FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - The Ghost by the Gretna Green

Some time ago I wrote a series of articles (which I later turned in to a podcast) on the assorted ghost stories associated with Aycliffe Village in County Durham where I spend a good portion of my childhood. One of these local ghosts was an example of a very common sort of spectre, the Phantom Hitcher. In the Aycliffe version, a young woman dressed in white is seen by the side of the road and hitches a ride, only to later vanish from the back of the vehicle. 

Now the interesting thing I uncovered was that while the version I heard in the mid 1970s usually placed the lady in white near the village church and travelling in the direction of Darlington, the story actually dated back to the days of coaches and horses. Back then the A167 which runs through the village was the old Great North Road, and in the days when the coaches ran, the ghostly lady would hitching a ride north and vanish before reaching the nearby village of Rushyford a few miles up the road.

The village is also home to another well-known phantom, the Grey Lady. And over the years, aside from the oft-repeated creepy tales told about both these local ghosts, sightings of a white female figure have been reported in the Aycliffe village area. And recently a reader got in touch to relate his sighting of this strange white figure. It was seen a little to the north of the village, near what was once the Gretna Green pub, and is now back in business as the Gretna Hotel. His account is as follows - 

I was with my friend Chris at the time, and both of us were about 9 year old. Both of us were living near to Neville Parade in Newton Aycliffe. Strangely we were out 'ghost hunting' and rode our bikes over to the Gretna pub which was derelict at the time. We spent a bit of time looking around before heading back over the road (A167). There is a path leading through a small field and then some woods back to the houses. Halfway up this path we stopped to look at a rag which was caught on some barbed wire on the fence that ran along the path (still in ghost hunting mode). After a few seconds I looked ahead into the field and saw a white figure kind of floating towards us. I shouted at Chris to look but he took this as an attempt to trick him or something and promptly rode off on his bike, so I don't think he saw it which was very frustrating at the time! I remember looking up again at this thing and it was a bit closer. I pretty much got straight on my bike and rode off as fast as I could.

So the thing is basically similar to what the other people have described. It was about 30 years ago so my memory is a bit blurry but I remember it being all white, wearing flowing, kind of raggy clothes but no distinctive marks. And the main thing was it had a white face with no facial features at all, which was really weird. Could a veil possibly explain this? It was kind of moving its arms slowly, and moving slowly towards me with very awkward movements from what I remember. Just really weird. It wasn't too far away either, maybe 30/40 feet away. Oddly, at the time I didn't think it was a ghost because it didn't strike me as what a ghost should look like. It didn't look very human, but rather humanoid - if that makes any sense - mainly due to having no distinctive features and the white face area. So I just told people I saw a kind of weird creature/alien/ghost thing.

Now people have obviously said I was 'ghost hunting' so my childish active imagination got the better of me. and I too have thought this could be what happened. That is, until recently listening to you podcast and reading the comments about other people's similar experiences in that specific area. So maybe I did really see something after all? I wonder now that maybe because I was ghost hunting I was more perceptive than I usually would have been. But maybe it was coincidence. I've had a lot of weird stuff happen to me over the years so maybe I'm just more tuned in to these things than some other people. Maybe this thing appeared to me because I was kind of asking for it and it somehow knew. And I just happened to be in a spot where something was hanging around and was able to pick up on that? Or maybe something there is causing people to hallucinate? Or maybe someone dressing up to scare people? Who knows! But at least now know I'm not the only one who's seen weird stuff there!

Very intriguing, I am sure you will agree. Now what struck me as particularly interesting is the detail that the figure lacked a face, for this would appear to be a common feature in most of the reports of the white ghost. Andrew Green in Ghosts of Today lists several encounters with a seemingly female figure dressed in a long garment and a hood but with no face visible within, and often described as moving oddly or even floating. It would seem a similar figure has been seen in the south end of the village near the church, in the surrounding fields, on the road heading north of the village, and even a good way up The Great North Road.

