Hampshire and Isle of Wight Ghost Tales

by Michael O'Leary

  But what of the elm tree?

  Well, this is the strangest thing. It always seemed to remain as a young vigorous tree, though around it other elm trees grew to stately height, passed away, and were replaced by yet more. This was remarked on only by the most local people, folk who counted the passing years in that little place, so the tree didn’t draw any great attention until nearly a century after the events that I’ve just described.

  It was then that the tree started to groan. This was not an average sort of a groan; this was a groan that was described in a pamphlet written in 1742 as a ‘groan like a human creature in the agonies of death’. The pamphlet was entitled:

  The Hampshire Wonder;

  or The

  Groaning Tree.

  BEING

  A full and true Account of the GROAN-

  ING TREE, in the New Foreft, near

  Limimgton in Hampshire.

  WHICH Has been heard for fome Time paft by Thou-

  Fands of People, who come from all Parts

  To hear this amazing and portentous Noife.

  This pamphlet went on to say that the groans ‘are so terrible and shocking to human nature, that few who hear them have power to stir from the place till proper cordials have been administered to revive their sinking spirits and confounded imaginations’.

  The pamphlet doesn’t say whether the locals were managing to make a few pence selling the aforementioned cordials – possibly containing some smuggled spirits. It does, however, go on to further describe the groans:

  They resemble in some manner the groans of a dying person, but withal so hollow and stupendously deep, that they seem to proceed from the inmost centre of the earth at least, and are so terrifying to the ear of human mortals, that it astonishes the very clergy themselves who have been to listen to it.

  But then maybe the lives of people during the life of the tree had known much to groan about.

  In 1750 a visit was made to the tree by Frederick, Prince of Wales. Oh what fun he and his courtiers were going to have. Edward King, in 1879, wrote, ‘While there, the hoax of the groaning tree was played off on the simple rustics, by some of the facetious courtiers who attended the Prince’.

  Oh indeed? What happened next has been preserved in the oral lore of the Forest. One of the ‘facetious courtiers’ positioned himself behind the tree and commenced to groan. He soon stopped. The tree took up the groaning, but did so with such terrible desolation that the courtier must have attempted to flee. ‘Attempted’, however, is the operative word. In spite of a wide-ranging search, the courtier was never seen again. Some said that he was driven quite out of his wits, whatever wits he may have had, and became a feral mad man living in the depths of the Forest, like old King Nebuchadnezzar. Some said, however, that he never escaped the tree.

  In an attempt to find out the cause of the groaning, a hole was bored in the trunk:

  Then in the trunk they bored a hole:

  This stopped the groaning evermore:

  For through the rift the imprisoned soul

  Flew out; it could not stand a bore.

  So wrote Henry Doman, the Lymington poet, in 1867 (Doman is as fine a poet as Lymington’s ever managed to produce).

  After this the tree was uprooted. It was said that amidst the roots, petrified into elm wood, was the face of a human, a face contorted into a grimace of horror.

  But maybe that’s only a story.

  7

  BEWARE CHALK PIT

  There are rather a lot of headless horses in Hampshire – and not infrequently the rider, or the coachman of the carriage they are pulling, is also lacking a head – though sometimes they have the aforementioned head tucked underneath their arm.

  At Copythorne in the New Forest we have an example of all of these; a coach driven by a headless coachman with his head under his arm, and pulled by headless horses. Further south in the Forest, Dame Alice Lisle, who was beheaded for harbouring fugitives from the Monmouth rebellion, is transported on dark nights from Moyles Court to Ellingham churchyard by a coach with no driver, pulled by headless horses.

  The phenomenon still lives in the imaginations of children. Portsmouth is overlooked by a very singular-looking hill, Portsdown Hill, and when I’ve been storytelling in schools in Paulsgrove, Cosham and Hilsea, areas around Portsdown Hill, children have told me about the headless horse that gallops around the hill on wild and windy nights.

  As far as I know, though, Farley Chamberlayne is the only place that has headless horses leaping through wormholes. It must be a wormhole, because it joins two distant places – and if it is highly fashionable nowadays to bring mentions of dark matter and other choice phrases pinched from quantum physics into narrative, well I can do it too! If I don’t understand it, that makes me no different to anyone else.

