Hampshire and Isle of Wight Ghost Tales

by Michael O'Leary

  As for the fisherman, he turned his back on the Island, and old Francheville, and swam out to sea, and as he did so he turned into a sea creature himself. He swam till he reached Southampton Water, and still he continued to swim, up the River Test and on and on, till the river became small, and still this strange sea creature flapped along the stream, its heart bursting. It came to the source of the River Test at Ashe, and still it flapped over damp meadows, and through hedgerows and nettle beds, and bramble bushes, until it came to Highclere. At Highclere the sea creature dragged itself up an ancient yew tree in the churchyard, and sat there barking and grunting at the locals.

  And this is one of the most unlikely legends of Hampshire, indeed one of the oddest in England. A Grampus, a strange dolphin-like sea creature, sat in a tree, in inland Hampshire, and it sat there until it was banished to the Red Sea by a local cleric. But that’s the legend; and indeed the whole story is most peculiar.

  16

  THE MISTLETOE BRIDE

  When I wrote Hampshire and the Isle of Wight Folk Tales I thought I’d better include most of Hampshire’s more well-known folk tales, because if I didn’t someone was sure to lurch up to me at some event where I was telling stories, and announce loudly, ‘I’m surprised you didn’t include the story of (so and so). Don’t you know it?’

  This is generally a fate worth avoiding; especially as such a person is out to score points, not to happily share a story.

  However, there was one well-known story I didn’t include (and yes, this has been pointed out to me) and that’s because I really didn’t like the story, it made me feel claustrophobic. It’s the story that is sometimes called the Mistletoe Bough, sometimes the Mistletoe Bride. I have recently, however, come to realise that there’s more to the story than I discerned, something that takes away from the claustrophobia, so I think, maybe, I’m ready to tell it.

  Firstly, however, the bare bones of the usual presentation.

  Once upon a time the young tenant of Marwell Hall, near Owlsebury, was betrothed to a young woman of good family, and they were due to have a Christmas wedding. After the ceremony, all in high spirits, they decided to have a game of hide and seek. The bride found her way into an unused and deserted part of the great house, saw an old oak chest, and decided to hide in it. When she shut the lid, a lock snapped shut – and she was trapped. The wedding guests searched Marwell Hall from top to bottom, and some of them must have walked past the chest – but inside it, she suffocated.

  It was many years later that someone prised the chest open to find therein the mouldering remains of the young bride. Since then her ghost has walked the corridors of Marwell Hall, and her hands are bleeding claws.

  Well, like many stories, this tale has many locations; in Hampshire it is also located at Bramshill House near Eversley, but it is also located at other grand houses throughout Britain. It would seem to be derived from a poem by the popular Victorian ‘parlour poet’ Thomas Haynes Bayley, a poem that Bayley based on an Italian story, and which was put to music by Sir Henry Bishop, composer of ‘Home Sweet Home’. At Christmas time Victorian patriarchs could stand at the head of the parlour, and sing the ballad in a mournful and stentorian voice – something infinitely preferable to having to watch a Disney film on the telly.

  So all these grand houses could adopt the story, and come to believe that it had been part of their traditional history for hundreds of years – but there was something different going on at Marwell Hall.

  Firstly, it already specialised in the ghosts of trapped women – and the invidious effects of arranged marriage.

  For a while, the tenants of Marwell Hall were the Seymours, whose daughter Jane had caught the eye of Henry VIII. It is said that King Henry waited at Marwell Hall to hear the news that his previous wife, Anne Boleyn, had been executed, so he could then be betrothed to Jane. Therefore the ghost of that trapped woman, Anne Boleyn, is said to walk the hall, with her head tucked underneath her arm, in order to lay her vengeful curse upon the Seymours. But then it would be hard to be more trapped than poor Jane Seymour, whose motto as queen was ‘Bound to obey and serve’, and who died giving birth to the future king, Edward VI. That poor motherless boy was put on the throne at the age of nine, and was therefore, until his early death, surrounded by perpetual intrigue and political manoeuvring.

