WITCHES, GHOSTS AND THE UNEXPLAINABLE

Are there really witches? Witches who can cast spells that make people’s hair fall out, give them aches and pains, and even kill? Do ghosts really exist, or are they really in the imagination? If you doubt, then explain this…

Since the early 1960s I have spent countless hours on the Lancashire coast observing the large flocks of wildfowl and wading birds that spend the autumn and winter there. I reached the shore at Fluke Hall near Pilling at dawn, climbed the sea wall and gazed through my binoculars across the flat expanse of mud and sand. Then a movement caught the corner of my left eye. About thirty yards away, a man on a bike reached the crest of the sea wall where a concrete ramp had been constructed to let shrimpers’ carts pass easily. He then cycled down the ramp, onto the hard sandy-mud and headed off in the direction of Heysham nuclear power station in the distance. I noticed that he wore wellington boots, a long brown raincoat and a trilby hat. He must have set a night-line for flounders, I reasoned.

But then, when the man and his bike were about two hundred yards away, they simply vanished, and for a few seconds I heard the strains of some eerie, almost electronic music coming from across Morecambe Bay. I looked at my watch. 7.15am. I rubbed my eyes and looked carefully. Perhaps the man was hidden in a hollow out on the shore. But he wasn’t. I strode across to the concrete ramp, walked to the bottom of it and looked for tyre tracks. There were none.

I am sure that, that morning, I saw a ghost. I have one other experience of a ghostly apparition, but you must wait for that.

Lancashire Witches

People who boast of being witches, or are said to be witches by others, go back to the dawn of civilization, but came to the fore in England during the 16th and 17th centuries when religious fervour and persecution reared its ugly head. One of the first recorded in Lancashire was Edmund Hartley of Tyldesley who, in 1597, was hanged for bewitching seven members of the Starkie family. However the preoccupation of those in authority with witches and their witchcraft peaked in the early 1600s with the publication of King James I’s small book Daemonologie, which encouraged people to root out and destroy witches. And not surprisingly, when such a subject is almost hysterically raised with a gullible public, the ‘problem’ is found to be far worse than anyone could have imagined.

On 18 March 1612 a poor, young girl called Alizon Device went begging on the road that went from Newchurch-in-Pendle to Colne. When packman John Law of Halifax approached she asked him to give her some pins, but he refused to stop and open his pack. She cursed him loudly for his refusal. He immediately had a stroke and a vision of a black dog with red glowing eyes. Fortunately there were others on the road, who carried poor John to a nearby inn and then sent for his son Abraham to come and help him. John was able to describe what had happened and it was clear (!?) that Alizon had cast a witch’s spell on him.

On 30 March she was taken, accompanied by her mother Elizabeth and brother James, to Roger Nowell, the magistrate at Read Hall. There she confessed to being a witch, told Nowell that her grandmother had initiated her into witchcraft, that another family in the area, the Chattox family, were also witches, and that the black dog, ‘with very fearfull fierie eyes, great teeth, and a terrible countenance’ was her ‘familar’. She had met this dog two years earlier and admitted that it did ‘suck at her breast’.

Alizon told how her father, John Device, had been paying Old Chattox not to harm his family. When he stopped paying, he died. She then described how her friend Anne Nutter had laughed in the presence of Old Chattox, that Chattox had considered this an insult, and that Anne had died three weeks later. She told of John Moore, who accused Old Chattox of turning his ale into vinegar; Chattox had made a clay model of him and he had died soon after. She said that her grandmother had killed someone by her witchcraft, and that Old Chattox had killed at least four innocent people.

Alizon’s grandmother was Elizabeth Southern who had adopted the alias Old Mother Demdike. In 1612 she was eighty years old, more or less blind and lived in squalor at Malkin Tower near Newchurch. With age she had grown spiteful, cursing people for little reason and had thus gained the reputation of being a witch who could cure or injure folk by casting spells. Her daughter and Alizon’s mother, Elizabeth Device, was a widow, and she also lived at Malkin Tower with Alizon, another daughter called Jennet and a dimwitted son called James.

Chattox was not the real name of the other family Alizon had told Nowell were witches. The matriarch of the family was Anne Whittle (‘Old Chattox’), like Old Mother Demdike, a repulsive old woman who was nearly blind and lived at Greenhead near the village of Fence. With her lived her two daughters Bessie Whittle and Anne Redfern, and Anne’s husband Thomas. The Whittles and the Southerns had fallen out a decade earlier, when Bessie Whittle had stolen food and clothing from Malkin Tower.

