The Penguin Book of Ghosts
Friday, July 18th, 2008
Author: Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson
Publisher: Allen Lane
Price: Hardback £14.99
(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Loading …
Not the usual Penguin book: this is a chunky hardback more than 400 pages thick. The Penguin Book of Ghosts consists of everything ghost-related from the two folklorists’ magnum opus, The Lore of the Land, published a few years ago.
Forget your orbs and EVPs; this comprehensive collection of yarns and superstitions is kept strictly within the bounds of traditional ghost-lore, old stories of good old-fashioned ghosts from the length and breadth of England.
Arranged county by county, this scholarly but thoroughly readable guide to England’s ghostlore will introduce you (or reintroduce you) to such charmers as Black Toby, Skulking Dudley, the Lumb Boggart, Old Cloggy and the ‘Queen of Hell’. Although the stories are of some age, the authors have been careful to check for up-to-date sightings and other information on the ghosts.
Here are just a few extracts to whet your appetite:
‘The neighbourhood of this tree [at Hockley, Essex] was believed to be haunted, as being at, or near the spot, where a woman is said to have killed her child, and during the night noises were heard resembling “Oh mother, mother, don’t kill me.” People used to come from miles to listen to the “shrieking boy”.’
‘One farm worker in the 1960s claimed that he used to hear [the ‘screaming skull' of Bettiscombe, Dorset] “screaming like a trapped rat in the attic”. Some believe the skull sweats blood before national calamities.’
‘As both were returning home drunk from the inn at Nether Stowey [Somerset], Walford strangled his idiot wife and hid her body in a ditch. The crime was soon discovered, and he was condemned to be hanged at the scene of his crime, and his body then gibbeted there. Some people still say they hear the gibbet’s iron chains rattling on windy nights, or smell rotting flesh.’
The comprehensive index is a particular joy of The Penguin Book of Ghosts. Not only does it allow you to look up any location or named ghost, every type of manifestation imaginable seems to be listed: from Black Dogs and headless horsemen to such specifics as silk-clad ghosts, bicycling ghosts and claw marks.
It is only unfortunate that there was no room for Wales, Scotland and Ireland in this unrivalled compendium. Perhaps this was a plan for the future, defeated by the sad and untimely death of Jennifer Westwood earlier this year.
Leave a Reply
Browse features
- Aliens (2)
- Black Magic (4)
- Creatures (7)
- Ghosts (5)
- Poltergeists (2)
- UFOs (2)
Browse news items
- Aliens (3)
- Black Magic (4)
- Conspiracy (4)
- Creatures (15)
- Entertainment (7)
- ESP (2)
- Ghosts (18)
- Mythology (2)
- Poltergeists (2)
- UFOs (18)
- Witchcraft (2)