  Farley Chamberlayne is quite a remote place, and walking through the avenue of yew trees I’ve felt that I’m a long way inland; but, on reaching St John’s church a view suddenly reveals itself; a view way over the Solent to the Isle of Wight, with the chalk ridge of the Island running the whole width of the distant horizon. Hampshire is hardly the Himalayas, but a hill is high only in relation to its surroundings, and Farley Chamberlayne is perched high and airy.

  Inside the church there are wonders – a weathervane with a snake and an arrow has been brought inside, a mass dial – a sundial where you used to place your finger to show the time of the next mass – and depictions of some strange figures.

  There is also a memorial plaque to one Thrift Smith.

  It reads:

  SACRED

  TO THE MEMORY OF THRIFT,

  WIFE OF JAMES SMITH, FARLEY,

  AND YOUNGEST DAUGHTER OF

  JOHN HEDDERICK ESQ. PLEBHOLE

  FIFESHIRE, NORTH BRITAIN,

  WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE

  THE 2ND JANUARY, 1815,

  AGED 27 YEARS.

  Poor Thrift died in childbirth far from home, though she was loved and missed by her bereft husband. Plebhole, as written on the plaque, is Blebhole, sometimes known as Blebo, a small settlement not so far from Saint Andrews in Fife. In Blebhole there is a legend of a headless horseman, all dressed in black, who gallops fearsomely around Blebo Craigs and Kemback Woods. Thrift took the memory of her home way down south to distant Hampshire, and as she passed on, the spectres of home were drawn to her by her homesickness, as death made physical distance irrelevant.

  The headless horseman leaps from his dark tunnel, passes St John’s church, and gallops down the avenue of yews, before leaping again into the darkness that flings him back to Fife.

  But if we can avoid wormholes to distant Scottish universes, and remain in Hampshire, let’s further explore the area around Farley Chamberlayne.

  Farley Chamberlayne sits at the edge of what is now a country park: Farley Mount Country Park. This is a glorious area of downland and woodland, centred round an extraordinary, pyramidal monument. The pyramid is hollow, and inside, on the north wall, there is a plaque with an inscription that reads:

  Underneath lies buried a horse, the property of Paulet St John Esq., that in the month of September 1733 leaped into a chalk pit twenty-five feet deep a foxhunting with his master on his back and in October 1734 he won the Hunters Plate on Worthy Downs and was rode by his owner and was entered in the name of ‘Beware Chalk Pit’.

  This doesn’t quite tell the whole story, at least not the way I heard it.

  Yes, man and horse fell to the bottom of the pit, and the horse saved the man; and it’s also true that the horse went on to win the Hunters Plate, whilst ridden by his owner – but the owner had changed.

  When the horse fell to the bottom of the pit, he was lamed, and the great huntsman really wasn’t so sentimental. The horse was no good to him now, so he allowed his groom, Joseph, to buy the horse at a knockdown price – something Joseph only did because he loved that horse.

  The horse was able to carry Joseph, though he couldn’t go beyond a walk, down to the pub at Hurs
ley. One time Joseph had a few drinks, and got into talk about horses. Someone made fun of Joseph’s horse and said he should be called ‘Beware Chalk Pit’, and – you know how it is, the beer flows, the tongue is loosened and impossibilities become possibilities – Joseph said his horse could beat any other horse hands down. ‘Go on then.’ Bets were taken, and Joseph was committed to the races that were to be held later that week on Worthy Downs.

  As Joseph’s horse ambled home, and as the cold breeze from the Solent started to blow up Joseph’s nose, blasting the alcohol fumes out of his ears, he started to realise what he had done.

  ‘Oh – poor old horse – oh what have I done? I just couldn’t stand them lummoxes laughing at you. Poor old horse.’

  Just then Joseph was startled to see a large white horsehead pass by. No body. No legs. No rider. Just a head.

  ‘Good drop of beer the landlady keeps,’ thought Joseph. Then a large white headless horse, ridden by a large headless rider wearing a scarlet hunting coat with enormous silver buttons at the back, drew level.

