A Ghostly Almanac of Devon and Cornwall (eBook)

Nicola Sly (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2009 | 1. Auflage
128 Seiten
The History Press (Verlag)
978-0-7509-5265-1 (ISBN)

Infos

A Ghostly Almanac of Devon & Cornwall is a month-by-month catalogue of reported spectral sightings and paranormal phenomena from around the South West of England. Contained within the pages of this book are strange tales of restless spirits appearing in streets, buildings and churchyards across the region, including a haunted German U-Boat wrecked off Padstow during the First World War; the 'Grey Lady' at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, so-named because of her grey nurse's uniform; the ghost of a Dartmoor Prison inmate seen herding sheep in the prison grounds and out on the moor itself; a shade with a penchant for horror films at Plymouth's Reel Cinema; and the infamous 'Hairy Hands of Dartmoor', which forces drivers off the road. Richly illustrated with 100 photographs and postcards, this chilling collection of stories will appeal to everyone with an interest in the West Country's haunted heritage, and is guaranteed to make your blood run cold.

Textauszug

JANUARY

North Devon District Hospital, Barnstaple, Devon

Given that many people will have died in hospitals over the years, the odd tale of ghostly activities in these institutions is perhaps not altogether surprising.

Jackie was admitted to the North Devon District Hospital early in 1996 with a very high temperature. She was immediately placed in isolation in a private room. Jackie freely admits to being delirious and to having hallucinations at the height of her fever, the most vivid of which being that there was a young boy standing pressed against the wall in the corner of the room. Even years later, she vividly remembers him as being about five or six years old, with a sad, flushed face and dark, wavy hair. He was wearing striped pyjamas and looked absolutely terrified at the activity that was taking place around Jackie’s bed, as the nurses battled to bring down her temperature. Ill though she was, Jackie recalls feeling that it was most important to reassure the frightened little boy and remembers trying to persuade the nurses looking after her to comfort him.

It would be all too easy to dismiss Jackie’s experiences as the product of her illness – except for two strange occurrences.

When Jackie’s fever had dropped, the nurses caring for her asked if she could remember her ‘hallucination’, which she still found upsetting several days later. Having described the little boy she had seen in the room, she was shocked when one of the nurses told her that a child exactly matching her description of the little boy had died there just a few weeks earlier.

Then, some years later, Jackie was at a dinner party in her home village in North Devon when the conversation turned to ghosts. To Jackie’s surprise, one of the guests began to relate a story of being in a private room at the North Devon District Hospital and of waking from a nap to find a small boy, dressed in striped pyjamas, standing in her room ‘looking lost’. When she spoke to him, the little boy immediately faded away and she had assumed that she had simply dreamed the encounter.

Jackie and her fellow dinner guest were quickly able to establish that both of them had been in the same private room at the hospital within three weeks of each other during January 1996 and that both had apparently seen the same little boy in exactly the same place.

Braddon Down, Near Lostwithiel, Cornwall

On 19 January 1643, Braddon Down near Lostwithiel was the site of a battle in the English Civil War. Royalist forces, commanded by Sir Ralph Horton, had spent the previous night camped at Boconnoc. As they were decamping, they discovered a contingent of Parliamentarian cavaliers preparing to challenge them.

In a battle that lasted for approximately two hours, the Royalists managed to defeat the Parliamentarian contingent without too much difficulty, effectively placing the county of Cornwall back under Royalist control.

The anniversary of the battle is said to be marked each year by the thunder of phantom hoof beats.

Brixham, Devon

On 9 January 1975, actor John Slater died in the National Heart Hospital after a long illness.

Although he appeared in many films, television programmes and stage plays throughout his career, Slater was perhaps best remembered for his role in the longrunning television programme Z Cars, in which he played the character Detective Sergeant Stone. John and his wife, Betty, had a home in Brixham for many years and, while living in the town, they took an active interest in the theatre there. Slater was even credited with personally saving the theatre when it was threatened with closure by taking out a lease on the building.

Slater is reputed to haunt both the theatre and also the rehearsal rooms of the Brixham Operatic and Dramatic Society at Cavern Hill. Since his death, there have been numerous sightings of Slater in costume at the theatre, along with reports of unexplained malfunctions of equipment, including the stage curtains. On occasions, a performance has been cancelled because the curtains refused to open, only for them to inexplicably be in perfect working order again as soon as the cancellation was announced.

Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, Exeter, Devon

In 1741, Dr Alured Clarke was appointed Dean of Exeter and immediately set about providing the city with a new, modern hospital. He approached local landowner John Tuckfield and managed to secure the donation of a large piece of land in Southernhay, which had previously been used for holding fairs and horse shows. Once he had the site for his new hospital, Dean Clarke commissioned architect John Richards to design the building.

On 1 January 1743, Mary Coote and John Elliot became the first outpatients to be treated at the new hospital, with the first in-patients being admitted just days later. The hospital was awarded royal status after a visit from the Duke and Duchess of York in 1899.

Brixham. (Author’s collection)

John Slater, 1970s. (Author’s collection)

A ward at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, 1950s. (Author’s collection)

The Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, c. 1910. (Author’s collection)

An Exeter nurse. (Author’s collection)

However, by 1974, the old building had become woefully inadequate for supplying the medical needs of a large city and its surrounding areas and a new hospital was built in nearby Wonford. When the doctors and nurses finally moved out of the old hospital, they left behind the ‘Grey Lady’.