On 2 April 1612 Roger Nowell examined Old Mother Demdike. The poor old lady must have been completely bewildered, and so confused that Nowell got her to admit that she had first met the Devil at Newchurch. He had been in the form of a boy, her familiar, called Tibb, who had then metamorphosed into a brown dog that had then fed on her blood. Tibb could also appear as a black cat and as a hare. She then confessed that she had brought about the death of the son of one Richard Baldwin by casting a spell on him.

Nowell then interviewed Old Chattox, who told him that she had been initiated into witchcraft in 1598 by Old Demdike and that she had a familiar called Fancie, which could appear as a man, as a brown dog and even as a bear. The consequence of these rantings by two old crones was that Nowell had them, together with Alizon Device and Anne Redfern, sent to Lancaster Castle, under James I’s Witchcraft Act.

Nowell later heard that on 12 April (Good Friday) a ‘witches’ sabbath’ had been held at Malkin Tower, with the aim of rescuing the imprisoned witches. It was also said that at the witches sabbath, a cat was christened as a familiar, that spells were cast and that the witches flew high into the night sky, presumably on their broomsticks. He had the site of the rituals examined, and human teeth and clay charms were found. On 27 April, Nowell and another magistrate Nicholas Bannister, examined Elizabeth, James and Jennet Device.

All three admitted to being involved in witchcraft and, most surprisingly, they also told the magistrates that Alice Nutter of Roughlee Hall was also a witch. According to James Device, Alice Nutter had joined with his mother Elizabeth in the killing by witchcraft of Henry Mitton, because he had refused to give Old Demdike a penny. This was surprising because Alice Nutter was a well-known wealthy lady; it is clear that they implicated her through jealousy of her property and social standing. As magistrates Nowell and Bannister delved deeper into the case, so others became implicated. And as a result Elizabeth and James Device, Alice Nutter, John and Jane Bulcock, Katherine Hewitt (also spelled Hewet) and Alice Grey were bundled off to Lancaster Castle dungeons to join Old Demdike, Old Chattox and Alizon and Anne Redfern. Later Margaret Pearon of Padiham was taken to the Lancaster dungeon, together with seven witches from Salmesbury and Isobel Robey from Windle, near St Helens.

One other ‘witch’, Jennet Preston, lived at Gisburn, then over the Yorkshire border, so she was sent to trial at York. She was tried with bewitching Thomas Lister of Westby Hall, Gisburn in 1608, the damning two pieces of evidence being that Lister had cried out her name in his death throes and that, when she touched his corpse, where she touched bled fresh blood. The latter was the sure sign of a witch for, as the King’s book Daemonologie, pointed out, ‘in a secret muther, if the deade carcase be at any time therafter handled by the murtherer, it wil gush out of blood.’ At the first trial Jennet was found ‘not guilty’, but she was convicted at a second. Immediately after that trial, Thomas Potts wrote that he wanted to ‘satisfie the world how dangerous and malicious a witch this Jennet Preston was. How unfit to live.’

The trial of the Lancashire witches took place at Lancaster Castle on 17-18 August 1612, with Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley presiding. Roger Nowell was the prosecuting council and the lawyer from London, Thomas Potts, clerk of court. Old Demdike had passed away before the trial. Notice that there were no defending lawyers. Accordingly, Nowell and Potts raised all the evidence that they had already extracted from the prisoners, and had them give evidence against each other. Nine-years-old Jennet Device, for example, stood on a table so that she could be seen easily, and announced that her mother was a witch who, with her familiar brown dog, had killed Henry Mitton and James Robinson from Barley-in-Pendle. Old Chattox, in court, described how she and Old Demdike had been to a banquet where light was brought by spirits and their familiars Tibb and Fancie had put in an appearance. And so it went on. And so on.

The outcome was that nine Pendle witches (Old Chattox, Elizabeth, Alizon and James Device, Anne Redfern, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, John and Jane Bulcock) together with Isobel Robey, were sentenced to death. They were executed at Golgotha (see page 154) on 20 August. Margaret Pearson was also found guilty, but sentenced to being pilloried on market days in Clitheroe, Whalley and Lancaster and to a year in Lancaster Castle jail. Remarkably, all the rest, including the seven from Salmesbury, were acquitted.

