Ghostly tales of a Grey Lady, a cat and a man with a cane
MERVYN EDWARDS looks at some of the spooks supposedly haunting the Potteries...
YOU’D expect to hear about ghosts in visiting some of our age-old properties in the North Staffordshire and Cheshire area. An organisation with the gravitas of the National Trust offers an internet post describing ‘Our Most Haunted Places’ – history with mystery, if you like.
Heritage venues may well ask you to admire their heavily-layered past, their 16th century carved tables, tester beds, pegged joints and carpenters’ marks, but spooks mean spondulicks and coffins swell coffers.
Hence many heritage attractions that groan with history also apparently groan with ghosts.
Stoke-on-trent’s oldest house – Ford Green Hall in Ford Green Road, Smallthorne – realises this as much as anyone, hence it has held night-time ghost-watching events.
The impressive property has been dated back to 1624 and was built as a yeoman’s farm house.
Reports of a spirit roaming the property have been circulating for some time. The Sentinel ran an article on this as long ago as 1977.
The newspaper interviewed Sylvia Furnival who lived at Ford Green Hall as its custodian. She and her husband regularly heard creaks and other strange sounds in the building – which should surely come as no surprise on account of its timberframed, wattle and daub structure.
Crucially, whilst confessing that the museum part of the house made her feel nervous at night-time, Sylvia admitted that she had never seen the spirit she had come to nickname Charlie.
Even in recent times, Ford Green Hall has been happy to tell you about what it calls its ‘reported ghosts’ – including a male attired in period costume and carrying a silver-topped cane.
Another male spirit stands, hands on hips, at the top of the attic stairs, wearing a red coat.
There is also said to be the ghost of a woman who has been spotted in a bedroom and who has apparently appeared through a brick wall that was not an original feature of the house.
Lastly, people claim to have seen the ghost of a cat at Ford Green Hall.
Little Moreton Hall, near Congleton, parts of which date from the 16th century, is reckoned by some to be haunted by the Grey Lady who walks in the Long Gallery.
During a restoration of the building, ‘assorted boots and shoes’ dating from the 19th century were discovered concealed in the structure of the building.
Shoes were concealed in buildings either to ward off demons, witches or phantoms or to encourage the fertility of female occupants.
One Tripadvisor contributor wrote of how his wife had well and truly been given the heebie-jeebies by something decidedly sinister – but not female – on a visit to this tourist attraction.
He quoted her as explaining: “I will NEVER go to that place again. Whatever it was was definitely a malevolent evil presence.
“It enveloped me in a suffocating, damp grip, as if I were being enclosed by a heavy cloak. Definitely male, it was guilty of something very heinous!”
Incidentally, the property incorporates a private chapel and the mysterious sobbing of a child is said to have been heard in there.
I should add that among other heritage attractions said to have a resident ghost is Gladstone Pottery Museum in Longton – though I have found staff members a little reluctant to talk about it.
Not so the team from TV’S Most Haunted, which with the aid of journalistic legerdemain, had the unerring ability to find evidence of the supernatural wherever they filmed.
The team reported temperature changes and flying objects on their visit to Gladstone in 2006. Perhaps it was the restless spirit of a saggar maker’s bottom knocker.
One of the talks I am regularly asked to present is called Tales of the Unexpected and it examines how suspected paranormal activity can often be explained and why we believe what we do.
Intriguingly, many perfectly rational people approach me when I have finished and in all sincerity convey some of their own eerie experiences.
Several people of my acquaintance claim to have seen ghosts. One of my female friends claims to have seen a strange gentleman apparition wearing a top hat outside Hartshill Cemetery.
Another friend, Laura Morrey, formerly worked with me at Chatterley Whitfield Mining Museum in the early 1990s.
Laura, now aged 55, was a receptionist who worked on what we called the front desk near to the administration building at the top end of the site.
She recalls: “I was working on a typewriter at the desk and on one occasion the electric typewriter started typing on its own.
“I initially dismissed it as a trick of my imagination. However, it happened a second time. Eventually, the Education Officer and yours truly were brave enough to put some paper into the typewriter to see if we were being sent a message.
“However, when we did so, there was only gobbledegook on the paper. We weren’t sure whether there was perhaps an electrical fault with the typewriter, so we had an engineer look it – and he could find nothing wrong with it.
“No-one liked sitting at the desk on their own and I sometimes found excuses to go elsewhere for company.”
Of course, no end of pubs have claimed to be associated with ghosts – though the ghoulish looking figure in our accompanying photograph does not appear to be frightening Mark Finney and Peter Baggley who were visiting the Beehive in Penkhull at the time.
However, other pubs have reported strange sightings in the past and I invite readers to make what they will of some quite crazy stories.
Take the Gardeners Arms in Liverpool Road, Newcastle (last known as the Full Moon).
In 1992 ex-landlord Cyril Humpage, who left the pub in 1984, told The Sentinel that a ghost said to be haunting the pub was probably his wife, who had died in the early 1980s, aged 59.
“Knowing my wife, if it is her, she is going to give someone a run for their money,” he asserted. He had invited a medium to the pub several years earlier and had been informed that the pub had a definite presence and that it was likely to be Muriel.
Not convinced? Well, how about the local belief in Longton that there existed a tunnel connecting the cellar of the Albion pub in Uttoxeter Road (demolished in 2003) to a crypt in the neighbouring churchyard.
It was claimed that ghosts would shift the barrels around, sometimes smashing the wooden ones.
The Sentinel reported in 2003 that darts maestro Phil Taylor had recently written his autobiography, conveying that the Cricketers Arms in May Bank – of which he became landlord in 1993 – was haunted.
It was reported that Phil had first spotted the ghost whilst changing barrels in the cellar on a busy Friday night. However, a couple of pages previously, wrote the newspaper, “the Power had painted the scene in the pub above whilst Charlie, as he was called, roamed below. ‘I would play party music by Mud and the punters never tired of ‘Agadoo’, he wrote. It’s obvious now that the ghost was bringing a message – turn that bloody music off.”
Personally, I have on two occasions felt a little uneasy at allegedly haunted spots in North Staffordshire. At Gawton’s Well, Knypersley, where the atmosphere is decidedly heavy, and during a visit with a younger companion to the Leopard pub in Burslem when my friend claimed to see a presence lurking to the left of me whilst I was standing at the top of a staircase.
Tragically, the Leopard closed some time ago and there is not a ghost of a chance of our exploring its spooky interior again.
Mervyn will present a Green Door history talk on Monday entitled A History of the Leopard. The venue is the Unit Z building off Davenport Street, just below the entrance to Westport Lake, Tunstall. Admission is £3, pay on the day, and free car parking is available.