Post by Graveyardbride on Jul 7, 2023 7:40:42 GMT -5
Mysterious England: Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire
Ancient history remains a living force in Derbyshire, a county that boasts a significant number of stone circles and similar memorials to long-vanished prehistoric peoples. Arbor Low (above), a thousand feet up on the moors, with its mysterious circle of recumbent stones, is one of the most impressive of these. At noon, when a strange quiet descends upon the landscape, there is sometimes an atmosphere which can best be described as magnetic, and at night under a full moon, some say every huge stone is a reservoir of psychic energy. A number of the more ancient stones of Derbyshire are credited with a sort of supernatural energy, one of which is the Lumsdale Wishing Stone at Matlock.
The Holy Wells for which Derbyshire is renowned are associated with intriguing religious ceremonies performed each Whitsunday (the 7th Sunday after Easter) when these locations are decorated with religious symbols and flowers. The well at Tissington is said to date from the time of the Black Death in the Middle Ages, being dug as an act of thanksgiving for the salvation of the village.
Sacred wells and streams were honored by our remote ancestors, and like the stones of Derbyshire, the waters speak with the voices of another age. To our ancestors, every cavern, river and stream represented a shrine of nature inhabited by some subterranean spirit with supernatural powers. A cave beneath Topley Pike is said to shelter the elfin guardian of a nearby magical spring, where the waters have the power to heal the sick. Over the centuries, there has been a modification of the superstition and to be cured today, one must visit the spring on Good Friday. There are other shrines, however, with unholy associations, for instance, the deep Eldon Hole in the Peak Forest, where the sprite in possession is none other than Satan himself, replete with horns, cloven hooves and forked tail.
Although the belief in evil spirits must be as old as man, the Satan of theology is a comparative newcomer, arriving with the Christian missionaries to satisfy the need for a scapegoat upon whom could be unloaded all the problems, perplexities and disasters of life, including the mystery of the crooked spire of the Church of St. Mary and All Saints (above) in Chesterfield. According to a well-known, and amusing, local tradition, Satan happened to be clinging to the spire at the very moment a virgin entered the church to be married. This rare phenomenon so astounded the Devil that he twisted his body round to obtain a better look, bending the spire in the process, with the result that it is now several feet out of true.
Halter Devil Chapel near Mugginton provides another reminder of Satan’s less sinister activities in Derbyshire. One dark night, a farmer by the name of Brown, somewhat the worse for drink, took a solemn oath that he would personally place a halter around the Devil’s neck. He ventured forth in the midst of a raging storm and seeing a cow looming before him in the deluge, mistook the animal for Satan and attempted to cast his halter over its horns. The indignant cow thereupon knocked him to the ground. Following his misadventure with the cow, Farmer Brown took the pledge and built a chapel to commemorate the events of that remarkable night.
While the Devil was regarded as a somewhat jocular character in some of the older legends, the same wasn’t true of witches, and anyone suspected of trafficking with Satan could expect a dismal end. In 1650, Ann Wagg of Ilkeston cast the evil eye upon a young maid and Farmer Elliot’s calf, which died within a matter of hours. Like so many other hapless agents of Old Scratch, Anne was handed over to the magistrates, who committed her for trial. Although the outcome does not seem to have been recorded in the county archives, it can almost be taken for granted that the “witch” was hanged.
Horrors of every sort seem to have found Derbyshire a convenient headquarters for hauntings. An old skull bearing the nickname “Dickie” was once kept at a farm at Tunstead Milton and it was firmly believed in the neighborhood that if it was ever removed from the building, calamities of all descriptions would befall the inhabitants thereof. Today, there is some doubt as to whether the skull still exists and/or retains its supernatural powers.
Romantic Bolsover Castle (above), once the hilltop pleasure palace of 17th-century playboy William Cavendish, is home to several ghosts. Visitors and members of staff often see mysterious balls of light, hear phantom footsteps and disembodied voices, and feel the touch of unseen hands. Although seldom heard, there also are reports of a woman’s screams and cries coming from the roof of the building. Additionally, there’s a Grey Lady haunting the grounds, and a small boy sometimes attempts to take the hands of women walking in the gardens.
Ye Olde Dolphin Inne, a Derby pub rumored to be close to 500-years-old, is haunted by an apparition known as the Flying Scotsman, who runs up and down the hall, a Grey Lady and a young boy who sits on the stairs. These three spooks, however, pale in comparison to the horror in the cellar, which has come to be known as “The Vault of Terror.” According to the legend, a young 18th-century doctor purchased the cadaver of a young woman upon which he planned to practice his dissection skills. When the body-snatcher delivered the shroud-draped corpse – fresh from the grave – the physician took it to the cellar, where he was engaged in opening the abdominal cavity when the woman let out a bloodcurdling scream, jumped off the table and sprinted up the stairs, one hand clasped to her stomach in an attempt to prevent the spilling of her entrails. Apparently, she had been declared dead while in a catatonic state and quickly buried. She succumbed to blood loss and shock shortly thereafter, and the doctor who examined the body noted “death by rude awakening” as the official cause of her demise. But the unfortunate woman wasn’t the only casualty of dissection that night: the young doctor who sliced her open was so disturbed when his cadaver jumped off the table that he lost all sense of reason and spent the remainder of his life in an asylum. It is said that to this day, customers sometimes hear what they describe as petrifying cries emanating from the cellar of the old pub.
