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.