For those who may wish to investigate further, we should note that the area described in the above account has now been built on, and where there was once a field where a young boy saw a strange figure in white are streets of houses. One wonders if any of these residences have reports of unwelcome guests in white...

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FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - Tales from the Playground Part IV - The Grey Lady

Over the last few entries in Folklore on Friday, we've been exploring tales I heard in a childhood spent in the little village of Aycliffe, in County Durham in the 1970s. We've identified some tales as urban legends, and traced others to actual reports of hauntings in the village. However if you mention the subject of ghosts and hauntings to anyone who has ever lived in Aycliffe Village, there is one name that will be mentioned more than any others - the Grey Lady. 

But despite being easily the most talked about phantom in the village, there seems to be very little written about the Grey Lady in gazetteers of ghosts or collections of local folklore. Indeed the only definite reference to her I have ever found was printed just a few years ago. In an interview with Mr Richard Matthews, a leading vet based in Barnard Castle, published in Newshopper (Wednesday 27th August 2014),  he recalled a call out to Aycliffe - 

I was once called out to lamb a ewe at night on a smallholding near the old church in Aycliffe village and told by the farmer that the place was haunted and he had recently seen the ghost of a grey lady. He then hid behind a tree and jumped out at me!

That said however, some collections of ghostly reports from the North East, do reference several sightings which are usually conflated with the hitch-hiking lady in white we discussed last time (see here). The first is taken from Ghosts of Today by Andrew Green (Kaye and Ward 1980) - 

Having escorted a lady friend home he was walking through Aycliffe Village when he saw 'a white shape about five yards away, walking in a field'. The figure clearly resembled a young woman in a wedding dress and a veil.

And over the years there have been other reports of a female apparition in vintage dress too. For example, a father out walking with his brother and son spotted a female phantom wearing Victorian dress. The figure did not appear to have any feet, and was in fact floating just off the ground. The spectre turned to look at her three observers and then sped away, reportedly 'faster than a greyhound'. 

Now to my mind, this female figure in period costume is undoubtedly the Grey Lady. For although the tale of the lady in white that haunts the road out of the village has been doing the rounds for more than a century, stories of encounters with this hitch-hiking spirit always describe her as appearing in contemporary dress. Plus she only ever appears on the roadside. Whereas the Grey Lady is always described as wearing "olden times" clothes and appears in several places around the village.

Most commonly the Grey Lady is seen in the vicinity of St Andrews Church. For accordingly to stories I heard, she is the shade of a noble lady who died while praying in the church - in one version she tripped on the altar steps and bled to death, while another story claimed she had been killed by round-heads while at prayer. However given that our year was studying the English Civil War when I heard this second variant, I rather suspect that what was going on in the classroom had shaped the spooky tales being told in the schoolyard. Once again, if you dear reader have heard a different origin tale for the Grey Lady I would love to hear it. 

However certainly the Grey Lady has close links to the old church. Generations of kids in Aycliffe Village have heard of the local rite associated with her, a classic example of what folklorists call legend tripping. It is said that if you go to St Andrews Church after dark, and walk (or run) around it seven times, and then stick a pin into the church doors, the Grey Lady will appear. Naturally I have heard of many who claimed they would attempt this, but no reports of anyone who actually did the deed in the end. Typically the whims of weather and parents, and in general the sort of catastrophes that prevent children from doing their homework, somehow always got in the way and the bold soul had to shelve their ghost raising plans.

But the Grey Lady does not appear to be bound to one particular location. And unlike the roadside lady in white or the red-eyed spectre that allegedly can be seen outside one of the village pubs (see here), the Grey Lady does not seem to trapped re-enacting the circumstances of her death. Rather she appears to be a phantom with a certain degree of freedom to appear where ever she chooses. However
it was also said that she appeared most often in the last quarter of the year, and in particular in the run-up to Christmas. And when I canvassed some locals about the village's famous spectre, one chap
recalled - 

I know a guy who saw her twice. He saw her near South Grove, off the village green when he was a kid. I was told that she appears around this time of year checking that people spend their money to help the needy rather than wasting it.

