Haunted Isle of Sheppey

by Neil Arnold

  This book is dedicated to

  Jacqui, Charlie & Morgan

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ‘This is Sheppey … the Isle of Sheppey – the island jewel of Kent.’

  Charles Igglesden

  Many thanks to the following – my wife Jemma, my mum (Paulene) and dad (Ron), my sister Vicki, and my grandparents Ron and Win. Thanks also to Emma Grove at the Sheerness Times Guardian and The History Press. I am grateful to the East Kent Gazette, Sheppey Gazette, Medway Archives & Local Studies, Sheerness Library, Elaine Price, David Sage, Trevor Edwards, Paul Langridge, Gary Dobner, Steve and Janet, Blue Town Heritage Centre, Simon Wyatt, Roger Betts, Alice Bodiam, Elsie and Brian, Bob Frost, Betty Oldmeadow, Paul Deadman, Philip Charles, Brian Slade, Mai Griffin, Lee Waters, Cassandra Eason, Paul Dummott, Paula Bailey, Tony Stubley, Sheila M. Judge (1920–2002), Colin Penney, Sheppey Matters, Lena Crowder and Minster Abbey Gatehouse Museum, Kent News, Kent Online, Sheppey Website, Charles Igglesden, Kent History Forum, and The Sheppey History Page.

  All photographs are by the author unless stated otherwise.

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Introduction

  one

  Shivers at Sheerness

  two

  Mysterious Minster

  three

  Quirky Queenborough

  four

  Supernatural Leysdown

  five

  Weirdness at Warden Bay

  six

  Eerie Eastchurch

  seven

  Haunted Harty

  Bibliography

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  With haunted houses, ghostly ghouls and mythical monsters, Sheppey has its fair share of spooky stories. The tales are the types that keep tongues wagging and our readers at the Sheerness Times Guardian never tire of hearing them so it’s great to have people like Neil Arnold keeping these legends alive.

  Neil was one of the first people I came into contact with when I started reporting on the paper and he’s featured regularly in my stories over the years, mainly about sightings of Sheppey’s mystery big cat. This is the one which intrigues me most, both as a reporter and a resident. So many islanders claim to have seen it; when they give me their stories and their descriptions, they are so clear, and witnesses are always adamant about what they’ve seen. Many of them were previously sceptics, but now they’ve seen it there is no doubt in their minds. I can’t decide 100 per cent whether I think it’s actually out there or whether there’s a less exciting explanation for it, but I love the idea that it does exist and I never get bored of listening to people’s stories. I lean more towards thinking there must be something in it – too many people have sightings of it for it to be nothing. The most frustrating thing is the lack of solid evidence, especially in this age of mobile phones, so I’m holding out for the day when we get that all important photo and, of course, when I finally catch a glimpse myself. Although having said that, Neil’s research has lead him to discover paw prints and animal carcasses, so it’s a great debate.

  But it’s not just the cat: Haunted Isle of Sheppey is full of other classic tales too, including the ghostly maid who is said to reside at Shurland Hall and the Grey Lady of Minster Abbey, who has been seen in the church grounds.

  By their very nature, these ones are harder to capture on film and therefore perhaps harder to believe. I would definitely have to see something pretty definitive for me to believe in the supernatural and life beyond the grave, but whatever your view, the book makes for interesting reading.

  Emma Grove, 2014

  Emma Grove is a senior reporter at the Sheerness Times Guardian and has worked there since 2008. She lives on the island.

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘The longer you linger in this famous little island, the deeper the fascination grows.’

  Charles Igglesden

  ‘Ghosts! Well, there are such things, so why not write about them?’