An omen which an early writer described as “one of the most bizarre superstitions of any time or clime” is associated with Chartley Castle, the ancient home of the Ferrers family. Here was preserved a herd of remarkable cattle which were apparently extinct elsewhere in Britain. Their appearance was distinctive, “their color invariably white, muzzles black; the whole of the inside of the ear and about one third of the outside, from the tip downwards red: horns white with black tips, very fine and bent upwards.” There is an ancient tradition that the birth of a black or parti-colored calf would be followed by the death within the year of a member of the Ferrers family. According to an 1885 article in the Stafford Chronicle, this dismal omen invariably proved true. The famous Chartley herd no longer grazes amid the castle ruins, nor are the Ferrers now associated in any with their ancient home – in the year 1900, in the absence of a male heir, the estate passed out of the family forever.
Well over a century ago, a correspondent writing in Notes and Queries described how Derbyshire folk became “perfectly horrified when a child or other person unwittingly brought a peacock’s feather into the house.” The supernatural penalty for doing so was, it appears, “loss, and various disasters, including even illness and death.” This ominous superstition still retains its hold in some parts of the county. For example, one 20th-centuiry Derbyshire woman ascribed the near bankruptcy of her family’s business to the acceptance of an inlaid tray with a peacock motif. Only after the tray had been removed from the house did their financial affairs improve. This terror of peacocks’ feathers, which also is shared by members of the theatrical profession, was originally based on the fear of the evil eye as represented by the “eyes” in the peacock’s tail. A peacock’s cry, incidentally, is supposed to herald rain.
Until a few decades ago, many in Derbyshire’s industrial trades, particularly those who worked in the coalfields, retained their superstitions. It was a strict rule among miners that following an accident, everyone had to cease work for the remainder of the shift, a custom carried out to break the run of bad luck and as an act of respect for the dead and/or injured. Miners throughout Britain shared similar attitudes when it came to coping with the hazards of the unknown in the bowels of the earth. Oddly, it was believed that pit accidents were more likely when beans were in flower. The lead miners of Derbyshire always refused to work on Good Fridays, a day which is also taboo in other superstitions. For example, washing clothing on this day is discouraged for fear it should “wash the head of the household away.”
However, not every superstition held by Derbyshire folk pertains to death and disaster, for one can still visit the Mermaid’s Pool at Kinder Scout at down and watch the fish-tailed maiden swimming gracefully in the dark waters below.
Nottinghamshire is a county with a remarkable history of hauntings, many of which are of a rather bizarre character. Newstead Abbey (above), offers a variety of ghosts comparable only to Borley Rectory in Essex, which was once declared “the most haunted house in England.” At some period following the Dissolution of the Monasteries by King Henry VIII, the Abbey of Newstead came into the possession of the Byron family, and it was among its melancholy ruins that the poet Lord Byron wandered in soulful soliloquy accompanied in spirit, at least, by another lost soul, a phantom friar, a lone survivor from the monastic era:
A monk, arrayed
In cowl and beads and dusky garb appeared
Now in the moonlight, and now lapsed in shade
With steps that trod as heavy yet unheard.
The Black Friar, as he was known, was an ominous figure whose appearance invariably foreshadowed a crisis in the Byron family. Lord Byron swore that in 1815, he saw the specter looking pleased just before his [Byron’s] ill-fated marriage to heiress Annabella Milbanke. And there were other apparitions who presented themselves to the Byrons, one of whom was an ancestral spirit, the heavily bearded Sir John Byron, who occasionally emerged from his framed portrait and promenaded through the state apartments in the afternoons or sat in his favorite chair perusing a heavy black leather book.
“Devil” Byron, the poet’s immediate predecessor, was actually haunted by the ghost of his own sister to whom, following a dispute, he had refused to say a single word right up to the moment of her death, despite her pathetic, endlessly repeated pleas, “Speak to me, my lord, do speak to me!” In the words of the poet Ebenezer Elliot, her pitiful ghost continued to cry out above the elements:
On winds, on clouds, they ride, they drive,
Oh hark thou, heart of iron.
The thunder whispers mournfully
Speak to her, Lord Byron.
Newstead’s other ghosts include a phantom woman in white and the poet’s pet dog, Boatswain, which Byron sacrilegiously buried at the site of the monastery altar.