I don't recall ever hearing any specific tales she had appeared to chastise a wrong-doer, but she was always talked about in terrifying terms. I'm quite sure that more than a few children over the years have been persuaded into behaving as otherwise the Grey Lady would come and get them. However she was never portrayed as an evil presence, but from the way the the Grey Lady was talked about, there was a sense she was always watching over the village. And although I cannot remember any tales that envisioned her as some kind of supernatural guardian, she has been a part of the village for many many years, and so perhaps we can say that the Grey Lady is simply the spirit of Aycliffe in more ways than one... 

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - Tales from the Playground Part III - Ghosts of Aycliffe

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been recounting and discussing assorted strange tales I heard as a child at a village school in the North-east of England in the 1970s. And among the usual urban legends and oft-recycled campfire tales, a good chunk of local folklore entered the mix, in particular accounts of various ghosts alleged to haunt the village. 

Now such tales of spectres on my own doorstep were a particular favourite of mine, and this was partly because it always deliciously terrifying to learn of ghosts roaming so near to my home. However it was also because these tales passed around in corners of the playground, filled an important gap. Now there have been many guides and gazetteers of strange lands and haunted locations published over the years, but I was always somewhat annoyed that such tomes generally never mentioned anything interesting in my local area. Oh yes, there was always reams written about the big hitters such as Avebury, Pluckley, Hampton Court or Glamis Castle, but often these books gave the North of England somewhat short shrift, and in particular there was rarely anything reported at all for the County of Durham. So then I naturally relished these pieces of local ghostly lore, for they made the immediate world around me a more exciting and magical place. Although given the lurid and generally dubious nature of these tales passed around the schoolyard, even as a child,  I was somewhat sceptical about their veracity. 

However I never forgot them, and in later years a little research would prove that several of these local phantoms were more than the imaginings of school kids. Probably best known to the wider world is a figure that haunts the road through Aycliffe Village. As we mentioned last week, in the old days, the Great North Road used to run through the village, and this particular phantom is believed to date back over two hundred years, first reported in the days when coaching inns thrived. This particular spectre is actually a familiar species of folkloric haunting, the road ghost. And as the name implies, these spirits haunt the sides of roads and highways, and usually they have a Phantom Hitchhiker style story attached to them. And this Aycliffe road ghost is no exception. 

What used to be the Great North Road is the A167 these days, and where it once used to travel through the centre, now it passes through just the North-west edge of the village. At the southern end you pass by an old church, St Andrews which dates back to Saxon times, and on the road leading into the village is where a former coaching inn stood, now a pub the North Briton. Now according to the tales I heard, it was said that the ghost of a young woman haunted this particular stretch of the road. On dark nights, it was said that drivers heading south towards Darlington reported seeing the figure of a young lady, usually described as wearing a white raincoat, standing by the side of the road, seemingly looking to hitch a ride. 

Now over the years, several drivers took pity on her, for as you'd expect it was nearly always a wet and rainy night, and offered the young lady a ride. Our mystery woman in white apparently always wanted to get to Darlington, but much to our gallant drivers' shock and horror, long before they reached the town, the young lady would always vanish from the car. However if your passenger melting away into the rain-streaked darkness wasn't frightening enough, in some versions it was claimed that our unfortunate drivers would look around and see the lady was now suddenly covered in streaming blood just before she dematerialised before their eyes! 

Of course, as is typical in this kind of folk tale, there is an eerie little coda. Our troubled driver would then later discover that the young lady he had picked up born an uncanny resemblance to a woman killed a few months earlier. And the driver would then discover a story that would tell of how she was looking to get home late one night, but unfortunately the vehicle she hitched a ride with met a horrific road accident that killed all involved. Naturally the tale usually concluded with the story-teller pronouncing solemnly that on dark, rainy nights you can still see her trying to get home... 

