Ice-cold prickle
I first heard of a ghost haunting the roads to the northeast of Newport Pagnell in an interview with Ruth Roper Wyld on Paul Bestall’s excellent Mysteries and Monsters podcast. Ruth told of seeing an apparition in a donkey jacket that was so deeply ‘wrong’ that she was too afraid to turn her car around and investigate. Apparently, the figure had been seen by a number of people in the area.
My friend Jackie Tonks and I had driven along the road at night some weeks before and seen nothing more spooky than a rabbit. More recently, however, we did experience something odd that Jackie found deeply disturbing. On Friday, 4 December 2020, we were driving along the road that links Newport Pagnell to the village of North Crawley. It was around 10.30pm. The North Crawley road becomes Brook End, then High Street, and finally Crawley Street. We were about a mile beyond North Crawley on the Crawley Street stretch of the road. We had turned around and started to drive back towards North Crawley.
Suddenly a strange sensation passed through the car. The sensation seemed to ‘enter’ the car from the right, affecting Jackie, who was driving. It was a cold, prickling feeling like standing next to a big open meat freezer crossed with pins and needles. Jackie felt it in her legs and side, then it hit the right side of my face and crawled around my scalp, neck and finally to my left cheek. Imagine ice-cold pins and needles, but with a dragging sensation as if something was moving over us. It lasted about 20 seconds. It was as if something moved through the car and though us. Jackie switched the interior light on and we both looked on the back seat. There was nothing there. We turned around and drove back through the area, but the sensation did not repeat itself.
Jackie later told me that she was badly frightened and that she felt that something was in the car with us for a while. She confessed she nearly screamed and burst into tears. She said it was one of the most frightening things she had experienced – and she had survived the Nepalese earthquake. I felt no sensation of fear – just the weird physical feeling of the ice-cold prickle.
Richard Freeman