Hampshire and Isle of Wight Ghost Tales

by Michael O'Leary

  But as for the girl down in Hampshire, well she had given birth to a daughter, and she’d struggled through life. She looked after her child and herself as best she could, and she found that earning herself a reputation as a bit of a witch afforded her a certain amount of protection; and maybe some sort of respect borne out of fear. She knew her herbs and potions, she was better than most at applying them for healing purposes, and she could also make a curse sound menacing enough so that the very fear it induced could bring about its effects.

  A landowner took a benign interest in the agricultural labourers thereabouts, and he gave her a small parcel of land in Hyden Wood. This wasn’t of enormous value, but it was something, not least because various woodcrafts were important in the area, and so the daughter grew up amongst woodlanders, and when she came of age, she married a broomsquire from nearby World’s End.

  Broomsquires made besoms – broomsticks – usually made from hazel and birch. This was not an esoteric activity, besoms were (and still are) thoroughly practical sweeping brushes.

  The daughter went to live with her husband in World’s End, but they both cast their eyes on the little piece of woodland where the mother lived; it would be ideal for carrying out the broomsquire’s trade. The mother, however, in her role as wise woman and hedge witch, wanted to keep her hovel on that land, and grow her own herbs and vegetables there.

  The most poisonous of enmities are liable to come not between people who have always been enemies, but between those who were once close, and this mother and daughter must once have been as close as close could be, a little unit battling against the big, bad world. Their falling out, then, was terrible, and the bitterness between them was terrible. This wasn’t something the broomsquire wanted, and he held no hatred in his heart for his mother-in-law, but, whilst he wasn’t a bad man, he wasn’t a strong one, except physically, and he did nothing to soften his wife’s growing hatred of her mother, who she called ‘that bloody old witch’.

  And then came the bad winter; a winter coupled with an agricultural slump and the dreadful taxation required by a ruling class to fund its wars. The old woman (for she was nigh on forty) shivered in her hovel as a biting wind blew sleet in from the Channel, freezing the south-facing slopes of the Downs. It was only when she had no other choice that she went to her daughter and begged to be taken in. The broomsquire would have let her in, how could anyone do anything else? But the daughter gave her such a look – such hatred – estrangement – a look that echoed the expression the old woman could make when she pronounced a curse – and the broomsquire was too weak to intervene. The old woman stumbled back to her hovel, and that night she died of cold and hunger.

  It was then that the realisation of the act hit the daughter; and her childhood, that close, intense, maybe claustrophobic relationship with her mother – the relationship that festered into hatred – rushed at her with the hopelessness and loneliness that her mother had felt when she was young and with child.

  And so the daughter climbed the gate to her mother’s parcel of land, at the crossroads in the middle of Hyden Wood, and hung herself from a beech tree.

  As for the broomsquire, he was never the same again. He became a complete miser; after all, he had no one to share anything with. It was during one of his journeys around Hampshire selling besoms, mops and brushes, that he was murdered for his money. This was whilst he was staying at the Brushmaker’s Arms in Upham, and it is said that his ghost still haunts the pub. Most accounts of Hampshire hauntings will mention it.

  They don’t, though, mention Deadwoman’s Gate. Mind you, personally I’m not obsessed with ghosts, and as I’ve already said, I don’t go chasing around after the so-called paranormal; I always go for the most prosaic explanation for unexplained events. But there is something about Deadwoman’s Gate – something troubling, something disturbing – the flutter and sense of story and tragedy – the sense of the intensity of that relationship between the two women, the mother and the daughter. I would like to think that they could gain some resolution, even beyond the grave, and that the relationship could again be loving. Maybe it is – and maybe that’s the problem. It could be that if, once again, it is the two of them against the big, bad world, and you or I pass through on that track through the woods, then we, the living, will represent to them that hateful, persecuting outside world, and we’d be better be very careful.