Apparently just a year after my family moved away from the village, in 1978 a Mr Dennis Fisher reported to the Birmingham Society of Ghost Hunters that the mystery lady had hitched a ride and done her unsettling vanishing turn again. Interestingly in this case she was travelling north and disappeared when they reached Rushyford some four miles up the road. However according to research into this spectre's history by Andrew Green, one of our leading parapsychologists, this is in fact the traditional direction she travels in - 

Ron Watson writing in the Newtonian mentions an earlier report in the Aycliffe Chronicle, of a phantom 'White Lady' haunting the Great North Road. The story is associated with the finding of the body of young woman in 1698 in the nearby River Skerne. She has been witnessed fairly recently, however, over 250 years later, dressed in white and wearing a veil. Originally it seems she was collected by stage coaches travelling between the 'North Briton' and what is now the 'Eden Arms' in Rushyford. 

from Ghosts of Today by Andrew Green (Kaye and Ward 1980)

It is interesting to note these variations in the tales of Aycliffe's vanishing hiker. The versions I heard as a child had clearly been updated to move with the times - her death involved a car accident, had occurred relatively recently, and reflected the fact that most folks were then travelling south into Darlington (where most of our parents were employed) rather than going north between two small villages. But also, as we see from Mr Fisher's report, the traditional version of the haunting was still occurring after I had heard the new variants. Once again, I would be interested to learn which version any of you good folks at home have heard.

As I mentioned earlier, this hitchhiking road ghost is the one you will most commonly find listed in books of ghostly lore that take the trouble to mention hauntings in the North-east. And often appended to the tale are reports of various sightings of a white female figure in the village itself. However I rather suspect these reports relate to the ghost that is most well-known to the locals - the Grey Lady. And shall learn more of this infamous spectre next time... 

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - Tales of the Playground Part II

Last week I was reminiscing about the assorted tales I heard during a craze for telling spooky stories at my old village school  As I recorded last week some of these tales were simply compressed, and often gruesomely embellished, versions of classic ghost stories, whereas many others were variations of famous urban legends. However there was a third flavour to these little chillers passed around our playground - what I am going to dub 'the local tale'. 

Now there were two distinct types of local tales. In some stories, it was just an existing tale injected with a bit of local colour; for example, numerous stories were given a nearby location, often along with the kind of fervent assurances that only excitable children can make, that with was indeed a true tale. Needless to say, despite various assertions of veracity such as "This just happened to a couple who lived just down the road from me, swear blind!", there was of course never normally the slightest grain of truth to these claims. And considering the violent and disturbing nature of many of the tales that was a very good thing indeed. My all-time favourite of these "it happened right here" stories was the claim that Dracula had been to our village during his reign of terror! I never believed this spooky "fact" as I was pretty sure Dracula was "just made-up", and in fact when I first heard that the Count had been in Whitby (which is actually not that far away from Aycliffe Village), I was similarly sceptical, thinking this was just another bit of local fakelore

But there was a stronger and purer variety of these local spooky tales - the stories spun about the assorted ghosts that allegedly haunted the village. One I always remember well concerned one of the local pubs, and it stuck in my mind as we had to walk past the allegedly haunted spot on a regular basis. Now Aycliffe Village was home to several pubs, and the one nearest to our school was said to have a haunting. Situated on one of the main roads through the village, the Royal Telegraph is a traditional old English pub that is still open to this very day. This hostelry, with its white walls and black Tudor beams, is a former coaching inn which did a roaring trade back in the heyday of the Great North Road which used to run through the village. 

Now then, like many country pubs, the Royal Telegraph still has an old fashioned sign outside. This is a large painted board bearing the pubs's name, mounted on an iron arm hanging out over the street below. Now the arm that held the board was made of ancient metal, wrought with decorative curlicues and terminates in a great spike. Should it fall, it certainly could do some harm, and of course, according to a tale I heard, this is exactly what happened... 