  So the ghost of Jane Seymour is also said to walk the corridors of Marwell Hall – and, clearly, both of these women lived in metaphorical boxes. But, enough of gloom, enough of claustrophobia, enough of pale ghosts wandering interminable corridors. There is another story.

  Firstly – the ghost.

  Is it a ghost?

  When is a ghost not a ghost?

  If you walk the banks of the River Itchen, near Ovington and Lovington Lane, Couch Green and Martyr Worthy, you might see a host of fairy ladies riding on white horses, and at their head a stately lady with a great hawk upon her glove. She is the Queen under the Hill – but when she was mortal she was betrothed to the tenant of Marwell Hall, and there was no arguing against that.

  As a child and a young teenager she had the freedom of the woods and fields and high, airy Downs above Winchester – but then came the time for family duty; for arrangements and social positioning, for the selling, trading and bartering of daughters.

  In her land of woods and fields, however, she had already met the King under the Hill, who rode upon a goat from his halls beneath the Downs.

  So, when after a marriage ceremony as hollow as the hollow hills, the nobles, notables, notaries, noggins and noodles agreed to indulge in her hide-and-seek frolic, her farewell to those carefree years, she ran three times widdershins (anti-clockwise) around Marwell Hall, and then disappeared off to meet the King under the Hill, him with his glittering eyes and a-riding on a goat.

  She was never found, and so they concocted a story that somehow, by some subconscious process, reflected the very entrapment that she escaped. Then, centuries later, it all merged into a Victorian Christmas song.

  The lands of Marwell Hall are now an open, spacious and humane zoo with a commitment to conservation. No doubt the ghost of Victor the giraffe haunts the place, because he, poor creature, did the splits in 1977, possibly whilst attempting to pay attention to a female giraffe called Dribbles. Despite all attempts to get him back on his feet, using a sling made by soft-hearted and empathic Portsmouth dockyard workers, he died in that position, his relationship with Dribbles sadly unconsummated. Possibly his ghost, floating around legs akimbo, still haunts the place.

  And as for the Queen under the Hill, well, if she’s not gone, she lives there still … although she and the King must have been mightily angered when a huge motorway cutting was hacked through Twyford Down, the very centre of their domain. You may be reminded of her presence if you’re driving north along the M3 in the evening. Watch as you come to the two slip roads that head off to the A3090 and the B3335 – you’ll see, ahead of you, the glittering imprint of the Queen under the Hill clearly in the landscape, the slip roads being her arms. When you’ve seen her once, you’ll see her every time.

  But I don’t know if you could call that a ghost.

  17

  THE RAT KING

  You are never more than six feet away from a rat.

  That’s the old adage, anyway, though how anyone could possibly know is beyond me. More than six feet beyond me. But there are always rats somewhere nearby – and sometimes the eye attunes to them and suddenly they seem to be everywhere.

  One time I was walking along a mundane paving-slabbed pathway, through council shrub beds, in a very late twentieth-century part of Basingstoke, and I wondered why there seemed to be such rippling movement from within the shrubs, like an ocular migraine, almost hallucinatory. I stopped, my eyes attuned, and then I could see that the shrub beds were swarming with rats, Pied Piper masses of rats, with people strolling through, blithely unaware of the ratty host around them.

  Then, in the countryside, in gardens, in parks, in gravey
ards there are those perfectly round rat holes that look somehow sinister, because we think rats are sinister. Maybe that is because of the bubonic plague, or rat-bite fever, or Weil’s disease. Or maybe it’s because of those bulbous tails – I confess I have an aversion to them – and given that squirrels are pretty similar to rats, it feels hardly fair to have no enmity towards them simply because they have bushy tails. Then maybe it’s because rats steal our food – nibble nibble nibble – the grain in the granary – nibble nibble nibble – the bread in the bakery – nibble nibble nibble – the leftovers from the plate. Serves you right for wasting food.

  I expect that rats think humans are a bigger nuisance. Don’t we swarm more than any rats? Don’t we carry much more disease? Aren’t we even more repulsive? Instead of pink tails, we’re all pink and hairless. But then – they need us. They live off us. They eat our food and live in, around and under our buildings – and they do it wild; without the sycophancy of cats and dogs.