  12

  ONION’S CURSE

  Calleva Atrebatum is a bit of an enigma. It is the remains of a Roman city at Silchester – a city that, when the Romans left, appears to have been completely abandoned. After a few hundred years the Saxons must have gazed on this crumbling, rotting city with awe. A place from a time more technologically advanced than theirs, with its hypocausts and latrines, its ceramic tiles and piped water. This is a science fiction concept, a futuristic city rotting before the eyes of the local people.

  Why didn’t the Saxons build on it? It does seem to be a feature of some Roman buildings that, maybe out of superstitious fear, the Saxons left them alone – but it’s not always the case. The Roman fort at Portchester remained inhabited, as did Roman Winchester.

  Perhaps there was something else at Calleva Atrebatum, something that caused it to be uninhabited to this day. There is something strange about the place.

  A couple of years ago I was booked to tell stories in a village hall in nearby Tadley. Now that was great, because the area is full of stories – and, unlike many other parts of modern England, the people know them. All the inhabitants of Tadley know about the Tadley broomsquires and the Tadley treacle mines – and if I were to tell stories about them, we’d get a nice bit of to and fro banter going; the very stuff of storytelling.

  I arrived in the area a couple of hours before the booking, because I fancied a wander around old Calleva Atrebatum, the site of that largely vanished Roman city. It was winter, so it was dark by five o’clock, but I thought that as the site was roughly rectangular, I couldn’t get lost if I just walked around the perimeter.

  I was wrong of course. Well, the path didn’t just follow the rather more complicated than oblong shape, which was far larger than I’d anticipated, there were ancient stone walls going off in different directions, with paths cutting off at right angles, right angles that could be the corners of the site, or maybe not! When I finally got back onto a road, I had no idea where I was – or whether I was on the same side of Calleva Atrebatum as I’d left my car. Eventually a farmer gave me a lift to my car, which was all a bit embarrassing, and I did get to the storytelling venue in time. Just. Still, I had another story to tell.

  I had been pixie-led, that wondrous phrase that describes more than just being lost – it describes the bafflement and bemusement of finding things not as they should be, of finding yourself unexpectedly back where you started from, or in the opposite direction from where you expected, or finding that when you thought you’d arrived in familiar territory, that the familiar had become unfamiliar, that directions were reversed, that here was there, and there was here.

  But I also had a sense, as I blindly wandered Calleva Atrebatum in the darkness, that there was something else there, something very large, something that merged with the shadows.

  Maybe it was the Giant Onion – not a giant onion, but a giant called Onion! The Giant Onion was reputed to live in the ruined city, scaring away anyone who entered by pulling ghastly faces at them. It was the Giant Onion who threw a stone at a mischievous imp who was taunting him, leaving the nearby Imp Stone next to the Silchester Road, a stone that clearly shows the indentation of a giant’s thumb; and Roman coins found within the site were always known as ‘Onion’s Pennies’.

  We always make giants comical in stories, but the presence I’d felt that evening wasn’t at all comical. Then the ‘pixie-led’ stories started to come to me, the stories about disorientation and mystification. So …

  Once upon a time there was a broomsquire from Tadley. One day he was heading homewards past Calleva Atrebatum,
after selling his besoms at Hogwood, Swallowfield and Stratfield Saye. At the ruined arch, the entrance to the old city, sat a blind beggar. He was raggedy, smelly, and generally tatterdemalion. ‘A penny, sir, an Onion penny for a poor, blind beggar.’

  ‘Get away from me,’ said the broomsquire, who was both repelled and fearful of anyone who should be sitting at the gates of Calleva Atrebatum.

  ‘Just a penny, sir, a penny,’ wheedled the beggar.

  ‘I said get away from me,’ shouted the broomsquire, and pushed the man. He hadn’t meant to push him over, but he caught the beggar off balance, and the beggar tumbled down the embankment into a ditch.

  ‘A curse on you,’ shouted the beggar, ‘a curse on you!’

