; but that just isn’t the case. A lot of people who have wandered the Forest for years have no origin there – well, I suppose that I’m a prime example, living in inner-city Southampton since the 1970s yet constantly roaming the Forest – but always, in a strange sort of way, a tourist. Indeed, nowadays, like most of the people who live in the Forest.

  Anyway, Geoff is a retired postman from Camberwell. He’s a keen cyclist, and all his life he’s cycled the Forest. Now, in retirement, he spends more time there than he does at home, frequently bivouacking out in the woods. Geoff is a practical man, and not one to go on about ghosts and stuff, but he’s inhabited the Forest, him and his bike, in all seasons and all weathers, and all the old Forest people know and accept him.

  Meeting Geoff one summer’s evening in the garden of the Crown at Bransgore, I pressed him for any knowledge of the Burnt House Lane shade.

  ‘It’s whoever you want it to be,’ he said enigmatically. ‘Well you call yourself a storyteller, you should know, it’s the one who tells the tale.’

  ‘What are you on about? How much have you drunk that you have to go all woo woo on me?’

  ‘I do know about that ghost, but you’ll have to listen, and stop being a smart-arse.’

  Where do I start the story?

  Often Geoff just pushed his bike, sort of leaned on it, listening to the wheels click-click and just letting the motion of walking and pushing take him. It was evening, getting dark, and he was ambling down Burnt House Lane. There are a lot of houses along the lane now, though it still has a rural feel to it, and there are also areas of woodland and compounds full of bits and pieces, including a Southern Gas sub-station.

  ‘There was a boy running, crying, and he was saying, “I never, I never’’,’ said Geoff.

  Geoff called out ‘Wait’ to the boy, though he immediately knew it was a ghost. He felt cold – suddenly cold – that cold in the bones that makes your heart flutter and shifts your bowels a bit – but it was a child, and it seemed to be a terrible injustice that a child should be a ghost – that a child should remain glued to the earth and locality.

  ‘Wait,’ Geoff called out again. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I never,’ said the boy, and his face seemed white and featureless, and his eyes looked like dark, ragged holes.

  ‘You never did what? Who said you did?’

  The boy disappeared through a hedge into a hollow at the edge of the woods.

  ‘’S all right, Billy,’ said the burnt girl, ‘see, that man’ll tell us a story.’

  And then the hollow was full of children, and they were clamouring and shouting and asking for a story, and Geoff grabbed his bike and pedalled away up the lane as fast as he could – which wasn’t as fast as a shade swiffling across the road – but Geoff didn’t want to be that shade.

  And no more do I – so I’ll keep the story second-hand, and not investigate too closely. But I can’t work out whether it’s a sad story or whether earthly pain has been ended; whether the children are children, or whether ghosts are real, or whether Burnt House Lane is really haunted – but I know that the shade could be anyone.

  6

  THE GROANING TREE

  I’ve heard the groan in the Forest. There are all sorts of things that can make a groaning sound – a deer barking, the limbs of a beech tree rubbing together in the wind, the sounds of nature red in tooth and claw; an owl swooping on a shrew, a fox snatching a rabbit, a weasel raiding a nest.

  There is, however, a deeper groan, pre
sumably something tree related because of the arboreal, ‘woody’ sound of it. The Forest doesn’t always feel benign: sometimes unsettling feelings, thoughts and sounds seem to emanate from the tree line; and I’ve already mentioned Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald’s comments about a feeling of hostility that he sometimes felt in the Forest.

  The story that particularly describes the singular Forest groan is that of the Groaning Tree of South Baddesley.

  Now this tree was an elm, and sadly we don’t see many of them anymore; though some of the stark skeletons left over from the ravages of Dutch elm disease still stand in field corners. The elm tree has always been associated with death; maybe because they were once favoured as the tree from which to hang people, the elm is sometimes called ‘the hanging tree’, or maybe because coffins were made out of elm because it was good at resisting the effects of damp. But I’d better start the story at the beginning.

