Hampshire and Isle of Wight Ghost Tales

by Michael O'Leary

  ‘I don’t like talking about the ghost I saw,’ said the old man.

  ‘Did it look tall?’ asked Abraham Elder.

  ‘Very lofty, and she looked quite white like.’

  Aha – a she. Questioned further the old man said he saw her ‘some way out to sea, when I was smuggling in a boat. I have never been smuggling since, and never would again.’

  ‘Could you see her legs at all?’ asked Ragged Jack, who had heard the story before.

  ‘Legs! No, what should she do with her legs, unless she were ashore?’

  ‘Pray, what attitude was she in? What did she seem to be doing?’ asked Elder, walking into a trap.

  ‘She was in stays,’ was the reply.

  ‘Ah,’ said Ragged Jack, developing a theme, ‘I suppose some unfortunate creature that died of love and disappointment.’

  ‘Dear, dear, dear,’ said the blind man, ‘I do not see how that could be. Whoever heard of a revenue cutter dying of love and disappointment?’

  Well, Ragged Jack has had his fun, but then the old man tells his story. He tells how one evening, when he was young and he had his sight, and with the weather starting to kick up, he set off on a smuggling mission with two companions. Out at sea the storm really hit them. Showing no sail, and with their boat half full of water, they thought themselves lost. Then one of the men screamed out, ‘We are run down!’ and there was a great cutter, close-hauled, driving right on to them. ‘Her bowsprit seemed to bury itself deep into the water, and a heavy sea tumbled into her, and then her bow tossed up into the air, so near that her bowsprit appeared to be right over us. We gave ourselves over entirely, when she suddenly luffed up.’ She was tacking into the wind to avoid the smugglers’ boat, and the men shouted, ‘We are saved’, assuming she would soon be on the other tack. But as her head turned into the wind, there was a terrible rattling of stays and sails – she couldn’t complete the manoeuvre and was pushed backward by the tempest, her stern went under water, and down she went, stern first. The next sea rolled over her.

  Ah, sir, many a time before we wished them all [the excise men] drowned – many a curse we had heaped on them; but when their turn actually came, we felt for them just, if you will believe me sir, as if they had been our own children. Sir, they put down their helm just for the chance of saving our lives. Who would have expected that from men who earned their livelihood by hunting us down? They were fine fellows, though, that they were, though they sailed in a cutter.

  But business is business, the weather cleared up, and the smugglers completed their journey to Cherbourg. They loaded their cargo, and with fine weather, they sailed for home.

  Nearing home what should they see but the self-same revenue cutter, hove to before them:

  We could see the people on board just as plain as we ever saw anybody in our lives before. There was one man standing at the helm in a pea-jacket, and the skipper in a gold-laced cap, walking up and down the deck, looking as comfortable and as important as if he never had been drowned at all.

  The skipper lifted a speaking trumpet and hailed them.

  ‘Oh, such a dismal, hollow sound; it was more like the rolling of a distant clap of thunder than the voice of a living being; but then, sir, you must consider that the poor fellow must have been dead at that time somewhat more than six-and-thirty hours.’

  The smugglers crowded on all sail and fled, all the time expecting a cannonball through their rigging, but there was nothing. When they looked back there was no cutter: ‘In the spot where she was lying there was just a bit of mist.’ Nearer to St Catherine’s Point they saw the cutter again, a shadow in the rain that had set in, and in panic they cut away their tubs of smuggled spirits, and finally got home safely. They never went to sea again.

  Now, what would the moral of that story be? Don’t be considerate at sea? Trying to avoid collisions is a mistake? Drown smugglers, or you’re liable to drown yourself? But then, what does a moral do to a story? It narrows it, takes away complexity and ambiguity; turns it into a sermon.