  Mrs Stella Stocker

  There are two visits to the Isle of Sheppey – situated off the north coast of Kent – which I’ll never forget. The first was when I was a child, it was a warm summer’s day in the late 1970s or early ’80s and I was accompanied by my parents and grandparents. I remember looking out to sea from Leysdown and exclaiming that the glistening water was ‘like a big bath’, so in awe was I by the stretch of grey-blue of the North Sea, the likes of which I’d never seen before. Then, just a few years ago I visited the island with my father – it was a freezing cold, snow-laden day and we were on the track of a melanistic leopard (a black panther) long rumoured to have prowled the marshes. I doubt very much on that particularly bitter day that even an elusive big cat would have been tempted to rear its feline head, such was the climate. The island was pristine white and the stark trees lining the country lanes seemed to be reaching into the pallid sky, but stranger still, the birds perched on the branches had literally frozen to death and hung upside down like macabre Christmas decorations. The morbid spectacle was something akin to a creaky horror film. I recall attempting to film the scenery – my hands could not stand the cold – but, despite not filming the shy exotic cat, the rumours still persist to this day. Many scoff at the legend of the local ‘big cat’, and there are even those who claim that such an animal is a ghostly manifestation of some long-deceased circus escapee. However, an island resident named Paul Deadman confirmed that unusual ‘pets’ had often been kept on Sheppey; he once told me:

  The Isle of Sheppey – marshland as far as the eye can see.

  There definitely used to be a lion living at Leysdown, it was in a cage above another building. I’m sure it was at a place called the Island Country Club and Hotel which is now a care home. I used to live at Warden Bay as a kid and we used to walk past it all the time to have a look! Also the Cross Brothers’ circus originally came from the island as well; they used to have the yard that is now a tyre firm at Blue Town. There used to be monkeys, a lion and various other cats all crammed into small cages! This was in the early/mid 1980s. I well remember sitting in the Cosy Cafe in Leysdown in around ’85 and the owner walked up the street with a tiger cub on a lead! I also remember the puma along the lower road; the man that had it was my dad’s mates nephew and he apparently had two when they were small but became too much as they got older!

  The Isle of Sheppey is an atmospheric place indeed, and, by the sounds of it, the ideal place for a surreal safari! However, despite only covering some 36 sq.miles (older records state 21 sq. miles, excluding the once smaller islets situated off the coast such as the islands of Elmley and Harty which eventually became part of the main island before the channels separating them literally filled up with silt), it is an environment steeped in history and some of it is rather ghastly. For instance, the isle is certainly one that freely gives up its dead – at Minster Abbey a 1,300-year-old head belonging to an Anglo-Saxon nun was unearthed during an excavation. In the 1920s more than twenty skeletons were unearthed in Minster and elsewhere skeletal remains of infants dating back roughly 500 years were found. In volume 28 of A Saunter Through Kent With Pen and Pencil, chronicler Charles Igglesden writes of Sheppey as consisting of ‘marshy pastures dotted with strange mounds, lanes overshadowed by elms and winding among the hills, old world churches and rustic homesteads and always glimpses of the sea to the north’. The ‘strange mounds’ of which he speaks were once believed to have been burial places of the Danes (said to have ravaged the island on several occasions beginning in the ninth century) or other warriors, slain when the Dutch invaded in the seventeenth century. Although the Dutch only stayed on the island for eleven days, much bloodshed was cause
d, with Igglesden remarking that ‘Here the soil was more deeply blood-stained than any other part of England during the invasion …’

  A more prosaic explanation for those mounds, however, is that they were constructed and used by shepherds many years ago in order to save sheep from drowning due to terrible floods which swept the island. Again Igglesden writes: ‘Here came the floods that swept the levels and drowned the long-haired sheep of Sheppey by the thousand, and shepherds too,’ but he was quick to dismiss the legends pertaining to the mounds as burial plots, stating, ‘I’m sorry to explode the old legend but no excavations have disclosed the skeletons of dead Saxon warriors or Viking kings’.

  Another rumour to abound from the island focuses on flora, for it was once recorded by a Donald Maxwell in his book The Seven Islands of Kent that, ‘there is to be found growing in the marshes of the Swale, and said [on what authority I do not know] to grow nowhere else, a low growing plant with a dull red bloom known as Dane’s Blood’. The flower, in folklore anyway, seems to be a symbol of the massacre of the Danes.