  Joseph touched his forelock.

  ‘Your honour seems to have lost his head,’ he remarked.

  ‘No I haven’t, you bloody gurt fool,’ said the head from underneath the rider’s arm. It wasn’t a pretty head; it had a mouth that went from one side to the other; sharp, pointy teeth; a skew-whiff broken nose; and two large, saucer-shaped eyes that shone like lanterns.

  ‘Begging your pardon, your honour,’ said Joseph, ‘but as your head isn’t on your body, I didn’t know.’

  ‘Well you should look before you opens your gurt, blubberin’ mouth,’ said the head from under the arm.

  Joseph began to resent being spoken to in such a manner.

  ‘Well, I’d think that any good Christian man should keep his head on his shoulders.’

  ‘And I’d think any good Christian man wouldn’t ride a lame horse,’ said the head, at which words Joseph’s nag broke out into a fine trot.

  ‘Now, isn’t that better?’ said the head.

  ‘Why, it is, sir, it is,’ shouted Joseph, as the horse broke into a canter.

  ‘So, Master Joseph,’ bellowed the head, ‘it’ll be a race.’

  ‘That it’ll be sir, a fine steeplechase, and – and – Beware Chalk Pit is the finest horse in all the land.’

  The phantom rider lifted up his head with both hands, stuck it fair and square on his shoulders, and whipped up his headless horse. Neck to neck, though not head to head, the two horses galloped down the avenue of yew trees below St John’s church, as, with a whinnying like a thousand screams, the headless horseman of Blebo, time as irrelevant to him as distance, leaped from his writhing, squirming wormhole, and joined the steeplechase, all galloping headlong down the hill. As they leaped onto a moonbeam, they were joined by the headless coachman of Copythorne, and then Dame Alice Lisle herself, having taken the place of her non-existent coachman, was shouting on the headless horses of Moyle’s Court, and then the headless horse of Portsdown Hill, followed closely by Hirondelle, the magical horse of Sir Bevois of Hampton, with the ghostly horses of Red Rice near Andover at the rear, but narrowing the gap.

  With Joseph and the red-coated rider leading the pack, the steeplechase whooped down a moonbeam towards Tennyson Down (though it had yet to be given that name, because Tennyson was yet to be born) on the Isle of Wight.

  And it’s Joseph at the head, but no, the head is ahead, though the horse is behind; and it’s Dame Alice galloping up on the inside, closely followed by the headless horse of Portsdown Hill, both of them passing the Copythorne Coach and the Red Rice riders. Hirondelle is dropping behind – that’s what comes of having a French name; but Dame Alice can’t pass Beware Chalk Pit; and they are thundering along Tennyson Down, to leap onto a moonbeam shining over The Needles, and into the final lap, up and over the farms and fields and rivers and streams and cities and villages and woods and copses of Hampshire, and onto the chalk ridge of Farley Mount, and as the hooves thunder onto the turf, the head of the headless horse of the headless horseman is just ahead of Beware Chalk Pit.

  The red-coated horseman stood up in his stirrups, lifted his head high above his shoulders, and whooped, ‘To me. Race to me!’

  ‘No, that’s not right, your honorific,’ shouted Joseph. ‘Your horse’s head was a head ahead of Beware Chalk Pit’s head; but if that head had been where it ought to have been, then you’d have been a head behind.’

  ‘Don’t go losing your head over this, Master Joseph,’ said the rider, ‘take him to the races at Worthy Downs,’ and then there was a scattering as the Copythorne coach headed west, and Dame Alice headed south, and Hirondelle headed east for Southampton, and the headless horse of Portsdown Hill headed east for Portsmouth, and the Red Rices headed north, and the headless horseman of Plebo and his glistening black horse headed for their wormhole and faraway Fife.

  Well, Joseph rode home, sober as a judge now, albeit a drunken judge. His wife didn’t believe a word of his story and gave him a wallop round the pate with the frying pan.

  But Beware Chalk Pit was in tiptop condition, and when Joseph took him to the races on Worthy Downs he came in way ahead of any other horse, and given that he was a complete outsider, anyone who had any money on him won a fortune.