  Once upon a time, to be precise a 1648 sort of a time, there lived, in the hamlet of South Baddesley, a cottager. Life was hard, Civil War raging throughout the land brought hardship and hunger, as well as suspicion and division. The cottager was getting on in years, for those times anyway, and scratching a living from his patch of land made for a difficult and precarious life. Sometimes, at night, he’d lie on his back and let out a groan. Though his body was exhausted, his sleep afforded him no rest because of the constant ache of hunger and his mind always being full of the worries of survival.

  One night he lay in the darkness; he’d raked the ashes over the fire, and outside his cottage an owl called from a tree.

  Suddenly there was a thunderous banging on the door.

  Glory be – what was this? The cottager heaved his reluctant body out of his hard bed and stumbled to the door. He opened it, and there stood a tall man wearing a black cloak and hood – all that was visible of his shadowed face was the end of a long nose, pointing out into the moonlight.

  The cottager’s heart filled with dread at the sight of this apparition, and he knew by the quality of the cloak that this was a gentleman. The trouble was, you never knew if it was a Royalist gentleman or a Parliamentarian gentleman, and it always seemed that ordinary folk could find themselves dragged into trouble with no intention, and no escape.

  ‘What is it, sir?’ said the cottager, automatically touching his forelock.

  The figure produced a note from his cloak.

  ‘I want you to take this note to the king,’ he croaked.

  The king? What foolishness was this?

  ‘The king, sir? How can …’

  The figure produced a purse full of coins with the other hand, though it looked more like a claw than a hand.

  ‘This is for you now, and there’ll be more for you on your return.’

  This was a fortune for the cottager; there was no question of refusal.

  ‘But the king, sir …’

  ‘The king is in Carisbrooke Castle. Give him the note.’

  The cottager didn’t have the first idea how he could give a note to the king, nor what all this could mean, but he had a purse full of coins, and the stranger told him to take the road to Lymington – so he hid the purse in a secret place up the chimney, and proceeded down the old sunken lane.

  A short way down the holloway he stopped, glanced around, and started to tuck the note into the roots of a tree that was growing out of the bank.

  ‘I said take the note to the king, you knave,’ hissed a voice, and the terrified cottager looked round to see the tall hooded figure standing directly behind him.

  ‘Yes sir, yes sir.’

  This time he thought he’d do as he was told, and headed for Lymington.

  It was early morning when he arrived, and – the strangest thing – looking over the reed beds towards the mouth of the Lymington river he saw no boats bobbing around, no people starting to move and get the fires going, no sign of life. He entered Lymington, and the town was eerily deserted, silent and empty. Down he went to a jetty and standing at the end of the jetty, wings outstretched, was a cormorant.

  It looked at the cottager. The cottager looked at the cormorant.

  ‘Get on my back,’ said the cormorant.

  ‘No,’ said the cottager.

  ‘GET ON MY BACK,’ said the cormorant.

  The cottager did so.

  The cormorant then took a run down the jetty, and launched itself into the air, with the cottager sitting astride it, as though riding a flying horse.

  ‘Which way is it to Carisbrooke?’ squawked the cormorant over its shoulder, though I’m quite sure cormorants don’t have shoulders. The cottager didn’t know, he’d never seen a map in his life, and he’d certainly never flown before. The sea was beneath him, the chalk ridge of the Isle of Wight was ahead of him: but how was he to know where Carisbrooke was?

  They flew into low-lying cloud and lost visibility.

  ‘Which way is south?’ croaked the cormorant. How was the cottager to know?

  Then they dropped out of the cloud and the cottager could see blue water, a town, and a castle. The castle was a bit ramshackle, and there was a windmill built upon a mound – having never been to Carisbrooke the cottager wasn’t to know it was the wrong castle. There was water, obviously the Solent, and there was a town, obviously Carisbrooke.