  Minstead is a lovely place, and I would certainly never accuse it of being rat infested – not any more than anywhere else anyway. I saw one cottage there advertised as a place to come ‘to get away from the rat race’, to leave the corporate rats of London town and come and dwell in Arcadian bliss. Presumably complete with Internet connection.

  And it’s got a great pub, the Trusty Servant, with its singular sign showing a man, a servant, and a pig’s head.

  And All Saints church with its house-like windows, and enclosed room so that no one could see whether the family from Castle Malwood House were listening to the sermon or playing cards, and a separate fireplace for that room, so that maybe the family members could cluster round it and drink sloe gin, whilst the poor people amongst the rest of the congregation shivered in the gallery and listened to the vicar droning on from the top of the most wondrous and strange three-decker pulpit. Of course, that’s the past, and when one Christmas day family members and I wandered in for the Christmas service, we were made most welcome, and the female vicar conducted a service that was warm and meaningful.

  I have seen rat holes in the churchyard though – but then you get them everywhere, I’ve seen them in my own back garden.

  And then there are the stories about rat lines – they were told about the forest. Rats who are resettling from one place to another are reputed to travel in straight lines, like Roman roads, led by their king. Nothing will make them deviate from that line; should there be a sleeping creature in their path, well – nibble nibble nibble, crunch crunch crunch – there’ll be nothing left. In the 1930s, when the byways and footpaths were full of tramping men, and some women, stories were told of unfortunate souls being consumed after they unwittingly found a sleeping place in the path of a rat line.

  But the story I’m about to tell goes back two centuries before that – and it tells of a time when a farmer near Minstead liked to exercise his cruelty on captured rats. Well, he mostly liked to exercise his cruelty on other people, on his wife, his children, and the peasants who worked his land. He was mean and vindictive, and because he liked to believe that he was always the victim and that people were always out to cheat him, he treated all others as enemies.

  In his barn there were rat traps, and why wouldn’t there be? No farmer wanted his grain to be eaten by rats, so he would put out rat traps, and quickly dispatch any rats they caught. Except this farmer didn’t kill them quickly – he’d torture them. He’d poke them, he’d prod them; sometimes he’d burn them with smouldering charcoal.

  On one occasion the farm workers saw that he had captured a particularly large rat – then they saw him go off and return with a squirming, wriggling sack over his shoulder. He tipped up the sack, and out tumbled a flurry of farm cats. The cats proceeded to stalk around and around the trap whilst the rat, frenzied with fear, looked almost demoniacal – it gibbered and squeaked, it foamed at the mouth, it wriggled and squirmed in the trap. The farm workers watched in horror, but it wasn’t the sight of the rat that filled them with horror, it was the sight of the farmer’s face. His normally sour features were now fixed into a hideous grin, his eyes shone, and he rubbed his hands together with hellish glee. Then he leaned forward and slowly lifted the trap door. The rat squeezed itself underneath and tried to make a dash for it, but the cats were on it in a hissing ball of fur, and then its tail could be seen, being gulped down the throat of a big ginger tom.

  One harvest time Sunday morning, all the folk of the farm were in All Saints listening to the vicar holding forth from the top level of that extraordinary pulpit. The farmer had cursed God, folk, and their idle time off during the harvest, and, in a particularly foul mood, he had decided not to attend the service –- quite an act of defiant blasphemy in those days. He inspected the barn, where the threshing and winnowing had been taking place, expecting to find fault with something. Then he looked up at the old wooden beams, and he froze, rigid with horror.

  It was the Rat King.

  The Rat King wasn’t a giant rodent, or a rat wearing a crown.

  The Rat King was a wheel.

  Let me explain.

  A Rat King is a mass of rats whose tails have become intertwined and stuck together, and then, according to the stories, the rats grow into each other and form a terrible, squeaking, gibbering wheel. The Rat King had been bowling along at the head of a rat line as a mighty colony of rats abandoned the forest village of Nomansland, on the border between Hampshire and the mad moon-raking county of Wiltshire, and headed for the more verdant pastures of Minstead.