[The original account of these witches was produced by Thomas Potts, James I’s chief witch-finder, in a book first printed in 1612, and called The Wunderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. It was reprinted by the Chetham Society in 1845.]

The Most Haunted House in England

CHINGLE HALL

Chingle Hall lies up a track off the Broughton-Longridge road close to Whittingham hospital and the village of Goosnargh. It was built in 1260 as a moated manor house by Adam de Singleton. You must remember that Preston and the villages around were, from early times, Catholic strongholds. The name of Preston itself, for example, is a contraction of Priests’ Town, and one of its four main old streets is Friargate, or the street leading to the friary.

Thus, when Henry VIII fell out with Rome, and through the Elizabethan and Stuart reigns, the area had many places where illicit Masses took place (see also Edmund Arrowsmith, page153). One of these was Chingle Hall, where its thick walls had hidden priest-holes constructed by Jesuit Nicholas Owen.

In 1600 the Hall was purchased by the Wall family, who had a son John born in 1620. He was baptised a Catholic by Edmund Arrowsmith. He travelled to Douai in northern France and then Rome, where he trained as a priest and was ordained in 1645. He then returned to England as a missionary in Warwickshire. In 1678 he was captured, found guilty of being a papist and martyred at Worcester on 22 August 1679. His head was obtained by some of his followers, who secreted it abroad, to Douai. Later he was canonised and his head brought back to Chingle Hall where it was hidden somewhere in the masonry. It is thought that most of the mysterious events that have been recorded at the Hall began with the return of St John Wall’s head.

Several visitors have reported seeing a robed figure, sometimes described as wearing Franciscan garb in the house. One report was of two monks together. And there have been many reports of groanings, crashes, doors suddenly opening and then closing, pictures on the wall shifting slightly, furniture being moved and sometimes barricading doors, the clanking of chains, heavy footsteps and an aroma of incense.

On Christmas Day 1980 BBC Radio Lancashire sent a team to investigate and record ghostly happenings in the Hall. They noted a sudden drop in air temperature (this has often been reported when other ghostly events occur) and recorded knocking coming from inside the Hall’s thick walls. They also took a ‘spectre detector’ with them and, when the air temperature dropped, it suddenly changed its pitch, indicating a ghostly presence.

The Most Haunted Town in England

Westhoughton is not only a very ancient town, it is reputed to be Lancashire’s most haunted town. The Ex-servicemen’s Club is haunted by a woman dressed in bright red. In the Labour Club, loud footsteps can sometimes be heard, ringing throughout the place, but the footsteps cannot be linked with anybody walking about. A ghostly apparition comes and goes in the Wheatsheaf Inn, and a woman wearing a long flowing dress haunts a house in Tempest Road.

But the events of 1993 in Westhoughton were the most mysterious. Water started to drip from the ceiling of a child’s bedroom, but plumbers could find no leak. Soon water was dipping from all the ceilings in the house, and again plumbers could not find its source. That the problem in this house was down to the supernatural was confirmed when ornaments, crockery and cutlery started to fly across the rooms.

The vicar came and conducted a service of exorcism, but to no avail. So the services of a medium were sought. She divined that the problem had been caused by the son of the family playing with a ouija board; this had, apparently, invoked the spirits. The medium went to work and, having exorcised three ghosts, the problem vanished.

White-Robed Ladies… and another Priestly Ghost

Samlesbury Hall, a Tudor building and the first in the county to be built of brick, lies close to the Blackburn-Preston road and was home to the Southworth family. In the second half of the 16th century, Dorothy, daughter of Sir John Southworth, made the mistake of falling in love with a son of the de Houghton family of Houghton Tower. But there was a major obstacle to her happiness. The Southworths were Roman Catholics, the de Houghton’s Protestant. Dorothy planned to elope with her lover, but her family heard of this and her brothers killed the lover and two of his friends and buried their corpses in the Hall grounds. Sir John then exiled Dorothy to a convent abroad. When she died, her ghost returned to Samlesbury and, wearing white robes, has been seen wandering through the garden and the hall, seeking her lover.