So named because of her grey nurse’s uniform, thought to date back to the eighteenth century, the Grey Lady frequently appeared on a corridor where the matron’s sleeping quarters were located. She was usually seen running along the corridor, often inexplicably vanishing into thin air.

In researching this book, I spoke to a former patient at the hospital who, in the 1960s, was recovering from an operation and had unexpectedly developed a high temperature. She vividly recalls an ‘old-fashioned’ nurse, dressed in a grey uniform, leaning over her bed one night and placing a welcoming cool hand on her forehead.

At the time, her experience was dismissed as delirium due to her raised temperature. Yet, to the patient, the experience was very real indeed and her description of the nurse clearly describes a woman in eighteenth-century uniform – did she meet the famous Grey Lady?

Penzance, Cornwall

On 8 February 2001, the Western Morning News included a letter from a gentleman named Paul from Redruth.

Paul related his experiences during a late-night visit made to the cemetery in Penzance, which he made with a friend in January 2001. Although their visit to the cemetery ‘started as a joke’, what Paul and his friend both saw left them petrified.

Both men saw a strange white shape, like a person, floating over the ground in the cemetery. The apparition stayed in view for about a minute then disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.

In his letter to the newspaper, Paul says that he and his friend were completely sober at the time and that neither of them believed in ghosts. Describing his sighting as ‘quite unbelievable’ he writes that he is aware of reports of other local people having seen ‘something’ at the cemetery.

Indeed, Paul’s experience seems to be the latest in a long line of sightings of the apparition at the cemetery, which lies in an area dubbed ‘The Penzance Triangle’. According to the results of a survey published in 2005, conducted by ghost researcher Lionel Fanthorpe, the 226-square-mile area of Cornwall between Land’s End, St Ives and the Helford Estuary is among the most paranormally active areas of Britain.

Warleggan, Cornwall

The rectory adjacent to the church at Warleggan was a large, sprawling house set in about three-and-a-half acres of grounds, which were filled with beech trees and mature rhododendron bushes. In 1931 it was occupied by the Revd Frederick W. Densham, the new vicar.

Densham was not a local man and from the moment he took up his position in the parish, he and the villagers did not get on. One of his first acts was to purchase a litter of puppies, the largest of which he named Gandhi. As the puppies grew into dogs, they were allowed to roam free and took to hunting the surrounding moors in a pack. Several sheep were maimed and killed by Densham’s dogs and, as a result, many of the local farmers stopped attending the church, while others demanded that the dogs should be destroyed. Eventually a compromise was reached and it was agreed that the rectory should be securely fenced to keep the animals confined. It was a mammoth project, but within a few months the rectory was sheltered behind an 8ft tall barbed-wire fence.

Densham’s alienation of his congregation continued. At meetings of the Parochial Church Council he proposed several radical ideas, which were invariably greeted with stunned silence and suspicion by the villagers. His authoritarian insistence that his motions for improvement were carried caused further ill feeling amongst his parishioners.

Gradually the congregation in the tiny church dwindled to only a very few stalwarts, at which time Densham decided to paint the interior of the church in bold reds, yellows and blues. He did not consult his parishioners first; no doubt wanting to give them what he imagined would be a lovely surprise. The horror of the villagers when they saw their beautiful church so desecrated probably came as a surprise to Densham – but not a pleasant one. The remnants of the congregation voted on his interior...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 3.8.2009
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Horror
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Regional- / Landesgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Lebenshilfe / Lebensführung
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
• Schlagworte: a ghostly almanac of devon and cornwall • Apparition • Apparitions • Churchyard • Churchyards • Cornwall • dark history • Dartmoor prison inmate • Devon • devon, cornwall, a ghostly almanac of devon and cornwall, churchyards, churchyard, german u-boat, shipwreck, wreck, wrecked, shipwrecked, padstow, grey lady of the royal devon and exter hospital, Dartmoor prison inmate, shade, horror films, Plymouth, reel cinema, the hairy hands of dartmoor • devon, cornwall, south west, the paranormal, the unexplained, unexplained phenomena, paranormal phenomena, spectral sightings, restless spirits, haunted german u-boat, padstow, grey lady, royal devon and exeter hospital, ghost, ghosts, dartmoor prison, plymouth's reel cinema, hairy hands of dartmoor • german u-boat • ghost • Ghosts • Ghost Stories • ghost tales • grey lady of the royal devon and exter hospital • Haunted, hauntings, ghost tales, ghost stories, spooky, unexplained phenomena, the paranormal, the supernatural, ghost, ghosts, haunted heritage, spirits, spirit, apparition, apparitions, poltergeist, poltergeists, spectres, phantom, dark history, manifestations, Phantoms, spectre • haunted heritage • hauntings • horror films • manifestations • Padstow • Phantom • phantoms • Plymouth • Poltergeist • poltergeists • reel cinema • shade • Shipwreck • shipwrecked • SPECTRE • Spectres • SPIRIT • Spirits • spooky • the hairy hands of dartmoor|Haunted • The Paranormal • the supernatural • unexplained phenomena • Wreck • wrecked
• ISBN-10: 0-7509-5265-2 / 0750952652
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7509-5265-1 / 9780750952651