Hyde’s phantom lorry
A little further information on the Phantom Lorry of Hyde mentioned in “Weirdness on Wheels” [ Ft350:29]. I have lived most of my life in Hyde [now part of Greater Manchester] and can confirm that the legend of this ghostly apparition was still being told when I was a child in the late 1960s-70s. I have traversed this section of Mottram Road around the New Inn, which used to be the main Manchester-to-Sheffield route, almost every day, but I’ve never seen anything untoward.
Between 1927 and 1930, this section of road accounted for 16 accidents involving vehicles, motorcycles and pedestrians. Considering the amount of traffic in the early Thirties and on a fairly straight section of road, this does seem a large number. The New Inn landlord reported unusual activity outside the premises, including vehicles moving on their own – although one incident does sound as if a handbrake had not been applied correctly. A neighbour left her nearby bungalow because “strange noises and ghostly occurrences had got on her nerves”. (See ‘Our Town, The Phantom Lorry, Remembering Hyde’ by Jeffery Stafford
<http://hydonian.blogspot. co.uk/2012/07/phantom-lorry-ofhyde.html>).
The events generated a number of spurious articles around the world. A French newspaper ran a story of a woodland murder that the accused tried to blame on the Phantom Lorry, and an American newspaper’s sensational account placed Hyde among a witchcraft-ridden mountain range known as the High Peaks, and in a near-inaccessible forest called the Peak Forest. It was inhabited by a backward tribe of half-savage natives whose weird rituals included sacrificing victims to the god of the speeding chariot every month.
On Christmas Eve 1944, Westwood Farmhouse, opposite the New Inn, standing alone in miles of open farmland, sustained a direct hit from a doodlebug (carried piggyback- style by a bomber, then released), killing two people. In the 1960s Manchester Council purchased the land to the rear of the New Inn to build the vast Hattersley estate to accommodate the overspill from the slum clearance around the city. Almost directly behind the New Inn was 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, home of the Moors Murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. Ant Marriott Hyde, Greater Manchester