  *

  I don’t know if there’s a moral to the following story. It’s a story that was told to me by a corkhead called Charlie, and he was certainly a man who liked a good tale. In some ways he expressed that through his leisure activity, which was being a Civil War re-enactor. I met him when I was telling stories at an event in Basingstoke, and he was quite a grizzled old bloke, one of the few re-enactors who looked like he really came from the seventeenth century. Charlie no longer lived on the Island, but he remained very fond of it, and to talk to him you’d hardly know he’d spent the last forty years living in Basingstoke. Sadly he died a couple of years ago; he had suggested that we write down his Isle of Wight stories, and like so many things, we never managed to get round to it until it was too late. I remember this one though, and if he was stretching the truth, or putting himself into a legend that he’d heard from someone else, well – don’t blame me.

  Charlie was a young man in the early 1960s, and one night he’d been for a pint or three at Freshwater and was pedalling back to the village of Brook in a wobbly fashion, down the Military Road, which follows the south-west coast of the Island; past Freshwater Cliff and Compton Bay, Shippard’s Chine, Hanover Point and the fossil forest – with a big moon hanging in the sky and the sound of the sea. He wandered into the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin at Brook, in order to sit on a gravestone, roll up a cigarette and watch the stars and the glorious moon. Just then the church bell struck: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 – and a pause – 13.

  Thirteen? Surely not. Then he looked up at the church and his befuddled brain took a certain amount of time to register that the church was different. It was older. St Mary’s church is a fine Victorian building, built in 1864 to replace the old medieval church that burnt down in the previous year. Charlie was gazing at the old church. He looked round at the gravestones; they were decorated with pictures of mermaids, anchors, ships in full sail, seashells and sea serpents. Then he heard the sound of the beating of a drum, and as he sat frozen on the gravestone, the figure of a mariner hove into view. At least it looked like a mariner, or a monster – or a drowned mariner. It was beating the drum, it had on the clothes of an eighteenth-century sailor, it was all festooned with seaweed and sea wrack, there were limpet shells on its skin, and its eyes shone in the darkness like pale yellow lanterns.

  Behind this apparition there appeared two more, and they were carrying between them something sagging and dripping water, something wrapped in sailcloth.

  Then, behind them, there was a drowned mariner playing a mournful tune on a squeezy box, and behind him a pale woman who moved slowly and gracefully, as if her body was animated by the movement of the sea.

  The first mariner started to speak, in a voice from both close by and far away: ‘We commit this body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the Sea shall give up her dead …’

  Then they lowered the body into a grave that was adorned with a headstone decorated with a carving of a mermaid.

  The woman offered her pale hand to Charlie, who sat like a stone carving himself, frozen with terror.

  Come take my hand,

  We’ll leave the land,

  Come down with me,

  To the wine, dark sea.

  Come down the Chine,

  Forever mine.

  Finally a noise seemed to issue forth from Charlie’s throat; he said it was as if he was somewhere else hearing himself scream, and as he ran from the graveyard, the church became its Victorian self. He fell over his bicycle, hauled himself back on to it, and pedalled off down the road as if all the demons in hell were following him – which maybe they were.

  Well that’s the story that Charlie told me, and you can believe it or not, as you please. Personally I’m glad that my only spooky Isle of Wight encounter involved nothing more than two lights. As traumatic as it must have been to Charlie, I’m sure, though, that it wasn’t bad enough to be the
reason for his move to Basingstoke.

  9

  CHUTE CAUSEWAY: STORY ROAD

  In the north-west of Hampshire, near the borders with Wiltshire and Berkshire, the shape of the Downs is almost sensuous. Long, gentle curves, and from up on the slopes you can see the cloud shadows drift across the fields.

  Up above Vernham Dean, on the ridge of the hills, Chute Causeway doesn’t quite fit the sensuous curves. This is strange, because most written descriptions say that it does. It is a Roman road, and the point the authors of these descriptions are making is that it is unusual in not being straight; that the topography has forced it to follow the curving hill. But the Romans have built straight roads over much more difficult terrain than this. Should you walk it, should you look along it, you’ll see that it is straight – it looks like a typical Roman road, but that every so often it bends – rather suddenly. Maybe this is to accommodate the shape of the hill, or maybe it is to avoid something. Walk it and you will see tumuli in the fields beside it, sometimes called Giant’s Graves, and there are thickets, dense copses and quickset hedges. It goes around Haydown Hill, and it is high, light and airy – and yet, paradoxically, it also has a sense of darkness.

