HYPNOGORIA 299 - The Black Lady of Bradley Woods

In a special New Year's episode, Mr Jim Moon investigates the legend of a ghost who reported walks on New Year's Day - the Black Lady of Bradley Woods. In this show we trace the history of this Lincolnshire haunting, and discover how the folklore has changed and evolved over the years. 

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FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - The Black Lady of Bradley Woods Part V

Over the past month, we've been investigating the tale of the Black Lady of Bradley Woods. We have looked at this well-known ghost's origin story, traced how various aspects of the legend have evolved over the years, and how this particular ghost story is actually still changing even in the 21st century. In fact, thanks to the Black Lady legend appearing on the internet it would seem that the story is actually still gaining additional elements, with a notable example being the claim that there is an informal folk ritual to summon up the Black Lady.

In recent retellings of the tale, such as the one found on the Creepypasta Wiki,  it is alleged that if you go into Bradley Woods upon New Year's Day and call out "Black lady, black lady, I've stolen your baby" three times, the spectre will appear. However most write-ups of the Black Lady legend also claim that this particular bit of lore is another recent addition to the mythos. Now the Creepypasta Wiki version appears to have been posted first in October 2013, but this version was copied and pasted, more or less exactly, from an entry posted on another website Urban Legends Online. And this earlier article (which you can find here) by "Storyteller" who claims to live locally, was posted a couple of years before on September 13th 2011.

Now another, later version can be found on the website Lincolnshire Info which details historical places to visit. In this article on the Black Lady (which you can find here), which was posted June 11th 2014, you find the summoning recounted again, but this time with a slight difference -  

 Most people in the village believe that if you go to the woods on Christmas eve and say, “Black lady, black lady, I’ve stolen your baby” three times, the black lady will appear to you.

So then this later retelling has the special date for the summoning as Christmas Eve rather than New Year's Day. And the change in dates is interesting, for it mirrors some of the variations in the actual origin tale of the Black Lady. For as we saw in the first part of this series, some versions of the story place the tragic events of the Black Lady's origin as occurring on New Year's Day, while others allege it all happened one Christmas Eve long ago.

Now having discovered a variation,  I carried on looking for other mentions of the summoning to see if there were further variants. Naturally I was also searching for versions which predated the Creepypasta and the Lincolnshire Info articles. And apparently there had been an earlier version of the legend posted, but one on a now-defunct site Mysterious Britain.co.uk. However thanks to some web wizardry, I was able to locate an archived version of the page which was written by Paul A McHugh and posted in July 2011. And this version also gives the date for the summoning as Christmas Eve. However curiously, in this article's retelling of the Black Lady origin tale , the date of the tragedy occurring given is New Year's Day.

Naturally this begs the question whether the Christmas Eve summoning date is genuine lore, or just an error. For logically you would think that the summoning rite should occur on the anniversary of the tragedy. And it is easy to imagine that a writer might accidentally transpose the two holidays - for that kind of simple error is a very familiar to anyone who writes. However on the other hand, folklore is not known for kow-towing to logic at the best of times, and it is not uncommon for legends to contradict themselves. Plus generally speaking, the spooks and spectres of folklore often manifest annually upon a Christmas night - all over the British Isles there are tales of ghosts who only will appear on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. And given the widespread nature of this Yuletide tradition of hauntings, it is actually perfectly plausible for the Black Lady legend to contain two seemingly contradictory dates.

So then, I continued to search for an older account that might shed some light on the matter. And on the site Ghosthits.com I found what appears to be an even earlier version. Now I have had no luck in working out exactly when this first appeared, but judging from the dates found in the rss feed for updates to the site, it was certainly published before June 2011, making it the earliest version so far. However this is not the usual version of the summoning rite we have seen repeated so far, but a far more detailed version, and one with some radical differences. You may read the full article here, but here is the relevant section for our investigation - 

When my mum was a child she lived near Bradley Woods and this is one of the places she used to play. This was in late 1940’s. My mother’s story. When we were children we used to go to the woods and several of us would spread out and call her. We used to say “Black Lady, Black Lady we have your baby” and we used to shout this in turn. When the grey mist came we used to follow it through the cutting to the side of the church (St Georges, a Norman church). When she got to the church she would fully appear. She was a young lady and she was dressed in grey and she would disappear through a door at the side of the church, although there was no door there.