  It wasn’t long before the broomsquire should have been approaching Tadley, but as he turned that familiar corner, all he saw ahead of him was Calleva Atrebatum. Once more he set off for Tadley, but just as Tadley should have come into view, with his own cottage, and his wife and children, there again was the crumbling gate to Calleva Atrebatum. Over and over again. His clothes became raggedy, his body became skeletal – till he was more raggedy than ever the blind beggar had been. This continued until one day the skeletal broomsquire toppled over, and fell into the same ditch into which he’d pushed the blind beggar.

  As he lay there, the thought came to him, ‘Today, I go home.’ He hauled himself out of the ditch, knowing that this time he really was going to reach Tadley. When he rounded that old, familiar corner, there was his cottage, and outside it there was a crowd of people.

  Some men came forward and told him to go away.

  ‘What happens here?’ asked the shocked broomsquire.

  ‘Mind your own bloody business,’ said the young man.

  ‘Please, please tell me.’

  ‘My mother, the woman of the house, is giving birth to my half-brother or sister.’

  The broomsquire gawped at his grown-up son.

  ‘But – I am your father, she is my wife.’

  ‘That’s a foul thing to say,’ shouted the young man, ‘my father was murdered by the Giant Onion twelve years ago – and the man who is with her is her second husband.’

  The broomsquire tried to convince his son and the others, but eventually they drove him away.

  So now his ghost stumbles around Calleva Atrebatum – a punishment, no doubt, for his lack of charity: something that makes me a bit nervous given that I didn’t buy a copy of the Big Issue today from that bloke outside the corner shop.

  So, maybe the ghost of the broomsquire stumbles around old Calleva Atrebatum – or maybe it’s the blind beggar – or maybe the Giant Onion – or maybe some sort of a synthesis of all of them. These stories could all be some sort of a symbolic expression of an older story – for even King Arthur, that very personification of a multitude of ancient stories, is associated with the site; indeed Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed that Arthur was crowned there. Arthur is said to sleep under many a hill throughout Britain, including the appropriately named Sleeper’s Hill in Winchester, so why shouldn’t he slumber beneath Calleva Atrebatum? Maybe the giant is Arthur himself. But then, who is Arthur? (Now isn’t that the title of multitudes of books sold in New Agey bookshops from Basingstoke to Brechin?) Is he a symbol of some sort of order, something that holds particular appeal during a time of doubt?

  Or a god?

  In 1866 archaeologists dug up a bronze eagle at Calleva Atrebatum. Rosemary Sutcliff, in her book The Eagle of the North – which became a Hollywood film – created a great story around the eagle, making it the mascot of a lost legion which disappeared into the Highlands of Scotland. Rosemary Sutcliff was, of course, a great storyteller, and had a talent for weaving tales around artefacts. I, however, am a purveyor of nothing but the naked truth, and can tell you that the eagle was part of a monumental sculpture. The eagle, you see, is the primary sacred animal of Jupiter, the god of gods, the Sky God. Maybe Jupiter, despised and abandoned god of the departed Romans, still stumbles around Calleva Atrebatum, a shadow of his former self, a god in reduced circumstances become a giant – a god reduced to gargoyle or ghost.

  Maybe, one day, he’ll go to Reading Museum and demand his eagle back.

  13

  BACK TO SCHOOL

  It was back in the 1960s.

  A young woman from Basingstoke was about to get engaged to a young man from Farnborough, and much of their courtship was carried out with the aid of a Royal Enfield motorcycle. She was looking forward to his arrival at her house on the outskirts of Basingstoke, because that Saturday they were due to head southwards down the old Roman road to posh old Winchester, to buy the ring.

  On the previous Friday evening they’d gone to the pictures in Basingstoke, and after he’d taken her home, he headed back towards Farnborough in a downpour of rain; a truly filthy, horrible night. Riding along Galley Hill Road in Church Crookham, he hit a patch of oil, skidded, and came off his bike. He died next to the churchyard. Maybe if he’d been wearing a helmet – and he did have one – things would have been different, but this was the sixties.

  The young woman knew nothing about this, so the next morning she eagerly awaited his arrival, and the trip to Winchester.

