Ghosts and Spirits abroad on Samhain eve
The Chilterns has its fair share of hammer horror and headless horsemen, a ghostly drummer boy and satanic monks. What is your pleasure?
Love it or loathe it, Halloween has a long history and a place in our collective culture. Despite the imported horrors from across the pond, Halloween is believed to have originated from an ancient Celtic festival of Samhain celebrated on the night of 31 October, the eve of All Saints' Day when ghosts and spirits are abroad.
A time of green men, shadowy figures loitering in typically gloomy places, a mummified hand and a request for help from a disembodied voice are enough to get you heading for the halloween hills!
Here are my top hair-raising creepies to delight you this eve
There are traces of the English Civil War across the Chilterns. In the car park of the very old Royal Standard pub in Beaconsfield, the sound of a beating drum is heard. It is the drummer boy, who in 1643 was executed outside the pub with eleven cavaliers. Watch paranormal investigators Jack Osbourne and Kate Cherrell receive a frosty reception during a sensory deprivation session there.
Halloween has to include a bishop, and this one is a complicated story of a repentant bishop turned gamekeeper, turned green man. He will approach you in the graveyard of St Bartholomew Fingest, asks you for a favour, then vanishes!
The Gothic-style battlements and Hampden House arch windows resemble an overblown wedding cake. Perhaps an influencing factor when the current owners bought the house from the family in 1985 to market as a wedding venue. They refurbished a structure that had seen wear and tear as a girls school and latterly as the location for the Hammer film company who churned out horror films and TV series in the 1980’s. An extraordinary sight in this quiet Chilterns valley.
With cows for company, a small white headstone makes the approximate place of the last execution of the highwayman, Robert Snooks in 1802. Rather fitting beside the busy A41 at Boxmoor. Quite the event, especially when his body was dug up the day after he was hanged, placed in a coffin (provided by the generous residents of Hemel Hempstead), and unceremoniously re-interred on the moor.
Sticking with highway bandits, Katherine Ferrers led a double life as heiress and all round gentlewomen who had fallen on hard times, and that of ‘a wicked lady”, who terrorised the county of Hertfordshire in the 17th century with her partner Ralph Chaplin. Apart from robbery, a catalogue of mayhem was later attributed to Katherine that included burning houses, slaughtering livestock and killing an officer of the law. She died from gunshots wounds sustained during a botched robbery and made it home to Markyate Cell, where she died still dressed in men’s clothes. No hard facts available, just local legends that improve with age.
The Knights of St Francis of Wycombe, better known as the Hellfire Club, are the focus of this charming edition of the 26-part ‘Discovering Britain with John Betjeman’ series. The intrepid journalist, poet and broadcaster ventures deep into the caves beneath West Wycombe Hill to evoke the ghosts of the satanic monks.
In a town with so many old houses, ghost stories are typically rife. Reputed hauntings range from Raans Farm over to Woodrow and spread out along the A413 from The Chequers Inn to Shardeloes. But perhaps the most poignant is the story of a group of 16th century Amersham townsfolk burnt at the stake for holding unorthodox religious beliefs. Nothing grows on the site of the fire and you can take a walk up the hill to visit the memorial and see for yourself.
Sir John de Plessis requested that after his death, he wished to be interred sitting on top of his favourite horse. After his death in 1262, his executors carried out his wish and he was buried in Missenden Abbey along with his horse. Sir John has been seen riding his horse in the hills above Great Missenden.
A monk is said to walk the very spooky Roman Road that leads up the hill away from Frithsden, skirting the former boundary of Ashridge House, once a Royal residence, monastery and reliquary of relics. There’s a very good pub there too!
No Halloween is complete without a witch’s curse. There is massive ancient beech on Whipsnade Heath with a connection to the infamous Dunstable Witch, Elizabeth Pratt. Or so the legend goes. She was accused in 1667 of bewitching two children, who upon seeing her, became ill with a ‘strange distemper’, and died, screaming. Elizabeth was tried as a witch and burned at the stake.