  It is a storied road. I have described in Hampshire and Isle of Wight Folk Tales how the ghost of the rector of Vernham Dean toils up the hill to bring food and drink to the miserable plague camp he set up there – and how Mistress Plague herself can be seen careering along the thoroughfare in her black coach. The stories are not cheerful – they are dark – they are concerned with death and putrefaction, betrayal and guilt. There is also a sense of marginality about them, something which suits both the road’s remoteness and its marking of the border between Hampshire and Wiltshire. The Romans must have had little shrines to their wayside gods at the bends in the road. With bountiful Haydown Hill so close, one might have thought they would have had a shrine to Ceres, or Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, but that seems much too cheerful for this brooding place, and in Roman times the hill was probably covered in dark forest – ‘Chute’ does, after all, mean forest. Perhaps, then, there was a shrine to Pluto, or Hades, god of the underworld, the Roman relation to all those deities and ancient kings sleeping under the hills of England.

  Be that as it may, in the eighteenth century the road was considered to possess a very strange characteristic – it was longer one way than it was the other! Going east to west, you could walk it in twenty minutes, but perambulating west to east could take you all day. Some people would even walk all the way around Haydown Hill, down to Vernham Dean, and back up again, to avoid this. Little Persephone Goater (oh, the glorious names people had – look at those eighteenth-century gravestones and see names like Fortune Coker, Charity Singleton, Nathaniel Stone), well she was in service to the gentry at the big house west of the causeway, and it was Mothering Sunday. On this day she was allowed to take home a cake that she had baked for her mother – and Persephone’s family, of course, lived east of the causeway.

  As she headed down the causeway, clutching her precious cake, her shoes went clip clop, clip clop. They were good shoes, wooden shoes, solid shoes – and this was because her father was the best cobbler on the borderlands between Wiltshire and Hampshire. The phrase ‘the cobbler’s own children have no shoes’ wasn’t true in his case; he wasn’t a man for fine words, but he expressed his feelings for his children by lavishing great care on their shoes; not so with his own shoes.

  But, as little Persephone Goater trip-trapped along the causeway she felt that she was doing a lot of hard walking but making very little progress, a bit like walking the wrong way along a conveyer belt, though that may not be a very appropriate simile for the eighteenth century!

  Taking forever to pass the Giant’s Grave, she saw, at a bend in the road, a tall, dark figure.

  ‘Whither away, pretty maiden?’ asked the gentleman, who smiled with his mouth, but not his eyes.

  Persephone felt a terrible dread envelop her, one that she had felt before when perambulating Chute Causeway ‘the wrong way’, but never this strongly, and there had never before been a gentleman standing in the road.

  ‘I’m going home for Mothering Sunday,’ said Persephone.

  ‘And what do you have in your basket?’ asked the gentleman.

  ‘A cake for my mother.’

  ‘Come with me,’ said the gentleman, ‘and I’ll show you where you can pick flowers for your mother.’

  ‘Oh no, sir, I’ve always been told not to leave the path.’

  ‘I said, come with me,’ said the gentleman, ‘and you’ll have all the cake in my kingdom.’

  Now, Persephone’s father was a practical cobbler, a man direct and to the point, and Persephone’s mother was Tredeem Goater, known throughout the border country as a woman not to be messed with; so Persephone wasn’t a girl so easily beguiled by a gentleman, especially one with cold eyes.

  ‘No sir,’ she said, ‘I need to get on home to my brothers and sisters.’

  The gentleman’s voice became hard and threatening, ‘You’ll be coming with me if I say so, young woman.’

  Then he looked down at her shoes.

  ‘Fine shoes, fine shoes,’ he ruminated, looking down at his own dainty, Italian brocade shoes that should have been the most fashionable of footwear, but seemed all burnt away, and rather hoof shaped, ‘… would I had a new pair of shoes.’

  ‘Let me past, sir,’ said Persephone, ‘and I’ll send my father, and he’ll make you some fine new shoes. He’ll have to come and measure your feet.’

  ‘No one touches my feet,’ screeched the gentleman, ‘leastways not without shoes on.’