Now there are several interesting points here. Of course, as we are looking at the folklore of the Black Lady, we need not concern ourselves with the question of whether the spectre actually did appear when called. What is important for us is that local lore claims that she would. Secondly, it is interesting to note that while the rhyme is more or less the same - there is only a minor variation in the wording - there is no prescribed date or time for carrying out the ritual. However while there isn't an specific date for this version of the summoning, it is instead more closely tied to a particular location. And more intriguing still is the fact that this account alleges that this summoning lore was common knowledge to local children in the 1940s, despite accounts of it only seeming to surface in the 21st century.

This kind of dating issue is one of the key problems for folklorists, for folklore often exists as an oral tradition, and therefore a piece of legend or lore may have been in circulation decades before anyone formally writes it down somewhere. Now given that this account is the earliest mention I could find of the summoning, I don't think we have any particular reason to doubt its veracity. Had it appeared later, there could be a suspicion that it was an embellishment of the later lore. However given the dates, the reverse could well be true, with the later, and briefer versions being been spawned from some clumsy paraphrasing of this little article. But equally, the shift from being tied to a certain place to a certain date could well be down to the natural drift that occurs in folklore passed down through several generations, or simply multiple versions being told at the same time in the area.

However what is particularly intriguing about the above report from the 1940s, is the fact that it chimes very closely with details of tales told of the Black Lady that are not usually recorded in write-ups of the legend. Several alleged sightings of the Black Lady describe her as dressed in grey, and there are other reports of her appearing as mist. Furthermore in the comments on local historian Rod Collins' article on the Black Lady, there is even a report, dated as occurring in the 1950s, of some local boys encountering something terrifying in the lane by St George's Church that leads into the woods.

It is enough to make you wonder whether there really is something haunting Bradley Woods... However I think it is more than fair to say that the Black Lady has certainly haunted the imagination of local folks for generations, and given how tales about her are not only still spreading, it will be many years before this particular ghost is laid to rest.

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - The Black Lady of Bradley Woods Part IV

Over the past few weeks, we have been exploring the assorted eerie tales that cluster around the Black Lady of Bradley Woods. This ghost has long been known in the local area, however as we have seen in our little investigations, the stories surrounding this particular haunting are not only still being told but are also still evolving. Now largely this is occurring in the usual way for folklore - that is to say that the details of a story change as the tale is retold over the years, and occasionally new elements and additions find their way into the fabric of the legend too. 

Now in the case of the Black Lady of Bradley Woods, tales of her hauntings have spread into a wider arena. For these days, her legend is recounted not just in the local area but across the world thanks to the dubious magic of the internet. Hence while the Black Lady isn't the only ghost in the region, she is certainly well on her way to becoming the most famous. She has her own Wikipedia entry, appears in countless online catalogues of local spooks, and perhaps most significantly of all, she has entered the strange worlds of Creepypasta. And if you are unfamiliar with Creepypasta, allow me to explain... 

While you may well be forgiven that it is some sort of off-beat cookery site, Creepypasta is a term, and part of the name of several websites, for short macabre tales shared online. Effectively creepypastas are the digital equivalent of all those old campfire stories and playground shockers that have been passed around orally by generations of kids. The term itself derives from a corruption of "copy and paste", a nod to how such creepy tales originally began circulating on the internet, as chunks of text copied and pasted from emails and bulletin boards. While some purists might wish to dismiss creepypastas as something separate and different from traditional folklore, to my mind if they are not an emerging modern form of folklore, they are at least closely related. For example, in our previous explorations we have seen what I have tentatively termed 'weblore' shaping the current versions of the Black lady legend. And the fact that she is also now haunting the online realm of creepypasta is also having an effect on the shape of her stories. 

Now then, the Black Lady makes an appearance on the major sites for creepypasta, the Creepypasta Wiki and her tale appears on this page here. Now this article retells the usual version of the Black Lady's origin, however at the close of the piece, it makes this addition - 

Legend has it that her ghost still wanders the woods today, and if anyone is brave enough to walk into the woods on new year’s day and shout "Black lady, black lady, I’ve stolen your baby!" three times, the woman shall appear and confront them.

