Peter Naldrett is the author of a new book called Spooky Britain and here, for the first time, he tells the story of his own experience that inspired his nationwide hunt for the eerie and mysterious.
Everybody loves a good ghost story, right? I certainly did and at university read Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens for pleasure. But my perspective on these things changed a little in my second year when I actually found myself inside one of these ghostly tales as the main protagonist.
It was the mid-90s. The X-Files were at their most popular. People wanted to believe in the paranormal. I was living in the north-west of England, renting a student house in a city well-known for its strange stories going back centuries. When I signed up for my course, I had no idea I would be the focus of a new one. Lancaster, of course, had been where England’s most famous witch hunt had taken place. More people were executed for being a witch in this Lancashire city than anywhere else in the nation outside London. And the events I would be involved in took place a mere stone’s throw from where the witches walked their final steps.
The Pendle Witches lived around nearby Pendle Hill in the early 17th century. Unfortunately for them this was in the reign of King James I, a man so obsessed with witchcraft that he wrote a book on it and influenced Shakespeare to create Macbeth. If they had been living a couple of hundred years earlier, like Old Mother Shipton across the Pennines in Yorkshire, they may have been approached with curiosity rather than anger and hatred.
In 1612, however, the eleven Pendle Witches went on trial in Lancaster Castle, a place you can visit today and see where the evidence was heard. The investigation into their activity started when Alizon Device had an argument with a pedlar, who fell ill after an argument. Panicked, Device admired using witchcraft and the family and neighbours were rounded up. A key witness was 9-year-old Janet Device who was encouraged to testify against her own family. Ten were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged.
The story of the Pendle Witches is featured in Spooky Britain and it’s not the only unexplained tale the book from the north-west. The mysterious stone graves of Heysham are covered, as well as the case of the Woodplumpton Witch who was buried headfirst and had a boulder placed above her to stop her rising from the dead.
On their way to being hanged, the so-called Pendle Witches stopped off for a final drink at the Golden Lion on Moorgate. The pub is still there, a plaque on the wall telling their story. And then they left their glasses and trudged further up the hill to meet their end. On the way up, they will have passed what is now Ullswater Road. Maybe they glanced across at what would become the site of my own paranormal experience.
My modern-day ghost story began in a relatively straightforward way. The television would turn on in the middle of the night. A bottle top seemed to unscrew itself and jump across the room. But I’m not a die-hard believer in the supernatural. Those things can be rationally explained and didn’t cause me too much concern. A surge of electricity or a faulty TV, perhaps a build up of gas in the pop bottle somebody had not put the lid on properly.
Later through the year, though, things started to get a lot more strange. Things happened that I still can’t explain today. Enough time has passed so I no longer get a shudder down my spine or lose sleep over it, but I look back on those events with a kind of detached wonder. I can’t explain it, but it happened. I know what I saw. The attic room was the focal point of the activity as time moved on through the year. From here you could look out towards Lancaster Castle and at night hear the reassuring sound of freight trains heading up to Scotland. And it was in this room that the black ash first made an appearance.
The first time I saw it, I had returned home from lectures and gone upstairs to the room. I wouldn’t have noticed my pillow normally, but there was a strange black dust in the indentation where my head had been. I remember giving it little thought at first. It registered in my brain as being something weird, but I quickly moved on and changed the pillowcase. But then it happened again. And again. And again.
It still never registered that it could be anything ghostly or supernatural. I was very practical about it. I remember talking to a housemate about it and trying to find a reason for it. The only thing I came up with was linked to plant at the other end of the room. Could the soil somehow have moved and landed on the pillow? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. But then, what was causing it? One afternoon I was sat at my desk writing a note to a friend and noticed the black ash falling onto the desk from directly above me. I smudged a piece of it onto the paper and wrote ‘this is the black ash I was telling you about’. Naturally, I stood on my chair and examined where the ash was coming from. There was no sign of it on the ceiling, no indication it was coming from anywhere that could be explained rationally. It just appeared in the air every now again and slowly dropped onto the desk.
Around this time, one of the scarier things happened. I was dozing off one night and became aware that the room was getting lighter. There was a sort of glow coming from the other side of the room. I stirred a little and literally saw one of the curtains opening, letting the light of a streetlight flood inside. That was about a week before the most alarming event happened.
I was in the house on my own, lying in bed at night. I knew nobody else was there because they were either out or visiting family. I didn’t hear anything, I didn’t see anything, but I felt it. I became aware of a presence at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the attic. It gradually made its way up the stairs and then waited at the top, outside my door. It felt like an electrical presence, an invisible static feeling. This was a couple of metres away from where I was laying, and it’s fair to say at this point that I was terrified. It was the first time any of the events had caused me genuine fear. And then the presence was gone, as quickly as it had appeared.
From that moment on, I tried to make sure I was never in the house on my own. Some people will, of course, ask why I stayed there. The answer is that I had no choice. I was a student with little money and a signed contract for the whole year. I couldn’t just up and leave to a new house. I have very fond memories of Lancaster and have been back there many times. But I’m not sure you could get me through the door of that house on Ullswater Road.
Peter Naldrett is the author of Spooky Britain, published by Bloomsbury and available now.