  ‘He can measure a foot with a glance, sir,’ said Persephone.

  ‘Hurry up, girl; hurry away and fetch him to me, or it’ll be the worse for you. I’ll come down and fetch the damn lot of you.’

  Well, Persephone hurried home, and the road didn’t seem so long.

  Her mother was delighted with the cake, but not so delighted with the story about the gentleman.

  ‘I’ll fetch him one,’ she bellowed.

  ‘No,’ said her husband, ‘I’ll measure his feet, a job is a job, and shoes for a gentleman will bring us good money.’

  ‘There’ll be no good money where that came from,’ said his wife, ‘’twill all be wicked money – and he’ll be dragging thee to hell or Haydown Hill.’

  But her husband would go – and he put on his good clogs, just to make a show, and trip trap, trip trap, trip trapped down Chute Causeway. He was going the right way, so it didn’t take him long to get to the Giant’s Grave.

  ‘Who’s that trip trapping down my causeway?’ said the gentleman.

  ‘’Tis I, Father Goater,’ said the cobbler.

  ‘You’re the middle sized one, I’ll warrant,’ said the gentleman.

  ‘I’m the man of the house,’ bridled the cobbler, who took offence at the thought of his fair Tredeem being seen as less than dainty.

  ‘Well, I need new shoes, but you will not touch my feet, cobbler.’

  The cobbler looked down at the gentleman’s burnt shoes, and said, ‘I think, sir, ’tis the blacksmith you’re wanting.’

  ‘Don’t talk back to me, cobbler,’ shouted the gentleman, ‘take my measurements, and make me a fine pair of black shoes with wooden soles that will not wear out on Chute Causeway, and that I can wear when dancing a fine caper on Haydown Hill under the light of a full moon.’

  ‘Yes sir, yes sir – I have the measurements.’

  ‘Then come with me, and we can make the shoes in my domain.’

  ‘Oh no, sir, I must go back to my cobbler’s shop, because there I have all the tools, and all of the materials.’

  ‘I can find you anything, come with me,’ insisted the gentleman.

  ‘No sir, if you really want the finest shoes, I need to make them in my workshop. My wife will bring them, I would not deceive you.’

  ‘Make sure that you don’t,’ said the gentleman, in the most
threatening of voices.

  Well, back home, Tredeem told her husband not to trouble himself making the shoes – although he would have done so.

  She gathered up a rolling pin, and a cast-iron frying pan, and up with her along the causeway.

  ‘Who’s that trip trap, bloody crash banging along my causeway?’ said the gentleman, as Tredeem’s broad girth, round, red face, and enormous clogs rounded the bend in the road.

  ‘’Tis I, Mother bloody Goater,’ she roared, ‘and will you say “Whither away, pretty bloody maiden” to me?’

  ‘Give me my shoes,’ said the gentleman, ‘or I’ll drag you to hell and Haydown Hill.’

  ‘Oh will you, my fine gentleman?’ bellowed the largest of the Goaters. ‘And I’ll give you a gurt whack round the pate, and a clog up the fundament,’ and she gave him such a crack round the side of the head with the cast-iron frying pan, that he spun sideways like a Catherine Wheel, and ended up back on his feet, with his head ringing like a bell. This was just in time to receive the clog up the fundament.

  ‘Get thee back to bloody hell and Haydown Hill,’ thundered Tredeem Goater, ‘and you’ll not be taking Persephone with you – and thank your bloody stars you haven’t got me there, because I’d give you such a time that you’d wish yourself in heaven, as sure as heaven is your hell, and hell is your heaven.’

  Well, the gentleman wasn’t seen for a long time after that – but it’s maybe that he’s back on Chute Causeway now. People don’t walk the causeway a lot nowadays, though it sees the occasional car hurtle along it far too fast. So, the gentleman may again be looking for souls to take under the hill, and if there’s no one with the character of Tredeem Goater to gainsay him, he may well get his way. Just don’t ever try to hitch a lift on Chute Causeway, because you may know the story about the vanishing hitchhiker, and it doesn’t end well.