Anyhow, the interesting thing here is the new addition to the story, the claim that you can summon up the Black Lady. And in other write-ups of the Black Lady stories we have an additional caveat that states that it is thought this summoning appears to be a relatively recent addition to the mythos. 

Now firstly we should note that such simple rites to call up a local ghost, a witch or even the Devil Himself, are common in local folklore. For example, as I have previously mentioned in these columns, a local ghost I'm familiar with, the Grey Lady Lady of Aycliffe Village, can be called up by walking round St Andrew's Church at midnight. And there are many more such tales in regional folklore. Common elements involve going to a certain place, usually on a certain day, or at a certain time, and either reciting something and/or performing some simple action - knocking on doors or walking so many times around an area are common examples of this. 

Folklorists have called these sort of informal folk rites "legend tripping". They occur all over the world and are perennially popular with teenagers. These rites share much in common with other spooky activities that kids everywhere practice, that I'm sure you are all familiar with, such as messing about with ouija boards at sleep-overs or summoning Bloody Mary. Legend tripping taps into that same spirit of daring each other to do something that will scare the pants off you, however it is specifically tied to a certain place which has a local folklore story attached to it. In some ways, you can see legend tripping as a way of bringing a legend to life, or as a kind of live action roleplay of a campfire tale (or these days a creepypasta). 

Now in the case of the Black Lady summoning incantation, it is claimed that this is a recent addition to the legend, and given its appearance in a creepypasta version of the Black Lady story, it would be easy to assume that this summoning is indeed a new addition to the lore. But I did wonder about that. For while the term "legend tripping" was only relatively recently coined by folklorists, and hence gained a lot of attention recently,  the actual phenomena has been going on for decades. 

For example, the humorist Odgen Nash wrote a terrifying ghost story called The Three Ds which appeared in 1948 in Harpers Bazaar, which tells of a girl at a Massachusetts boarding school who is dared to do the local legend trip to the grave of one Elizabeth Catspaugh, a witch hanged in Salem. Going further back into the realm of fiction, the tale Wailing Well by MR James can be read as a legend trip going horribly wrong - in this story a group of Scouts out camping (a traditional place for telling of eerie tales of course) are warned from going into a certain patch of woods. One boy decides to test the truth of the legend, and needless to say as this is a James story, pays dearly for it. Delving back even further into literature, there are countless ghost stories from the Victorian era that have as their central premise someone going to stay in a supposed haunted house as a wager or a dare. 

So then, is the summoning of the Black Lady really a recent addition, or is it a case of this aspect of legend being only recently recorded? Next time, we'll attempt to trace this element of the story back to its roots.

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - The Black Lady of Bradley Woods Part III

Over the past few weeks we have been discussing aspects of one particular ghost story, the tale of the Black Lady who allegedly haunts Bradley Woods in Grimsby. Now then, as we are concerned with this haunting as folklore, whether this particular spectre exists or not is an issue - for what we have been examining is how the stories about the Black Lady have changed over the years. Now given that folklore exists first and foremost as an oral tradition, and therefore it is impossible to date exactly when the eerie tale of the Black Lady first appeared. However, certainly the story of the haunting and the tragic tale of its origin have been told in the local area throughout the 20th century and continue to this day. And last week we saw how in the 21st century, the story is still changing, now thanks to the tale being circulated on the internet, as weblore if you will.

It is the fact that this eerie story is still actually evolving that makes the tale of the Black Lady so intriguing. For in folklore we can roughly divide any old tales into two categories. Firstly there is what I would term 'preserved lore'. These are stories and legends that have been written down and recorded, but now more or less just exist as retellings of the exact same tale. Or to put it another way a standard version now exists, and it is a story that is read about in books rather than still being told by people. On the other hand however, we have the second tentative category of what I would dub 'living lore'. These items of folklore I would define as a local story that is not only still being told as part of a surviving oral tradition, but is also still being changed and added to as the years go by.