  ‘There ’tis!’ shouted the cottager, and the cormorant swooped down low across Southampton Water and into Southampton’s rather ruinous castle. It deposited the cottager onto his bottom on a patch of grass, flew up again, and perched on one of the sails of the windmill.

  To the cottager the approaching miller looked very important.

  ‘Are you the king, your highness?’ asked the cottager.

  ‘Are you bloody mad?’ replied the miller.

  ‘I’ve a letter for the king,’ said the cottager.

  So the miller took the cottager to the colonel in charge of the Parliamentarian garrison at Southampton. The colonel had a look at the note, and things did not go well for the cottager. The letter was from Scottish Royalists who were plotting with the king (who was imprisoned in a rather open and liberal fashion in Carisbrooke Castle) to invade England. It was the discovery of this note that lead to the defeat of the Scots at the Battle of Preston, and sealed the fate of King Charles I. Not everyone knows that – neither does everyone know that after chopping Charles’ head off, they stitched it back on again, so he’d look nice and tidy in his coffin.

  As for the cottager – plainly it was the gallows for him.

  Now, in Southampton, there was, until recently, a raised stretch of land near the docks, called The Platform. It had once been very important, a place where visiting dignitaries would parade up and down, where the local gentry would walk of an evening – and where the gallows used to be. I know of it because, when I was a council gardener, our mess hut was on The Platform. Southampton isn’t a city that showcases its history; it is possible to visit and see nothing but retail outlets (that’s what shops are called nowadays), but in this part of the old town there’s masses of history: the old city walls, Gods House Tower, the oldest bowling green in the world, St Julian’s almshouses in Winkle Street, the medieval Merchant’s House, the Wool House, the Cloth Hall, Cuckoo Lane, Catchecold Tower, the Tudor House, St Michael’s church, Town Quay – the list can go on. The Platform, however, seems to have slipped from notice, and during recent road development it was all torn away, leaving its only memory in the name of a nearby pub, the Platform Tavern.

  So, in the 1640s, there was, on The Platform, a very fine gallows – and there had been much work for it in that turbulent decade. It was made out of elm, that wood that neither splits nor rots, the wood that carries the symbolism of mortality.

  So: the noose was put around the cottager’s neck and the hangman was ready to drop the trapdoor.

  ‘Now’s the time to say your last words,’ growled the hangman.

  The poor cottager looked down at the crowd – and amongst them he saw a tall black-clad figure, with a cloak and a hoo
d, and the end of a long pointy nose sticking out of the shadow.

  The cottager let out a terrible groan – a groan that told of the unfairness and helplessness of being caught up in the affairs of the powerful, a groan that told of the hardness and iniquities of his life, a groan that told of loss and humiliation; of horror and fear. As this desolate groan escaped his lips, the cords fell from his wrists, and the gallows started to vibrate. The executioner fell from the wooden platform, and the crowd screamed. The cottager clutched the gallows tree – and it took off, vertically, like a rocket. Up it flew, up into the clouds, where it levelled off, before it went into reverse thrust like a budget airline plane coming into Southampton International Airport. It then descended into South Baddesley, and stuck itself into the ground behind the cottager’s cottage. He staggered inside and flung himself onto the bed.

  The next morning came, and the cottager woke up with the most terrible headache. He looked on the floor and saw the empty cider flagon.

  ‘Oh my Lord,’ he moaned, crawling out of bed and spitting into the fireplace. But then he felt up into that chimney cavity, and there it was – the purse full of money!

  He stumbled out of the cottage, and looking behind it to where – surely – the gallows had embedded itself into the ground, there was an elm tree.

  Well, after this the cottager prospered in a quiet sort of a way, and he lived a long life. He managed to keep his head down throughout the remaining shenanigans of the Civil War, and then through the Interregnum and the Restoration; continuing to simply live his life. Some put his quiet prosperity down to an involvement with smuggling out of the creeks and inlets between Lymington and Needs Ore Point, at the mouth of the Beaulieu river, but if that was the case, no one knew who he could be working with.