Folklore of Yorkshire (21 page)

As we can see from these examples, the attributes of ghosts during the Middle Ages were quite different from later specimens. Although their initial appearance might cause alarm, their behaviour was often humble and rarely malevolent; they appeared during the hours of daylight as much as at night, and in everyday places such as a field during ploughing; and, perhaps most unusually, they were able to communicate and effectively articulate the reason they were condemned to walk the earth. Whilst returning spirits might be feared, they were not in themselves a negative force: such restlessness was unfortunate for the spirit concerned, but it was still regarded as a natural aspect of Creation rather than a transgression against the proper order.

All this changed with the Reformation. Protestant theology rejected the doctrine of Purgatory and saintly intercession as Popish superstition, meaning intercessory prayer was no longer required by the dead. It followed that spirits could not return to seek such favours from the living. The soul was either comfortably ensconced in Heaven or condemned to the eternal torments of Hell, and there was no way back from either. However, popular belief in apparitions of the dead was stubborn and sightings of such phenomena persisted. Reformed theology was forced to account for this evidence and it did so by suggesting that ghosts were not the spirits of the departed, but visions of angels or more frequently, demons masquerading as the dead. It is with this development that ghosts began to be perceived as baleful aberrations and more profoundly feared.

Yet although this belief was acceptable to the more Puritanical – indeed, the frequency of ghost sightings may have further confirmed their belief in the Devil’s growing power on Earth – many Protestants continued to argue over the precise nature of ghosts. Given the obstinacy of such reports and their association with spirits of the dead, it seemed that to deny the possibility that ghosts were restless souls was to risk denying the afterlife. With the rise in a purely materialist ontology and rationalist religion fostered by the philosophical writings of Rene Descartes, the threat of Sadduceeism (the denial of the afterlife) became a considerable cause for concern during the seventeenth century. Protestants began to endorse belief in ghosts once more; as proof of the immortality of the soul and a counter-argument to sceptical philosophy.

However, the purposes of ghosts underwent revision. Rather than embodying a theological message, their concerns became secular: they appeared by divine providence in order to right wrongs, prevent future injustice, correct immoral behaviour and so forth. In Yorkshire, there is a fine illustration of ghosts’ new rationale in the story of the apparition that appeared to the Earl of Newcastle, at Bolling Hall in Bradford during the Civil Wars. A Royalist army under the earl had laid siege to the city which was occupied by Parliamentarians; they had been bombarding it constantly with cannons and the earl declared that he would put the whole citizenry to the sword. But the night before he was due to carry out his threat, he awoke in his room at Bolling Hall to see the apparition of a white lady standing at the foot of the bed. He looked on in terror as it pulled his bedclothes aside and uttered, ‘Pity poor Bradford! Pity poor Bradford!’ The following morning, the earl spared the city.

The room in Bolling Hall near Bradford, where the Earl of Newcastle witnessed a terrifying apparition. (Kai Roberts)

In this period, it was such an article of faith that murder victims could appear as ghosts to expose the crime against them, that magistrates accepted testimony of such sightings as evidence. For instance, on 14 April 1690, William Barwick murdered his pregnant wife Mary whilst they were walking near Cawood Castle and buried her body beside a pool in that region, a crime for which he was tried and executed on 16 September of that year at the York Assizes. The case was remarkable in that Barwick’s offence had seemingly come to light through supernatural intervention detailed in the statement of his brother-in-law, Thomas Lofthouse, and as such was recorded by the antiquarian John Aubrey in his 1696 book,
Miscellanies
,
as evidence of the existence of ghosts.

Lofthouse had asserted that on the day of the murder, Barwick had told him that Mary was staying with relatives at Selby. However, around noon a few days later, Lofthouse was drawing water from that pool when he witnessed a female apparition walking in front of him. She looked and was dressed much like his wife’s sister, but she was unnaturally pale. After a while she sat down at a spot near the pool and held ‘something like a white bag’ in her lap – perhaps suggestive of a swaddled baby, representing her unborn child. Lofthouse told his wife what he witnessed from which she concluded that her sister had been murdered and buried where her ghost had been seen. They searched for her at the relatives’ house in Selby, but when she could not be found they applied to the Lord Mayor of York for Barwick’s arrest.

These cases became increasingly rare as the Enlightenment gathered pace through the eighteenth century and educated opinion turned firmly against the possibility of ghosts. Yet, much as the Reformation had failed to extinguish such belief two centuries earlier, it persisted amongst the majority of the population. Nonetheless, without a dominant religious or moral agenda which could provide a function for their existence, ghost traditions grew fractured, contradictory and confused. Moreover, the apparitions themselves became increasingly purposeless: they no longer manifested to seek absolution or intercession, nor to expose crimes or prevent injustice. Often, they simply haunted a specified location and terrified residents or travellers, but otherwise rarely had any influence over mortal affairs.

A vast majority of the enigmatic headless horsemen and white ladies which fill up so many Victorian topography and folklore collections, seem to owe their existence to that stripping away of religious and moral function of ghosts which had been accomplished by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Yorkshire has no shortage of such spectres. The popularity of headless ghosts is especially puzzling and they are so abundant in the county that it would be a tedious, perhaps impossible, task to list them all. Suffice it to say, nearly every locality had such a ghost, which would walk or ride nightly for no obvious reason. However, they exist primarily as rumour legends, and few first-hand accounts of encounters with these apparitions exist.