In the case of the Black Lady, we have clearly a more or less standard version of the story - the sad tale of her origin - that has been widely recorded. However, as we saw last week, when we investigated claims that she also haunts/or had haunted the nearby Nunthorpe estate, we discovered this was a somewhat recent addition to the legend, indicating that her tale is still being embroidered through retellings. Now this new element to the story appears to be a simple case of mistaken identity, with two separate but relatively nearby hauntings becoming confused. But while this might be just an  error, it does demonstrate that the story is very much still alive. And what is more, there are further other elements in the lore of the Black Lady that appear to be recent additions too.

Traditionally the Black Lady is seen walking within Bradley Woods, or spotted near its edges. However, while researching the legend, as well as finding several sightings of her walking in the woods being made by passing motorists, I also discovered that it is claimed that sometimes she will cross the road, causing passing cars to slow down before she melts away. Furthermore in my delving into the Bradley Woods stories, I discovered a first-hand account, dating from the 1960s, of a Black Lady encounter in which the car actually struck the soon-to-vanish figure with an audible bump.

Of course, if you are at all familiar with folkloric ghost stories, these accounts of the ghost causing phantom accidents will undoubtedly sound very familiar. And this is because there are many tales of local hauntings which have the spectre walking out in front of a car. In fact, this ghostly behaviour is so common it appears to be a modern variation of the well-known Vanishing Hitchhiker story that has been termed "the Spectral Jaywalker". Many examples of it, and its elder sibling tradition, are detailed on Sean Tudor's excellent site Road Ghosts.

Quite how such tales end up being so common, occurring not just all over the British Isles but all over the world, is a question folklorists and researchers are still investigating. However in the case of the Black Lady, I did find some interesting possible clues to how they spread. In the lively comments section on local historian Rod Collins' article on the Black Lady, where I found the 1960s jaywalking report mentioned above, I came across several other mentions of the Black Lady haunting the road. Interestingly however, I also found references to what appears to be a sub-tradition that alleges that instead of a figure, mysterious lights are the cause of these phantom near-misses.

Now one plausible explanation for the spectral jaywalker phenomena is that they are optical illusions. The theory claims that thanks to the bends in the road, direction of travel, and other natural effects of the local landscape on both light levels and visibility, some places generate an illusion or impression of a shape or a figure on the road. It is a well established fact that rapid changes between light and darkness can produce visual distortions - photically induced hallucinations are a good example of this - and it is thought natural features on specific stretches of road such as sunlight shining through trees can produce subtle strobing effects that generate these illusions. So then, given that many spectral jaywalkers are described as pale figures - often ladies in white - or as in the case of the Bradley Woods haunting, patches of light or mist, this may well be the scientific explanation for a real phenomena that underlies the folklore.

Sadly I've not been able to trace much further detail on these particular tales of hauntings on the Bradley Road, but it would seem that this section of road is a common spot for sightings of the Black Lady. But given that one commenter on the Rod Collins article mentions his father recounting a tale of a vanishing car on the Bradley Woods road, one cannot help but wonder if these tales of lights on the road were perhaps originally a separate road ghost story. As we saw last week, the Black Lady legend appears to have absorbed (or at least to be in the process of absorbing) a separate tale of a hooded figure that haunted Nunthorpe in 1980s, and therefore I suspect the haunting at Bradley Road may well have been unrelated to the Black Lady at first, but is now becoming part of her folklore.

I suspect this is often the case where one story is more active than others. And have no doubt the tale of the Black Lady is still very active - it is indeed living lore. For her eerie story continues to be told in the local area, and now her fame is spreading online too. Next time, we will examine a further example of the Black Lady legend becoming more elaborate in recent years, one that sees the Black Lady incorporating another sub genre of folklore...

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - The Black Lady of Bradley Woods Part II

Last week we told the eerie and tragic tale of the Black Lady of Bradley Woods. However there is another story attached to this particular ghost which also delves into her origins to a lesser degree. And while the legend we recounted last week bears all the hallmarks of a traditional ghost story from local folklore, this supplement to the main legend,  I suspect, is of far more modern vintage.

