H is for Halloween
Ghosts and Spirits are abroad on Samhain eve and the Chilterns has its fair share of hammer horror and headless horsemen, a ghostly drummer boy and house of horrors. What is your scary pleasure?
Welcome to the next instalment of my new A - Z Chilterns Treasures journey of discovery in the Chiltern Hills. This week has to be H for Halloween, whether you love it or loathe it, Halloween has a well deserved 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 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 this eve.
Here are my top hair-raising creepies to delight you on this October 31st
No Halloween is complete without a witch’s curse. In 1667 Elizabeth Pratt of Dunstable was accused of witchcraft. It was alleged she met at ‘the Three Knolls’, for the purpose of bewitching two children. In her evidence, she implicated three other women, like herself from Dunstable, saying:
…the devil appeared to her about a fortnight since in the form of a catt, and Commanded [her] to goe to those three persons aforesaid to seek the destroying of the two Children… She said she was with them when they mett to bewitch the eldest childe…and that they had two meetings about it whereof one was at the Three Knolls…
The Five Knolls as they are now known, actually consists of not three, not five but seven Neolithic barrows, and is the finest round barrow cemetery in the Chilterns. In 1928 the central grave pit was excavated, and a crouched female skeleton with a Neolithic knight at her shoulder was found. In Saxon times, about thirty bodies were buried in rows, their hands tied behind their backs, presumed victims of a massacre. Centuries later, yet more bodies were added, this time of gallows victims - typically buried where they died. The wind always blows on the Downs and standing on this site is eerie..I don’t think I’d like to be there at night!
A very spooky Roman Road A monk is said to walk the very spooky Roman Road that leads up the hill away from the hamlet of Frithsden, skirting the former boundary of Ashridge House, once a Royal residence, monastery and reliquary of relics. All the right ingredients for a haunting!
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.
With cows for company, a small white headstone makes the approximate place of the execution of the last highwayman, Robert Snooks in 1802. Rather fitting beside the busy A41 at Boxmoor, it was quite the event. Buried where they died, 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 somewhere 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.
Portrait of Katherine Ferrers. The image is in the public domain; 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.
Hampden House of Horrors There are traces of the English Civil War across the Chilterns and in the car park of the very old Royal Standard pub in Beaconsfield, the sound of a beating drum is heard on this night. 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.
In a town with so many old houses, ghost stories are rife. Reputed hauntings range from Raans Farm over to Woodrow and spread out all 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. William Scrivener, ‘on whom an extraordinary piece of cruelty was used, his own children being forced to set first fire upon him’. William Tylesworth was also burnt here, ‘and Joan, his only daughter, and a faithful woman, was compelled with her own hands to set fire to her dear father’.
The monument to the Amersham martyrs. A mummified hand was found in the walls of Reading Abbey by workmen in the 18th century and was believed to be the hand of St James. Well, why not as Reading Abbey was dedicated to St James. In the thirteenth century, an industrious person write a list of the miracles caused by the hand of St James - recording and spreading stories of miracles was important to ensure pilgrims kept coming to the abbey. The relic changed hands many times and was placed in a wooden box in a church in Marlow until returned to Reading Abbey in 2018.
There you have it, stories for a misty spooky halloween! Next week it’s the letter I….I is for? Where do you suggest I go?
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Links you will need
Amersham Museum is the keeper of local stories and makes a half day visit including the walk up the hill to the martyrs monument.
I have been busy with A - G so far, and here are links to earlier posts.
