Strange Tales
Location: Cheshire
What have white ladies, a child crying in the night and a bricked up nun got in common?
No, it’s not the start of a bad taste joke - they are three of the most frequent ghost sightings in the UK, a sort of top three of the spook parade.
Through the art of storytelling, ghostly tales are as popular as ever. But are they merely an entertaining way to frighten gullible listeners, or is there more to it?
Historical roots
Many ghost stories are especially regional, in fact some are so local they can be pinpointed to a single village or road. There are countless examples of sinister tales illustrating this: the Chowne Murder , Marbury Heritage Project and the A12 Highway Haunting . These tales are linked with historical fact, albeit some more loosely than others.
But pull back from local stories, and you soon find a different pattern. Popular ghostly figures hint they could be a part of our storytelling folklore. Accounts of ladies in white, unfortunate nuns and weeping children crop up all over the country, especially in historical buildings aiming to attract visitors. Is this where folklore and ghost accounts merge, and are they are merely an example of supernatural urban myths?
The White Lady appears
Take the White Lady, who appears from one end of the British Isles to the other, albeit with a few local seasonings. In Newstead Abbey in the heart of Nottinghamshire, she is reported to walk amongst the grounds where she was a former frequent visitor. The White Lady of Godolphin House Cornwall is a benevolent being who appears in her own ghostly funeral cortege and blows kisses to visitors. The Salmesbury White Lady is famed for wandering the grounds and buildings of Salmesbury Hall, in a bid to meet her dead lover.
Gateway to another world
Mysterious and beautiful, White Ladies are also often associated with water or bridges, enticing the living to a watery grave. Maybe the White Lady is a traditional symbolic figure - the dead come to fetch the living when it is their time. Beliefs held from days when lakes and wells were regarded by pre-Christian Celts as gateways to the otherworld add strength to this argument.
So could it be that White Ladies are just messengers or perhaps they have a more sinister meaning, harbouring malignancy and causing death? Their history is too hidden to reveal the truth.
So what of our other two ghosts? A wailing child can be heard from Berkshire to Berwick upon Tweed, or so the accounts tell us. And apparitions of nuns are two a penny, usually with an accompanying tale that they’ve been walled up as a punishment for conducting illicit love affairs.
A chilling authenticity is added when skeletal remains are found behind walls of haunted locations. But which came first – the discovery of the remains or the sightings? Look at any such story and the facts and fiction are all to difficult to separate.
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