In conformity with the eternal law that decrees desecrated shrines are doomed to suffer continued hauntings, Rufford Abbey, a former Cistercian monastery near Ollerton, is haunted by a skull-headed monk. According to an old story in the district, a man who came upon the monk unexpectedly collapsed and died from shock. The monk, it seems, had the disconcerting habit of peering over the shoulders of members of the household while they admired their reflections in the mirror of a dressing table.
Robin Hood and his band and Sherwood Forest are inseparable, but whether the outlaw was an actual historical personage or a figure from folk mythology remains a matter of debate among historians and folklorists alike. The late Margaret Murray, that learned authority on historical witchcraft, believed there existed a positive link between the warlike Robin Hood and elfin character Robin Goodfellow, one of the personifications of the elemental spirit we know as Puck. Should this be the case, we have an interesting example of the evolution of a nature spirit into a human being in traditional lore.
Robin Hood and Maid Marian survived until fairly late in history as stock characters in the old May Day games which in all probability originated as fertility rites. The link with arboreal sprites seems to be even more firmly indicated when one visits the thousand-year-old Major Oak in Birkland Wood near Edwinstowe, wherein Robin and his entire band were supposed to have concealed themselves from the forces of the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Nottingham Castle has long been the focal point of a curious haunting that continues even now to mystify the investigator. The ghost of Regent Roger Mortimer, who was imprisoned in one of the dungeons prior to his execution at Tyburn on November 29, 1330, has been heard, although not seen. Over the centuries, phantom footsteps have resounded from within the dungeon created from the solid rock upon which the castle stands, and it has been suggested such is the tread of the long-dead prisoner in his cell. The anguished cries of a woman, believed to be Isabella, Mortimer’s tragic mistress who actually witnessed armed guards dragging her lover from his chamber to his appointment with the hangman, also have disturbed visitors from time to time.
Nestled in the rocks beneath Nottingham Castle, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem (above) dates to the time of Robin Hood, and in addition to tales of the Merry men, the 12th-century pub is both haunted and maintains a cursed object on the premises. It is said the old watering hole was the final stop for soldiers on their way to the Crusades, and on at least one occasion, welcomed no less a personage than King Richard I, himself. The basement consists of a series of caves leading to the castle, and it has been suggested that when the local jail was full, prisoners were held in the space below the pub, leaving behind a residual haunting.
Nonetheless, Ye Olde Trip’s primary claim to infamy is the cursed galleon, a small wooden ship now maintained in a glass case above the bar. According to legend, hundreds of years ago, a landlord accepted the model in payment for a bar tab and customers seemed drawn to it. Unfortunately, anyone who touched the object – even to clean it – sickened and died soon thereafter. Even the owners who finally placed the ship in the glass case allegedly died several weeks later. On a lighter note, young women who sit in a particular chair on the premises seem to find themselves in the family way shortly thereafter. While women hoping to start a family eagerly take a seat in the “fertility chair,” others avoid it like the plague.
Constructed in 1500, Holme Pierrepont Hall, a medieval manor house, is haunted by several members of the restless dead, including two female spirits, one of whom resembles the portrait of a Pierrepont woman and another who is seen at dusk rushing from the hall to the nearby churchyard. The other apparitions are the ghosts of various servants who seem to be going about their business, totally oblivious to the world around them.
During the late 16th century, Nottingham was the scene of a spectacular series of exorcisms carried out by John Darrell, a lawyer-turned-Puritan preacher, who acquired the sort of notoriety that ensured him a place in the calendar of infamy along with the likes of Matthew Hopkins, the Essex witch-finder general. Darrell began by expelling devils from children and had acquired something of a following when, in 1593, he drove demons from the body of William Somers, an 8-year-old ne’er-do-well.
Four years later, in 1597 to be precise, Somers began to exhibit the same symptoms, which, according to notations by the high sheriff, included rising several feet from the bed and “great facial distortions,” and on one memorable occasion, his “face turned directly backwards, not moving his body at all.” (The head-turning scene in The Exorcist was based on this account.) Unfortunately for Darrell, when interrogated, Somers admitted he was putting on a show and the exorcism was fraudulent. In 1604, Darrell was investigated by Dr. Samuel Harsnett, later Archbishop of York, after which such practices were virtually outlawed, and little was heard of this curious ritual until 1951 when the Witchcraft Act was repealed.
Sources: Supernatural England by Eric Maple; Britain's Haunted Heritage by J.A. Brooks; Haunted Places of Derbyshire by Jill Armitage; Haunted Nottingham by Andrew James Wright; "Don Juan " by Lord Byron; "Mines and Stones - The Hidden Derbyshire," Frank E. Earp, Nottingham Hidden History Team, October 31, 2013; The Barefoot Backpacker, December 11, 2017; English Heritage; Haunted Nottingham; Spook-Eats; Lucy Worsley; Ye Olde Dolphin Inne; Aaron T. Pratt, "An Elizabethan Exorcist's (very weird) Secret Press," and Primary Source, Harry Ransom Center.