If you look up the legend of the Black Lady, you will soon find an oft-repeated assertion that the Black Lady was a nun. Now at first glance this appears to make a lot of sense, for British folklore is chock full of phantom nuns and spectral monks. However, quite clearly her origin tale make no mention of her being a nun at all. Now in the realm of folklore, it is not uncommon to find a ghost or spirit to have several different origin stories, and this is very true in cases such as this one where the entity has no definite name.

However there are some factors here that raise some suspicions. Firstly, so far as I can tell, no one has ever described her as sporting the usual nun's wimple and habit. And secondly, the nearest convent, and indeed the nearest sites of former convents even, are actually several miles away. Now having done a fair bit of digging into the assorted accounts of the legend,  I am beginning to suspect that what we will call "the nun theory" isn't so much folklore but something I have started to think of as weblore. And what is weblore? Well, as any reader in any field will tell you, the major problem with researching virtually anything online is discovering endless pages featuring the same information copied either in whole or in part from one single source. The most common example of this are the hundreds of pages that simply copy and paste entries from somewhere like Wikipedia. Additionally there are an equal number of sites that don't copy and paste wholesale, but simply paraphrase the text, allowing further inaccuracies and distortions to creep in. Hence any errors from an original source are very quickly reproduced, and the rogue factoid becomes part of the popular wisdom on the subject.

Of course there is a similarity here with the traditional way folklore is transmitted, with folks repeating the same stories time and time and again, and sometimes adding or omitting various details, either deliberately embellishing the tale or just by making mistakes. However the line I would draw between actual folklore and it's modern relation weblore, is that the former is done through an oral tradition or by literature, and the process is slow and gradual. Whereas weblore evolves rapidly from the mechanical means of copying and pasting, with variations creeping in from repeated mistakes or poor copy editing, rather than the tale organically changing through being retold through different tellers.

Now then, if you look up the legend of the Black Lady, you can find many sites that simply repeat or rephrase the Wikipedia entry on this ghost. And the text on the original page states that "One theory that has been put forward is that the Black Lady is the ghost of a nun", and unsurprisingly this factoid has become part of the weblore of the Black Lady. However if you look up the reference Wikipedia gives for the nun theory in the page's footnotes, it points to a report in the Grimsby Telegraph, and this newspaper article actually says something a little bit different.

To begin with, the newspaper report is detailing an eerie photograph that allegedly may show the famous local phantom. Apparently while taking pictures of her cousin at night in Bradley Woods, photographer Kirsty Richie discovered strange shapes appearing in the shots. Naturally this was enough for the local paper to happily recounts the legend, and the piece remarks -

One theory is that she is the ghost of a nun, and was also said to appear in Nunsthorpe before moving to Bradley.

So then, I decided to dig a little deeper, and began looking for tales of ghostly nuns in the nearby Nunsthorpe. Now this western area of Grimsby is only a few miles away from Bradley Woods, and was once the site of the Priory of St Leonard. And yes, this religious institution was once home to nuns - and for more information on it I would direct the interested reader to local historian Rod Collins's page on it.

However the priory was closed down by Henry VIII in 1539, and it then became Nuns Farm. In 1935, this was demolished and eventually in the 1920s, the land was acquired by the local council and new houses were built on the site. Unsurprisingly given the area's long and rich history, I did find some reports of ghosts roaming this new housing estate, but I couldn't find any tales of a spectral nun being spotted. However I did find several mentions of a hooded man being seen, and in fact the case was featured in the popular TV series Arthur C Clarke's World of Strange Powers. In episode 5, entitled  "Ghosts, Apparitions and Haunted Houses", which first aired on 1st May 1985, we got the following report of the hooded man -

Now I rather suspect that these eerie tales of a hooded figure are the real origin of the alleged nun ghost. I would guess that these reports of a hooded ghost, and in fact most likely this 1980s TV report on the sightings, were misremembered, and hence the hooded spectre ended up changing sex and becoming a nun. With that muddle in place, it is a short step for someone to theorise that these two ghosts dressed in black and appearing relatively close together were one and the same. And so a hooded figure becoming conflated with the Black Lady.