Apparently back in the olden days, Victorian times to be precise, a lady was out for an evening stroll in the village, wearing, as all good ladies did back then, a huge bonnet decorated with flowers and feathers. According one version, she was a local lady from the village, but in others she was a traveller just passing through while journeying up the Great North Road. Anyhow, while she was walking, a great storm blew in and she hurried to find some shelter from the elements. Seeing she was nearing the Royal Telegraph, she made for the friendly lights of the inn. However the storm grew stronger and stronger, and the Telegraph sign swung wildly back and forward in the great blasts of icy wind and rain. And just as she was reaching the inn, a great gust came, and the great iron arm was blown free from its mounting in the white walls. The sign and spike came hurtling down and dashed out the lady's brains, killing her stone dead on the spot. And it is said on dark and storm nights, when the wind makes that old sign swing wildly back and forth, you can see the figure of the lady standing beneath it, her red eyes glowing in the twilight... 

As you may imagine, knowing this tale made passing the old inn something of thrill on windy days, when the skies were dark and the sign was swinging. I distinctly remember it was said that sometimes all that would be seen were her glowing eyes floating in the shadow of the swinging sign... 

And the old pub still has its hanging sign, but the spikey ancient arm I remember has now been replaced it seems. Now I always assumed that this was an authentic local ghost story, for it has all the hallmarks of a typical folkloric tale,with elements such as being based around a local landmark, and a set of special circumstances when the spectre can be seen. However despite reading many books and articles on ghosts and folklore in the Darlington/County Durham area, I never came across an account of this haunting in print. But then a few years ago, I happened to meet a lovely old lady who still lived in Aycliffe Village, and as it turned out she knew the Royal Telegraph rather well. For her parents had run that very pub for many years, and she herself had grow up there. Naturally I just had to ask about the ghostly lady who appeared on stormy nights beneath the sign... But alas, she'd never ever heard the tale! 

On one hand this does rather suggest that possibly this ghostly tale was just the invention of imaginative children rather than a story rooted in local history. However on the other, folklore in its purest form is an oral tradition, and hence an obscure story from a little village may well have been told for generations without it being recorded in print. Alternatively it might have been a tale that was only told by a couple of generations of schoolchildren and has since been forgotten. It probably goes without saying that I would be very interested to hear from anyone else who remembers hearing this particular ghost story. But whatever the truth of the matter may be, at least now the tale of Royal Telegraph's ghostly lady has been set down...

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - Tales from the Playground

Aycliffe Village School by Eric Thompson

I can trace my love of folklore back deep into my childhood. A huge inspiration for myself, and I daresay many of us growing up in the '60s, '70s, and '80s were the wonderful retellings of all manner of folk tales and legends from all round the world in the books of Ruth Manning-Sanders. However I also had a more personal connection. I grew up in the little village of Aycliffe in the North-east of England, and at the little village school I attended there was something of a craze for telling spooky stories. Quite how or why this pass-time took off I am not entirely sure, but what I can tell you is that is was very popular, and it seemed to be something more than just some passing fad. There was a great deal of kudos in having a popular tale to tell, with the keepers of the best stories being sought out at play-time or over the lunch-break to spin their out their stories for new audiences.

I heard a great many stories back then that have stuck with me to this day, and often because more than a few them made bed-time a troubling prospect. But over the years I have been able to uncover the origins of a large number of them. When writing of the strange tales children tell each other in A School Story, that great writer of ghost stories MR James remarked -

I imagine, if you were to investigate the cycle of ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be highly-compressed versions of stories out of books

Now being a lecturer and a teacher himself, the good doctor was bang on the money here. And what he observed of schoolyard tales back at the start of the 20th century was still very true in my playground some sixty years later. Indeed, a good number of the stories I heard, that were retold with all the appropriate hushed tones and lurid details, were exactly as James described: concise reworkings of tales from books. For example, I particularly remember hearing a version of the WW Jacobs's famous chiller The Monkey's Paw; in fact this was my first encounter with a version of this famous short story. However of course, this playground version had a few details changed - most notably that at the tale's climax, the front door is opened to reveal in gruesome detail the mangled and rotted corpse that has been called up from the grave.