Some traditions were more colourful than others: a headless woman that haunted the road between Leven and Riston in East Yorkshire used to leap up behind horsemen and slap their ears, whilst at Stokesley, just such a ghost in burning clothes was said to walk from Lady Cross to Kirby Lane, then disappear with a shriek. At Low Hall in Yeadon another headless woman emerged from the oak panelling of a bedchamber and glided across it, white robe flowing behind her, to disappear into a concealed chamber by the fireplace. Yet another example haunted a barn at Dalton near Thirsk, and appeared carrying her head like a lantern, emitting light from its eyes, nostrils and mouth. There was a hole in the barn wall supposedly made by a horrified tramp as he tried to escape from this vision, and it was shown to visitors as a mark of the tradition’s authenticity.

The tomb of Sir Richard Beaumont, whose headless phantom walks nearby. (Kai Roberts)

The headless state of such ghosts is perplexing. Had the ghost represented a known individual who had been beheaded it would make sense, but decapitation was actually a rare mode of execution in English history, reserved for the aristocracy. Sometimes the condition of the ghost is associated with mere head injury, such as the headless apparition that haunts the foot of Colburn Nab in Staithes, identified with a girl whose skull was shattered by a falling rock from the cliff above. In other instances a vague tradition seems to have been invented to account for the appearance. For instance, natives of Linthwaite claimed that the headless horseman who rode the lanes in those parts was the ghost of a local chief who had been beheaded on orders of the king for his disloyalty, although the historical record is silent about such an individual.

Perhaps more egregiously, the headless ghost of Sir Richard Beaumont, said to walk between Kirkheaton and Lepton near Huddersfield on the night of 5 July, was supposed to have been decapitated in a quarrel with a fellow highwayman over their spoils. This is despite the fact Sir Richard is known to have died in 1631 of natural causes and there is no evidence to suggest that he ever engaged in criminal activity. It seems likely that Sir Richard’s ghost was originally headless for some symbolic reason which was forgotten by subsequent generations, and the story about his death was appended when an explanation was demanded; or the phantom was once an anonymous headless ghost onto whom Sir Richard’s name was superimposed by later tradition.

Conversely, when the apparition of an historical figure who actually was beheaded is seen, the condition of being headless was not observed! This is true of the ghost of Richard le Scrope, a medieval Archbishop of York, who was executed for treason by order of Henry IV on 29 May 1405 in a field outside the walls of the city. Locals believed that Scrope’s ghost occasionally appeared conducting his own phantom funeral, which processed from his former palace at Bishopthorpe to the scene of his execution. An apparition assumed to be Scrope on account of his attire was supposed to walk behind a floating coffin; his head was not only intact, but bent over the pages of a large book from which he read, although no sound issued from his mouth.

A similar nebulousness prevails in the case of white ladies. Numerous sites in the county are haunted by white ladies who seem to walk for the most ill-defined reasons. The remains of a fortified manor house at Hall Garth in Wetherby were thought to be frequented by such an apparition, connected with some unspoken tragedy in a family who had once dwelt there. Similarly, the vicinity of a cliff just outside Barwick-in-Elmet was haunted by a female phantom dressed in white, who appeared to wash her garments in the beck near Ass Bridge. She was supposed to be the spirit of a woman murdered at Parlington but no further information was given and it is unclear whether such a crime ever took place.

Some folklorists have suggested that white ladies are actually a degraded relic of fairy belief, and are not so much spectres but genius loci whose original tradition evolved into something more appropriate for the age. It is certainly true that such apparitions tend to haunt archetypally liminal sites of the sort often associated with fairies; for instance, watery places and bridges as can be seen in the case of the Barwick ‘cliff lady’. White ladies are also regularly linked with ancient ruins and earthworks; perhaps most famously in the example of the White Lady of Skipsea Castle, in which the shade of a beautiful young woman wearing a white robe mournfully wanders the remains of a Norman motte-and-bailey castle. Another white lady haunts Danes Dyke, a two-mile long defensive earthwork of Iron-Age provenance near Flamborough.

It was also during the eighteenth century that the motif of evil men and tragic death became strongly associated with ghosts. As the folklorist Gillian Bennett observes, whilst the dead no longer seemed to return for any purpose, the popular dislike of ambiguity meant that such phenomena required a
cause
. Bennett writes, ‘If their actions
after
death have no logic, it follows that any rationale must be found in events
before
their death. The havoc they wreak after their death therefore gets explained by the havoc of their life or dying. Either they are assumed to have had a malice so intense that it cannot die, or they are assumed to have had a death so cruel that the death itself cannot die and goes on being re-enacted somehow.’

This is best exemplified in the haunting of Calverley Hall near Bradford, scene of one of the most infamous tragedies in the history of the county. Sir Walter Calverley, owner of the hall in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, had married Philippa Brook, the daughter of Lord Cobham; but whilst Philippa was a virtuous woman, Sir Walter was a wild and dissolute man. On 23 April 1604, heavily in debt to his creditors and possessed by a drunken rage, Sir Walter attempted to murder his wife and succeeded in killing two of his children. He was caught as he attempted to flee on horseback and after refusing to plead at his trial, he was sentenced to ‘peine forte et dure’ – a form of torture-cum-execution in which heavy stones were piled on the defendant’s chest until he either entered a plea or expired from suffocation.