Headless phantom coach horses
MATT SALUSBURY finds what might be a perfectly reasonable Iron Age explanation for for some very odd ghost stories…
There are a remarkable number of traditions from around the British Isles featuring phantom coaches. These are often driven by headless coachmen, sometimes with even the horses pulling the coach being headless too.
The village of Olney, Buckinghamshire, is allegedly the home of a phantom coach pulled by headless horses and with a decapitated driver. Kingston Russell House in Long Bredy, Dorset, is said to be haunted by a coach with a headless coachman, a headless footman and four headless passengers, pulled by a team of four headless horses. Headless horses driven by a headless coachman were said to emerge at midnight from a hole at Rowlands Hill in Wimborne, Dorset. Another phantom coach, with a headless lady passenger, as well as a headless coachman driving headless horses, was alleged to ride around the site of a former court building in Stackpole Elidor, Dyfed. To look upon the phantom coach said to appear on Christmas Eve with headless horses and a headless coachman at the reins, at Penrhyn, Cornwall, causes death, and so on.
Toby’s Walk in Blythburgh, Suffolk, is haunted by “Black Toby”, Toby Gill, a Jamaican drummer of the 4th Dragoons regiment lynched by locals around 1750. In most versions of the story he walks the heath on foot; in some he drives a hearse to Hell, pulled by headless horses. Research by Joan Forman, local author of Haunted East Anglia, concluded that the coach with the headless horses is a later – 19th century – story that became conflated with Toby Gill.
There’s a veritable cluster of phantom coach traditions around Bungay, Beccles and Oulton on the Suffolk-Norfolk border, each with a version in which the horses and sometimes the coachmen are headless, associated with local aristocrats and their stately homes. The phantom coach with a headless coachman (no details on the headlessness of its horses) at Bungay and Geldeston is associated with the Bigod family. The phantom coach at Nursery Corner on the Beccles to Bungay Road is linked to the Blennerhassetts of Barsham Hall (now a ruin) and bears that family’s crest. In some versions, headless horses pull it all the way to Hassett’s Tower in Norwich. The coach emerging from Roos Hall near Beccles, Suffolk, on Christmas Eve also has headless horses and sometimes headless coachmen.
Boulge Hall, near Woodbridge, Suffolk (not far from Sutton Hoo, with its Saxon horse burial, FT 390:72-75) has a tradition of a coach pulled by headless horses, said to convey either the temperamental “Queen of Hell” Mrs Short or Mr Fitzgerald, both former owners of the Hall, now a farm.
While headless ghosts make a sort of sense as the souls of those executed by beheading, comparatively few coachmen actually got the chop; beheadings were usually reserved for highprofile figures. These were anyway out of fashion in the golden age of coachmen in the 18th and 19th centuries, with England’s last beheading happening in 1747. Headless coach horses, though, don’t make sense at all – horses weren’t beheaded.
The recent discovery of an Iron Age chariot burial in Pocklington, East Yorkshire, ( FT395:14-15), might help explain some headless coach traditions. Archæologists at the the Iron Age burial site at Pocklington have already uncovered over 200 burials. These included the first Iron Age chariot burial discovered in England; unearthed in 2017, this included a young man with grave goods buried in a two-wheeled chariot and the complete skeletons of two horses in full harness, found buried as if pulling a chariot.
The following year, an excavation at a different part of the Pocklington site uncovered a barrow containing another Iron Age chariot burial, from around 100 BC. 1 In this burial, a “highstatus” man in his 40s or older was found crouched inside the chariot. The chariot itself, with its team of two horses, was buried as if the horses were leaping up out of the ground. Paula Ware of MAP Archæological Practice told the Yorkshire Post their heads may have even protruded from the earth and been visible above ground. 2 The heads of the horses were certainly at the point in the burial that was nearest the ground. It’s likely they were destroyed through centuries of ploughing, leaving behind the skeletons of two headless horses. Ploughing, along with natural erosion, is known to have destroyed or damaged many ancient barrows and tombs over the years – the antiquarians of the 18th century were already recording traditions of local “giant’s graves” that had disappeared. Any chariot burials that farmers stumbled across while ploughing may well have remained unrecorded. The grave goods of “high status” Iron Age warriors buried with their chariots would have been made of precious metals, so it would have been tempting to walk off with the loot and cover up evidence of the burial.
Could superstitious folk of the 18th century have uncovered one such unrecorded chariot burial, with horses in full harness buried upright but with no heads, and interpreted it as headless horses pulling a coach? Well, the counties associated with headless coach horse traditions listed above are also rich in Iron Age archæology...
Thanks to Paranormal Database (www.paranormaldatabase.com) and @manukenken for headless horse intelligence.
NOTES
1 “Further chariot burial discovered at Pocklington”, Archaeology, 3 Jan 2019 https://archaeology.co.uk/articles/news/further-chariot-burial-discoveredat-pocklington.htm
2 “Leaping out of the grave: Rare Iron Age chariot with horses is an ‘unparalleled’ find”, RT, 11 Dec 2018 www.rt.com/uk/446132-chariotyorkshire-horses-spear/
✑ MATT SALUSBURY is Chair of the National Union of Journalists London Freelance Branch, Chair of the trustees of Dunwich Museum and a regular Fortean Times contributor.
Headless horses pull the coach all the way to Hasset’s Tower