  And the farmer stood directly in the path of the rat line; whilst on the beam the Rat King glared at him with 101 eyes (one of his constituent parts only had one eye) – and then the line of rats came marching up the staddle stones, and spread out, coming in through the door, and between the planking – and they were on him. If you’d been there, and I’m glad I wasn’t, what would you have seen, but a pink, wriggling mass of rats’ tails, and a Rat King bowling around like a Catherine Wheel that celebrated Guy Fawkes Day on it true anterior date: Halloween.

  When the farm folk got back from church, and when they looked into the barn, they called upon all of the saints of All Saints, for what did they see but a bloody, red skeleton; and out of the right eye socket – the flick of a rat’s tail.

  So now, somewhere below Lower Canterton, which is above Upper Canterton, walking through Piper’s Wood, for the Pied Piper never got as far as Minstead, is the most terrible ghost; a stumbling skeleton festooned with rats’ tails. I’ve never seen it myself, and I’ve never even met a bloke who knows a bloke who knows a bloke who has seen it – but then who’d go walking in Piper’s Wood at midnight?

  Anyway, the rat line reached Minstead and the village was infested. The locals had never heard of the Pied Piper, and he was either over on the Isle of Wight, off in Germany, or stuck in Piper’s Wood anyway. So they brought in cats, and the rats ate the cats; they brought in dogs, and the rats ate the dogs; they fetched rat catchers, and they all gave up in the face of overwhelming odds.

  Given that prayers in All Saints had no effect, and the vicar said (whilst the rats treated the pulpit as a helter-skelter) that it was a punishment for sinfulness (though the inhabitants of Minstead couldn’t think that they’d really sinned any more than anyone else – chance would be a fine thing – and they were never as bad as the devilish inhabitants of Totton), the good folk of Minstead decided to take their problem to the great and mighty. Thus a deputation set off through the forest to visit Old John, 2nd Duke of Montagu, at his grand, stately pile in Beaulieu.

  He suggested that they get cats.

  They told him they had.

  He suggested that they get dogs.

  They told him they had.

  He suggested that they employ rat catchers.

  They told him they had.

  He suggested that they pray.

  They told him they had.

  Now Old John wasn’t such a bad duke, as dukes go, and he had never considered himself to be a
bove the ways and whiles of common folk. He had a soft spot for Old Widow Dore, who Mr Brand the antiquary tells us was a parochial witch who had just been released from Winchester Prison, and he let her live in one of his houses, down by the mill. He visited her now and again to get potions and spells to counteract the various ailments of advancing age. The Reverend Richard Warner wrote in his excellent and frequently read Topographical Remarks relating to South-Western parts of Hampshire, 1793, that she was no ‘black and midnight hag’ but that her ‘spells were chiefly used for the purpose of self-extrication in situations of danger’ – and wouldn’t that often be the purpose of spells for a vulnerable old woman; her only defence against a cruel world? But Old John wasn’t cruel, and he valued her potions, and he thought that maybe she could do something to help the benighted inhabitants of Minstead.

  So, after the Minstead deputation had started to trudge disconsolately back to their rat-infested home, he went to visit Old Widow Dore. Now, the Reverend Warner tells us that ‘I have conversed with a rustic whose father had seen the old lady convert herself more than once into the form of a hare, or cat, when likely to be apprehended in wood-stealing, to which she was somewhat addicted’. Addiction seems a strange word to describe the gathering of life’s necessities! Anyway, on the promise of a supply of firewood that would see her to the end of her days, the Widow Dore transformed herself into the form of a cat, and sallied forth to Minstead. En route, she conversed with the fairisies and the sprites (they abound in the forest), and it was a combination of these beings that wiffled into Minstead, and drove out the rats; who all packed their bags and headed for Basingstoke.

  Maybe this accounts for Minstead’s current ghosts. Go there; have a couple of pints in the Trusty Servant, and then look for the Adam and Eve oak trees, reputed to be two of the oldest trees in the Forest. If you look up at them as the sun sets, you might see the cat people – they could be fairisies, they could be cats, they could be ghosts. Whatever – they’re another of the strange legends of the New Forest, and maybe they have something to do with the Widow Dore.