Furthermore from my research it is quite clear that the stories of the Black Lady haunting Bradley Woods date back well before the reports of a hooded figure in Nunsthorpe. To turn once more to local historian Rod Collins, in the lively comment section on his article on the Black Lady there is no shortage of folks recounting their own tales of the Black Lady, with several locals recalling hearing the stories as children in decades before the era of ZX Spectrums and Rubik's Cubes. Quite clearly Bradley Woods has had a spooky reputation for a considerable amount of time...

As for the photograph in the report (which is archived here), I have reproduced it above alongside a version where I adjusted the brightness levels to better see what is going on. To my eyes, I would guess the strange shapes are possibly the result of some kind of reflection, but given the low quality of the picture I was working with it is hard to be certain what is causing the spooky looking shapes. However, given the nebulous nature of the shapes, I am strongly inclined to rule out a deliberate fraud, as I suspect that a deliberate hoax would produce something resembling a typical pop culture ghost rather than some mysterious patterns.

But the photograph does actually prove something about the Black Lady of Bradley Woods. For while the above snap may well fall short of providing concrete evidence for the existence of ghosts, it is absolutely rock solid proof that the story of the Black Lady is alive and well in the 20th century. And next week we will look at how the tale of this spectre is very much still a living legend. 

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - The Black Lady of Bradley Woods

Last week we were looking at the local legend of Peg Powler, and this week we're delving into regional lore once more to encounter another fearsome female apparition. As I remarked in my little series Species of Spectres, one of the common features we can categorise folkloric ghosts by is their colour. And indeed the British Isles abound with assorted phantoms that are named after the hues they appear in. Among these sorts of ghost, White Ladies are quite common, however in Lincolnshire we have a rare example of an opposite type of haunting - the Black Lady of Bradley Woods. 

Roughly three or so miles from Grimsby, lies the little village of Bradley. It is a quaint little place, and although the village is undoubtedly ancient - for example, its church, St. George's, dates back to Norman times, it has always been a small place, and even today its population still numbers just around only 200 souls. Just south of the village, lies the Dixon Nature Reserve and Bradley Woods. However Bradley Woods has long been home to something other than the usual wildlife. For local tradition holds that the woods are haunted by a mysterious figure known as the Black Lady of Bradley Woods.

According to eyewitnesses down the years, this spectre appears in the form of a young woman, all dressed in a long black cloak, with a tear-stained face. Mostly she is seen walking in the woods, however there are several tales of folks just seeing a pair of eyes watching them, or simply having a sense of being followed. While there are no stories of her ever attacking or harming anyone, the Black Lady has been used by parents as a scary cautionary figure for generations, with the classic line being "If you don't behave, the Black Lady will come and get you!"

So who is the mysterious Black Lady? Well, while local lore has never provided a name for her, there is a most commonly reproduced tale of the origin of the Black Lady. As you might expect, there are several variant versions. For example, one version holds that these events occurred in the Barons' War - two civil wars that occurred in the reign of King John in 1215, and a second uprising against Henry III in 1264 - while another states the tale happened during the time of the Crusades. But regardless of the dating, the story itself stays more or less the same, with the most common version actually placing the events in the War of the Roses (1455 to 1487).

According to the tale, deep in Bradley Woods was a cottage, where lived a woodcutter, his wife and young baby child. However these times of strife saw the woodcutter enter the military, with most versions claiming he was forcibly pressed into service. So then, the woodcutter had to leave his home, and left his wife and child with no idea when he would be back. And every day, his forlorn wife would pick up their child and wander to the edge of the woods and look out for her much missed husband returning home.

However, one day while making her daily walk through the woods, according to some versions of the tale, on New Year's Day,  the young wife encountered a band of mounted men. These fellows were soldiers, usually alleged to be from an enemy force that have entered the county. But wherever they came from, villains they certainly were. They demanded money and drink from the woman, and then beat her, raped her, and rode off taking her child with them. Naturally our lady was devastated and never truly recovered from this terrible ordeal. She dressed in black for the rest of her life, and continually wandered the woods looking for her child. Even after her husband returned, she continued her heart-breaking search until the day she died. Of course, not even death could stop her search and she wanders the woods to this very day, still looking for her lost child...

However that isn't the only tale told of the Black Lady of Bradley Woods, and next week we shall delving further into the legends and lore surrounding this particular haunting!