  Maybe it was really one of those punters who built the monument on Farley Mount, rather than Paulet St John esq., but the Farley Mount incident is remembered in a song that I’ve heard in a few pubs over the years. I can’t remember it all, but I remember the chorus:

  Beware Chalk Pit, Beware Chalk Pit,

  as you go galloping o’er the downs,

  Beware Chalk Pit.

  8

  GHOST ISLAND

  There are areas of England that are particularly rich in archaeological discoveries – and you wonder what was special about those particular places. Then, if you look further, you will find that nearby there is a university with an archaeology department that specialises in whatever period is relevant – and they have carried out a lot of archaeological digs in their own locality. In other words, the cluster of discoveries is defined by the seeker, rather than by the distribution of sites.

  It is the same with ghosts. The Isle of Wight has sometimes been called ‘Ghost Island’ because of all the recorded hauntings, but on closer inspection you will find that enterprising ghost hunters have sought them out, and set up tours and ghost walks – the relevant factor being the Island’s status as a holiday destination.

  I’ve written about the most famous of these in Hampshire and Isle of Wight Folk Tales, but of course there are plenty more. Personally, I’m not given to trailing around after the paranormal – it all gets a bit obsessive – and people do seem to be able to conjure up poltergeists when it might just as easily be a draught; or Grey Ladies at dusk, when shifting shadows so easily play tricks on the eyes. There are places, though, where I have felt that eerie feeling – and just wondered what is out there. One of those places is the long south-west coast of the Isle of Wight – the straightest stretch of coast on the Island’s roughly diamond shape, with all those lonely beaches between St Catherine’s Point and Freshwater Bay.

  It’s all very popular for windsurfing, kitesurfing, canoeing and the like – but it can be strangely bleak and eerie at night. One late evening I was taking a long walk up the coast, and ahead of me I saw a red light and a green light, like the port and starboard lights of a boat, but they seemed to be on the beach. I assumed I would catch up with them and find out what they were, but I couldn’t. They were always the same distance ahead of me – it didn’t matter whether I tried to run, or whether I stopped dead. I even wondered if they were lights on some sort of a buggy, but there were no tracks in the sand. I did feel spooked out; not in the grip of some terror, but odd, off kilter, shifted sideways.

  But then strange lights seem to be a feature of the Isle of Wight. Wendy Boase, in her book The Folklore of Hampshire and The Isle of Wight, wrote about a doctor and his wife who saw the
whole landscape lit up as if they’d entered a time-slip: ‘The hedges and fields were a sea of luminous brightness. Across the road ahead of them were figures carrying flaming torches, but there was no sound and no colour except that of the lights themselves.’ I do notice, though, that when such a scene is to be made believable, the person who recounts it must belong to a thoroughly respectable profession. Thus, the ghostly Grey Lady in the old hotel must be seen by an off-duty policeman, or the ghostly Roman soldiers that were seen crossing the road in Southampton must be described to us by a bank manager. If they are seen by a storyteller, or a professional ale taster, people tend to think that it’s all made up. This in spite of recent revelations concerning the truth-telling capabilities of some of those ‘respectable’ professions.

  Anyhow, on this long stretch of coast there would, at one time, have been plenty of smugglers’ lights – and plenty of ghost stories to keep meddling people away when cargoes were being landed. There was also Atherfield Ledge, Brook Ledge, and Brighstone Ledge, all rocky outcrops that have, over the years, claimed ship after ship, and life after life. This has led to many reports of ghost ships, no doubt with their port and starboard lights a-twinkling, or disappearing down beneath the waves.

  In 1839 Abraham Elder wrote about one of these, demonstrating in his book Tales and Legends of the Isle of Wight that he loved a good tale.

  Elder tells us that along with his friend Mr Winterblossom and their guide, Ragged Jack the antiquary, they were talking to an old, blind corkhead. (Isle of Wighters of several generations standing are known as corkheads, or caulk heads – but for an explanation of that you’ll have to read Hampshire and Isle of Wight Folk Tales by Ragged Jack’s heir assumptive, Michael O’Leary.)