  The name Sheppey is said to derive from the Saxon word sceapige – meaning the island of sheep. It is said that the first ever lamb bred in England was at Sheppey, although this may have been imported Roman stock, because as Mr Igglesden states, ‘… we do not find them [sheep] in Caesar’s list of animals, which he found in this country and indigenous to it’.

  It was the Romans who considered the stretch of the Swale – which separates Sheppey (at that time known as Insula Ovium) from the mainland – to be of great importance for their travels. Their ships would no doubt have travelled from the River Wantsum off east Kent to the area of Sheppey known now as Shellness. Even so, despite the varying invasions, numerous settlers and eroding cliffs, the island has stood the test of time. However, ancient history has very much embedded itself into the Sheppey coastline. Every now and then numerous fossils dating back millions of years are unearthed, especially around the beaches of Sheerness. Giant turtles, crocodiles, elephants, snakes, huge birds and all manner of plant life as well as ancient serpents have been found over the last handful of centuries entombed within the rocks and clay. Nowadays of course, the island is inhabited by almost 40,000 people, but most of these reside in built-up pockets on the island, leaving the rest of the land to soggy marsh and sprawling fields.

  It’s no real surprise that wildlife is rife on Sheppey, although it was rumoured in the early 1900s that no fox, mole or rat inhabited the island. This is contradicted, however, by the belief that the church at Elmley was so rarely visited due to a sinister plague of rats which would drive visitors away. The former village was once described as ‘one of the loneliest spots in Kent’ and was once believed to have been a setting for human sacrifice!

  Coming back to the island’s wildlife, in the 1860s a colony of European yellow-tailed scorpions were discovered living at the Sheerness docks, in healthy numbers. They are believed to have been imported on a ship, as they are usually native to southern Europe and north-west Africa. In 1997 the presumed-extinct Maid of Kent beetle turned up in a lavatory on the island. The 1in long insect, which resembles a golden-haired bee, was apparently last seen in Kent in 1950 and reported officially endangered during the 1980s. It was also recorded that in the June of 1756 a huge whale, measuring approximately 36ft in length and weighing ‘many tons’ was caught at Minster-on-Sea. Another whale, of the humpback variety and measuring almost 40ft in length, was found dead off Sheppey in the spring of 2013. In 1972 a dolphin was found washed ashore at Leysdown, while in ’64 a plague of poisonous jellyfish invaded the Sheppey coastline. In 2012 an even stranger out-of-place animal turned up on the island – albeit dead. A wallaby (a marsupial native to Australia) had somehow made its way across from the mainland. Press at the time believed that the animal had swum across the Swale; either that or it had obtained a cheap day return on the train. The animal was more likely an escapee from a private collection and sadly, it was eventually hit by a car. Mind you, in the autumn of 1912, the island was said to have been briefly visited by even weirder invaders – aliens! On 14 October 1912 what became known as the ‘Sheerness scare’ hit the headlines after numerous island residents reported a strange buzzing noise emanating from the night sky. No craft was actually seen, despite numerous lookouts being stationed across the island. Many feared that a German Zeppelin airship was to blame and the scare was addressed in the House of Commons during late November with Prime Minister Winston Churchill commenting that some ‘thing’ had most certainly been experienced. However, with no British aircraft in the skies at the time and the nearest foreign Zeppelin being some 400 miles away, no one was quite sure what had spooked so many people. Weirder still, at 10.30 p.m. on the night of 22 March 1979, local police received several phone calls from motorists who claimed to have seen a bizarre entity near the Kingsferry Bridge at Sheppey Way. Witnesses described a ‘creature’ dressed in a silvery costume akin to a diving suit, but resembling an ape in form – maybe that unidentified flying object of 1912 had dropped some ‘thing’ off! Despite investigations, police could find no trace of the humanoid; some of the reports seemed to contradict one another, with one male motorist claiming that the face of the being could not be seen because it wore a helmet with a black visor. Consider also that a majority of the vehicles travelling over the bridge were clocking an average speed of 30–40mph; one wonders if they’d merely seen somebody walking late at night. We’ll never know if there really was a Sheppey ‘space ape’ or simply a person in rather unusual fancy dress. Whatever this character was, one male witness – a lorry driver – was so spooked by its appearance that when he got home that night he took a shotgun to bed with him whilst another claimed that the being was a ghost!

