In the late 18th century, if you were travelling by road you ran the risk of being robbed by a highwayman. Of course there are many tales of these rogues, sometimes they are cast as the hero, sometimes the villain, but sometimes, they are the ghost!
Now the roads around the town of Marden in Kent were the haunt of a fearsome highwayman, known only as Gilbert. And one Christmas Eve, a man and his daughter were traveling in a horse-drawn coach to Hawkshurst, when Gilbert stopped them. The daughter managed to leap from the coach, but before her father could disembark, the horses became startled and bolted down the road with the man and his coachman in tow.
The two men struggled to get the horses back under control so they could go back and find the man's daughter, who had been left behind with Gilbert. But, when they got back to the scene of the attempted robbery, she was nowhere to be found. But they did find Gilbert, drenched in blood and dead as a doornail, sprawled on the ground with a dagger in his side.
What had occurred was this - when the girl was left alone in the dark with just Gilbert for company, she recognised him as the villain who had murdered her brother several years earlier. With rage overcoming her fear, she slipped out a knife she had concealed on her person and stabbed Gilbert with all her might. She fled away into the night, and according to local legend, when she was found, she was quite quite mad.
But you may ask, if the girl was insane and Gilbert was dead, how do we know what happened that fateful night? Well, if you take the Marden road to Hawkshurst on Christmas Eve night, the whole ghastly tragedy is played out again in spectral form…
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