According to some authorities, there is no evidence that Sir John had a daughter called Dorothy, but that he did have a sister of that name. As for Sir John himself, he was heavily fined by the authorities during his life for his Catholicism, and it seems that his life ended violently on 3 November 1595. Apparently he was murdered in Samlesbury Hall by being stabbed, with his death-blood staining the wooden floor. His ghost is also said to haunt the Hall.

During the Civil Wars, when Lancashire was the focus for several important battles, a band of Cromwell’s soldiers searched Heskin Hall, near Eccleston, for Papists and Royalist sympathisers. The Hall had long been held by Catholic families (the Molyneaux through most of the 16th century, then the Mawdesleys in the 17th), and it had a priest-hole where the family could hide their priest when danger threatened. This time the Parliamentary force were successful and found a priest in hiding. To placate them the priest denounced his Catholic faith. Then, with the soldiers’ encouragement, to prove that he really hated Catholics, he took the family’s young daughter and hanged her. The ghost of the young girl, clad in a white robe, has haunted Heskin Hall ever since, and there have also been reports of loud bangs and knocking and objects being moved that could not be explained other than by the supernatural.

Park Hall to the west of Chorley and home to the theme park Camelot has a lake, and there have been reports of a white lady emerging from that lake. The lake is a flooded medieval quarry, and it is thought that the white lady is from that period and is the ghost of a young women who, having failed to marry her lover, committed suicide by throwing herself in the lake.

Dunkenhalgh Hall, close to Hyndburn Brook at Clayton-le-Moors, is the family home of the Petre family. Early in the 18th century the family employed a French governess called Lucette to care for and to educate their children. Sadly for Lucette, she became pregnant by one of the Petre family and, as such families did in those days, they refused to allow her to marry the child’s father and disowned her. Whereupon she threw herself into the Hyndburn, which in places is a very deep stream. Her white-shrouded ghost has been seen in and around the Hall and stream.

Castle Hill, near the lake at Newton-le-Willows, is an old Norman motte and bailey castle (i.e. a mound of earth). Since the 1950s – there are no earlier accounts – there have been sightings of a ‘white lady’ on and close to the mound, by the lake and on the nearby Newton Lane. Others have also experienced an unexplained ‘happening’. In 2005-8 I went once every week by train from Newton-le-Willows to Manchester Museum where I studied the Museum’s collection of water insects. On my way home, after leaving the station I walked by the lake to where I had parked my car. One November evening, at dusk, I was walking along the lake dam where I heard someone behind me – light footsteps and heavy, short breaths. I turned, but there was no one there and both steps and breaths immediately ceased. Others have had a similar experience…..

Meols Hall, at Churchtown on the northeast end of Southport, is ancient manor house. Today it is over a mile from the sea, but 250 years ago the tide came within a quarter of a mile of the Hall’s gates. The story goes that a ship was wrecked close to Churchtown and a young lady rescued. She was taken to the Hall and several of the estate workers found out that she was from a wealthy family. They tried to extract money from her, but when she refused to cooperate, they murdered her. Since that day her white-robed ghost has been reported gliding through the estate grounds, although my informant – a Churchtown man – suggests that the tale was put about to discourage poachers from visiting the Hall!

There have also been female ghosts clad in raiment other than white. At Turton Tower there is a lady dressed in black who may be seen, if you are lucky, gliding up the staircase.

In contrast at Worsley Old Hall, the home of the canal-building Duke of Bridgewater, the ghost of Dorothy Legh glides down the stairs wearing green attire. And if you visit Gubberford Bridge, which carries traffic across the River Wyre to the village of Scorton, you might see the grey ghost of a servant girl gazing down into the water. It is said that she was murdered by a jealous lover.

The Rabbit of Crank

Sometime in the 19th century, an old lady lived in a cottage at Crank, a mile or so west of Billinge, with her daughter Jenny. She was a noted healer, who sought herbs in the field with which to practice her craft. Not far away lived a man called Pullen, who developed some sort of wasting disease. He asked the old woman for help and then, when her herbal medicine failed to cure him, he went to local poacher, Dick Piers, to seek revenge. He told Piers that the old woman was a witch and that she had poisoned his body. He then asked Piers to go to the cottage with him, and to help him kill the woman by slashing her wrists so that she would bleed slowly to death.