  The so-called Sheppey ‘space ape’ enigma may not have been solved, but several years previously, in 1967, one reputed Sheppey alien invasion was. The armed forces, members of the Ministry of Defence and several police officers were called into action when a handful of strange disc-like objects turned up across the south-east. One such ‘flying saucer’ was discovered at Sheppey. At the time a number of people had truly begun to believe that the island was being invaded by Martians until bomb disposal experts, X-raying the disc, discovered a set of batteries. The disc simply turned out to be part of a huge hoax carried out by a bunch of university students who had planned the ‘saucer’ flap as part of their rag week. They’d placed six discs – which resembled sci-fi-style alien spacecraft – seemingly in strategic fashion across southern England, and even filled some of the discs with a peculiar gooey substance to give the effect of extraterrestrial content!

  Nowadays access to the island doesn’t have to come via flying saucer! Two main bridges cross the Swale, the most recent of these – the Sheppey Crossing – being constructed in May 2006 to ease the flow of traffic that would often find itself lined up on the Kingsferry Bridge, a lifting bridge built in 1959 to allow ships to pass beneath it. There have been a handful of bridges built over the years connecting Sheppey to the mainland. Charles Igglesden believes there may have been some type of structure in place as early as the fourteenth century which connected Sheppey to Elmley, although it was destroyed by a large wave. Before the first main bridge in the 1860s, it was believed that people were transported across the river by a small ferry. However, the trip would have been made a lot easier in 1779 when the Thames froze and a sheet of ice stretched from the island to Essex!

  View from Sheppey Way of the Sheppey Crossing – a bridge built in 2006 to allow further access to the island.

  Ever since childhood I’ve been interested in the quirky and eerie side of history, particularly of local antiquity; those macabre tales and ghostly yarns which often leave readers scratching their head in bemusement. Sheppey has one of Britain’s most famous legends pertaining to a chap named Sir Robert de Shurland. His tragic tale is one that has become urban legend, passed down through generations, at times altered to fit in with the current climate. The yarn refers t
o an interesting tomb situated in Minster Abbey church. The vault depicts a resting knight accompanied by a horse’s head which appears to be rising out of waves by his feet. Many believe the horse is called Grey Dolphin and that it was mounted by de Shurland in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Sir Robert, due to his gallantry in battle, was given the right by Edward I to comb the shores of Sheppey with his lance and take home whatever flotsam and jetsam he should find. However, de Shurland became involved in an unfortunate incident which many believed would lead to his eventual death.

  The tomb of Sir Robert de Shurland at Minster Abbey. Note the horse’s head at his feet.

  Whilst some say the story is a fable, possibly originating from the seventeenth century and elaborated on over the succeeding years, it is still one of intrigue, for it is said that de Shurland once killed a monk who failed to respond to his orders. Sir Robert became ridden with guilt after committing this act and so decided to visit the king in order to be pardoned. At the time the king was said to have been in a boat moored off Sheerness.

  Sir Robert, on Grey Dolphin, rode along the beach with haste and then dismounted before swimming to the king’s location. Although the king forgave Sir Robert, once back on shore the knight was approached by a witch who told him matter-of-factly that Grey Dolphin, which had saved his life by transporting him at pace to the king, would eventually be the death of him. Legend has it that de Shurland was so disturbed by the woman’s prediction that he dismounted from his horse and with his sword beheaded the poor animal there and then.