Lying paralysed on the battlefield at Culloden, where the English had just routed the Scots, soldier Sam Addy confessed to Jack Langstraffe that he had murdered Cicely Kirby on Blackwell Lane, Darlington, a few days earlier when the English army had broken its journey north in the town.
Langstraffe, who had lost part of his arm, lunged at Addy, for he had been dating Cicely in secret. Theirs had been a love that could not reveal itself because she was a lowly maid lodging in a house beside the Skerne, whereas he was the son of wealthy Blackwell farmer.
A stretcher party separated the two men and carried them to a field hospital where Addy, his back broken, explained how harmless horseplay had ended when Cicely fell and bashed her head on a tree root. In haste, he’d finished her off by strangling her with her scarf, and burying her in a shallow roadside grave. As Addy struggled for breath, the hospital tent filled with a bright white light with a ghostly green girl at its centre. Then he died. Similar spooky sightings have been reported in Blackwell Grange on the anniversary of the Battle of Culloden.
On 2 September 1935, workmen in Blackwell Lane found a young woman’s skeleton in a shallow roadside grave. It was almost 200 years old.
(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2000)