Furthermore, another large proportion of these little stories were what we would now term urban legends. And indeed I heard a great many of the classics during my school's spooky story craze - ones I'm sure most of you will at least know of, if not heard in your own youth - The Hook, The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs, the Killer in the Backseat, and of course the great-daddy of the all The Phantom Hitchhiker. Now typically, many of these tales were embellished in various ways depending upon the teller, and it is interesting to note that the first three famous tales I mentioned, plus a good many other little stories of death and murder, I first heard as being incidents in the blood-soaked career of the same killer, a monster known only as Jordan.

"and Jordan was bouncing all the children's bloody cut-off heads on the bed..." 

Now there was no definite description of Jordan; he was always a somewhat shadowy figure. But according to the lore passed around my playground, Jordan was a cannibal and an insane killer, often escaped from a nearby asylum. But there were dark hints that he was something more: I vividly remember a grim-faced little girl in a woolly hat solemnly proclaiming that he was, and I quote, "half man, half ghost". However despite his unclear origins and nature, what all the various stories of his gruesome escapdes agreed upon was Jordan's weapon of choice - he committed his acts of horror with his abnormally long and sharp finger nails. They were as lethal as bayonets and just as strong, capable allegedly of piercing brick and concrete... Well, at least according to leading Jordan authority Little Miss Wooly Hat, and obviously back then, I had no cause to doubt her.

Most infamously for me, in a scene that haunted my nightmares for years, was the Jordan version of the climax of the tale of the Hook. Just like the classic incarnation of the story, at the end the girlfriend disobeys the police and looks round to see what is on the roof of the car. And discovers that, as usual, the tapping noise she has been hearing is the demented killer banging her boyfriend's severed head on the car roof. However in my local version, Jordan actually had the dripping head, and now partially gnawed to boot, impaled on his long talon-like nails!  

Now of course, I'm sure many of you are stroking your chins and formulating all kinds of theories that our local bogey-man Jordan was clearly inspired by kids hearing garbled reports of that 1980s horror superstar Freddy Krueger. But the interesting thing is, I was hearing these tales of this monstrous maniac with finger knives in the early 1970s, a good decade before Wes Craven first brought the infamous dream-killer to the screen. However I suspect I am not alone in getting an extra dose of the chills from the first Nightmare on Elm Street movie, as for pupils of a certain village school circa the mid 1970s, old Fred Krueger appeared to be a figure from our own childhood nightmares come to life...

Another iconic character with knife-like, super-strong talons that could have served as an inspiration is of course that famous X-Man, Wolverine. However delving into comics history, I was hearing the blood-splattered tales of Jordan a good while before Wolverine would become a familiar face for British comic book readers. The famous mutant and his retractable claws had only appeared in late 1974, and it would be another few years before he became one of Marvel's stars. He certainly hadn't made it into the Marvel reprint comics that were appearing in UK newsagents at the time, and if I recall correctly he didn't even appear in the Marvel Superheroes Top Trumps set that came out in 1977 which '70s kids regarded as the ultimate guide to the Marvel heroes and villains.

I also have wondered whether our local monster was perhaps inspired another famous character. In the '70s, the BBC produced a two and a half hour version of Dracula, which starred Louis Jourdan as the Count. And what's more, in this version Bram Stoker's undead villain was seen sporting long and sharp nails. Had some imaginative child seen part of this production and been inspired? Or perhaps a more likely scenario is that some kid saw a trailer for this forth-coming production and seen an image of a sinister man with pointy nails and heard the star's name... However as plausible as that might be for the genesis of my childhood bogeyman, as this production of Dracula screened at Christmas 1977, just before we moved away from the village, unfortunately Louis Jourdan's Count is arriving too late on the scene to inspire all those blood-thirsty tales I heard.

Louis Jourdan as Dracula

It is a fair bet I think that some kid at some point thought it would be cool if all these much passed around tales of murderers and madmen could be the work of one super-maniac. However I would love to know the inspiration for the name, but I suspect I'll never know where the long-taloned cannibal killer really came from. And perhaps that's for the best - monsters are always scarier the less you know about them...