Piers did as his friend asked, but the old lady began to scream out, loudly, as they severed her arteries. In rushed Jenny, carrying her pet white rabbit. Pullen and Piers now turned to Jenny, who was a witness to the murder they were is the midst of committing. Jenny dropped the rabbit and fled out into the dark night. The two murderers killed the rabbit, kicking it to death and then fled. The next day Jenny’s body was found on Billinge Hill. She had died from fright, exhaustion and hypothermia.

Shortly after, Jenny’s rabbit – or the ghost of the white rabbit – confronted Piers. He fled in terror and committed suicide by hanging himself in a quarry on Billinge Hill. The rabbit then confronted Pullen, who turned mad and died of a heart attack. It was said that the rabbit of Crank appeared to others in the Billinge-Crank area, and that whoever saw it, died soon afterwards. Happily, it seems, there have been no recent reports.

The Phantom Horseman of Wycoller

Wycoller is a ‘hamlet frozen in time’ in East Lancashire, close to the village of Trawden. Also close to the Yorkshire border, it is part of Brontë country, and Wycoller Hall was the model for Ferndean Manor, in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The Hall was built by the Hartley family in the 16th century and later owned by the Cunliffes, but it was abandoned and much of its masonry robbed for other buildings. Now the centre of a Country Park, Wycoller is well worth a visit.

All that remains of Wycoller Hall, Jane Eyre’s Ferndean Manor and home of the Phantom Horseman

Once every year, the story goes, a phantom horseman, dressed as a Charles I cavalier, would gallop up the drive to the Hall, rein in his horse, dismount and go rushing in and up the stairs. From the upstairs, witnesses would hear loud screams, and then they would see the phantom horseman rush out of the Hall, regain his mount and gallop off into the night. Since the Hall has been left in ruins, and much of the stone taken away, the phantom horseman still visits, but now he simply clambers amongst the ruins before leaving.

It is thought that the phantom horseman was a member of the Cunliffe family who, during the Civil War when the family was in financially dire straits because of his support for Charles I, murdered his wife upstairs in the Hall after a violent argument. And the screams heard by witnesses are from his wife’s ghost.

This is perhaps the most fascinating road name in Lancashire

The Lost Fisherman and his Wife

Today the village of Banks is separated from the tides of the Ribble estuary by over a mile of land reclaimed from the sea in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Before the reclamation it was a small fishing village, with boats moored in a creek called the Crossens River.

One winter’s evening a fisherman called Ralph failed to return home and his wife went out to look for him. As she walked along the cart track that led from the village to the creek, people heard her crying out, ‘Ralph! Ralph! Where are you, Ralph?’ But alas, he never replied. His small boat had been wrecked and he was drowned. Ralph’s wife died soon afterwards from her grief.

Today the cart track is the road leading into Banks village from Southport, and on wild and windy winter evenings a ghostly form can be seen wandering along, crying ‘Ralph! Ralph! Where are you, Ralph?’ And the road is called Ralph’s Wife’s Lane.

Haunted Pubs

The ghost of a Cavalier soldier killed by a party of Parliamentary soldiers during the Civil War glides silently through the very old New Inn at Foulridge.

Lizzie Dean worked at The Sun Inn, Chipping. She was betrothed to be married, but in 1835 she saw her beloved leaving Chipping Church having married another woman. In her grief she hanged herself in the Inn and her ghost still haunts the place.

During the 18th century the George Hotel on Church Street, Preston was a coaching inn. About this time the landlord, Robert Clay, is reputed to have murdered two young girls and buried them beneath the cellar floor. Much later, workmen were renovating the place and they removed a slab of stone from the cellar floor and by so doing, released Clay’s ghost that occasionally puts in an appearance in the bar and cellar.

A landlord of the Coach & Horses in Everton hanged himself and his ghost haunts the old inn.

The Railway Inn at Waterfoot is haunted by a ghost called Jane, who can pass through the walls from one room to another.

During the English Civil War (again!) the son of Lord Stannycliffe was in the Ring O’Bells in Manchester when a band of Parliamentarian soldiers walked in. He tried to hide in the cellar and then escape to the sanctuary of a nearby church, but he was hacked down in the churchyard. His Cavalier ghost still haunts the Ring O’Bells.

And if you walk down the lane in the hamlet Greenhalgh, northwest of Kirkham and Wesham, at midnight, beware. A coffin floats along in the air at head-height!