  The doorbell rang and she opened the door – there was no one there.

  He was just down the road, revving up the bike, wearing a helmet and a scarf covering most of his face. What she could see of his face looked very pale.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Get on,’ he said tersely. She donned her leather jacket, and climbed on pillion.

  Gazing at the back of his helmet something didn’t seem right – then she realised that he wasn’t taking the Winchester Road, he was heading the opposite way, out towards Hook and Farnborough.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she shouted, but her words were lost in the wind and the roar of the bike. Then she saw that there was blood running down his neck from the back of his helmet, and something that looked horribly like brains.

  She started to scream as he stopped the bike in Galley Hill Road, and dragged her into Christ Church graveyard. There was a spade leaning against the church wall, and he grabbed it and started to dig. She kept trying to run, but every time he grabbed her and dragged her back to the side of the deepening grave – however, when he was waist deep in the ground, she broke free and ran – through the porch, and into the church. Desperately she hauled on the bell rope – and that’s how the vicar found her, hauling on the bell rope and crying hysterically.

  Now this is an old, old story. Folklorists have given story types categorisations and numbers, sounding remarkably like food additives, and, according to the Thompson motif-index of folk literature, this is E215! The last version I came across was in Iceland, and involved a dead minister carrying his intended bride away on a horse. But I heard this story from teenagers at a secondary school in the Aldershot/Farnborough conurbation, and they knew nothing of motif-indexes, or obscure books about folklore; they were just telling a horror story. (It was over ten years ago that I heard this, so some of the details might be adapted, but I think I’ve got the gist of it.) These teenagers were being genuine tradition bearers, the more so for being unaware of it.

  Kids and schools are great sources of traditional folklore. ‘Bloody Mary’ in the school toilets is a regular source of fear; no doubt that’s where J.K. Rowling got the idea for Moaning Myrtle.

  On one occasion I was even asked to tell stories in a primary school in order to dispel belief in this particular myth. The big kids, the Year 6s, had been frightening the infants with tales of Bloody Mary, and it had all got a bit out of control.

  Imagine: there’s a primary school classroom, buzzing with life and colour and activity – and then there’s the toilets, stinky and echoing, gurgling and rattling noises emanating from the plumbing. It’s scary. Infants at this particular school were refusing to go for a wee, when they desperately wanted to do so, and some of them were even getting constipated, because who would ever poo in the malign
presence of Bloody Mary?

  My task was to ‘deconstruct’ the stories, so the younger children could see that it wasn’t real (the head teacher’s task was to give those Year 6s a right royal rollicking!), but it all demonstrated the power of the imagination. Teachers often seek to stimulate children’s imaginations in the hope of getting them writing, but they don’t want this. And those Year 6s effectively demonstrated the power of storytelling, but not in a way the teachers would want!

  But it isn’t just the children who tell stories about ghosts in schools. The caretaker of one school told me that he’d left a bucket of water and container of bleach in one toilet, whilst he was cleaning another, and whilst he did so something hurled the bleach into the bucket so hard that it splashed the ceiling. I, of course, put on my cynical voice and said, ‘Well, it just fell in.’

  ‘No,’ he said, and told me that it went in so hard that it was propelled by more than gravity. I’d better not say the name of the school, but let’s just say that when I looked into the story afterwards, I discovered that lines of monks supposedly walk through the place where the school toilets were later situated. These places, though, can work on the imaginations of adults just as much as on the imaginations of children. I’m sure that part of this is that when a school is in full function, there’s so much life, drama and activity going on, that the contrast, after the kids have gone, is so quiet that it seems eerie.

  Cleaners at Mount Pleasant School, a classic Victorian school building in Southampton, have told me that they never liked to be the last one on the premises – because they were liable to hear echoes of the past; the slamming of the lids of old-fashioned desks – even the drone of bombers passing overhead during the Blitz.

  And then there are the ghosts of children themselves, and a lonely ghost upon a hill.