(This article can be found in Paranormal Magazine issue 42)

Generally it’s believed that ghosts tend to haunt places which have seen a great deal of life – and therefore death. But apparitions are also reported from the open countryside, even from the most remote locations, as JANET BORD explains.

Ghosts seem to be particularly attached to buildings, the spookier the better – churches, castles, stately homes, and ruins of all kinds. They are equally drawn to more domestic settings – pubs, hotels and, of course, everyday houses.

Wherever people have gone about their lives, be it the lords and ladies of bygone eras, or the humble labourers of more recent times, ghostly echoes remain of all manner of traumatic events that have taken place down the centuries.

But what about the wild, windswept uplands?

The wild open spaces of Britain are likely to have been sparsely populated – some rarely even visited – but do they too carry echoes of the past in the form of ghosts and hauntings? It would seem so – and the manifestations are often just as strange and unexpected as those of lowland ghosts.

Sometimes the trigger for a particularly strange haunting may be hard to discern. I am thinking especially of the ghostly ‘hairy hands’ which were said to haunt a stretch of road on lonely Dartmoor in Devon. The first inkling of something strange was in 1921 when Dr Helby, who worked at Dartmoor prison, was flung off his motor cycle and died of a broken neck in March that year. A few weeks later a motor coach drove off the road and some of the passengers were thrown out. The driver later said he had felt invisible hands pulling at the steering wheel. Two men on a motorcycle had trouble with their steering while coming down the same hill, and in August that year a young army officer on a motorcycle was slightly injured when he was thrown onto the grass verge. He later commented: ‘It was not my fault. Believe it or not, something drove me off the road. A pair of hairy hands closed over mine. I felt them as plainly as ever I felt anything in my life – large, muscular, hairy hands. I fought them for all I was north, but they were too strong for me. They forced the machine into the turf at the edge of the road, and I knew no more till I came to myself, lying a few feet away on my face on the turf.’

Local people thought the accidents were caused by excessive speed and the road camber, but a man who used to wander on Dartmoor at night told of hearing an awful scream near the hill where the accident occurred; and a woman saw the hairy hands in 1924, clawing at the window of a caravan where she was staying, only half a mile from the haunted road.

Whatever was responsible for the ‘hairy hands’, they were linked to a possible death. Death is frequently the catalyst for hauntings, as seems to have been the case in the Dorset hills in the early years of the 20th century. Bill Smith gave a first-hand account of his experience, which took place when he was a lad, walking with his uncle late one bright moonlit night in 1915 from Combe Down to Norton St Philip. They noticed a movement in the dry-stone wall, possibly a sheep that had got trapped, and went to look, but could see nothing and there were no sheep to be seen in the field, only the valley dropping away below them. Then they heard a horrible scream, but again there was nothing to be seen.

They sat and rested for a while, and then heard the scream again – this time they also saw what looked like a man rising out of the ground 20-30 feet below them. The uncle went to investigate, but again found nothing, and he said that the figure appeared to go back into the ground, though there was nowhere for anyone to hide and the ground was firm. As they continued walking up the hill, the uncle pointed out a large stone in the wall which had a large red ‘M’ on it. He said it was known as the Murder Stone, because a man had been murdered there many years ago.

Some months after this possible sighting of the ghost of the murdered man, a workman found an old stone coffin buried in the hillside, but there was no skeleton inside it.

Tragic suicides may sometimes be the trigger for ghostly sightings on the downs above Beachy Head in East Sussex, the high cliff from which so many people have thrown themselves 545 feet on to the rocks below. It is rumoured that there is something about the cliff top that makes people want to throw themselves off it, and certainly if you suffer from vertigo I can confirm that it is a place best avoided!

There have been tales of a black-clad monk beckoning people to their deaths, and a lady in grey often seen on the cliff edge is thought to have been a suicide victim herself in the 1850s. A man walking on the downs in 1976 saw the ghost, as did his dog, which began growling and quivering with fear. The ghost bent down as if to stroke the dog, which ran off howling, whereupon the ghost disappeared. Another cliff-top ghost was that of a woman looking like a farmer’s wife and carrying a bundle, possibly a child, which she hugged close to her before stepping off the edge.

Further west along the south coast, inland from Worthing, stands the high point known as Cissbury Ring, an Iron Age hillfort on the West Sussex Downs. It is a lonely, atmospheric place, haunted, according to local lore, by a highwayman executed there in the 18th century, who said he would never rest after his death. Following burial in the middle of the road, his corpse kept coming to the surface again, and his ghost was seen riding along the track. Cart-drivers would drive straight through him, and they would also report that their wheels had gone over something lying on the road, even though there was nothing to be seen there.

Violent death was also the trigger for a haunting on the windy hills of the Derbyshire High Peak. A young couple were murdered in 1758 in the spectacular

limestone gorge known as Winnat’s Pass while they were eloping to get married, their skeletons being discovered decades later by miners working at the spot, and reburied in the churchyard. On windy nights, or so it is said, the cries of the murdered lovers, begging for mercy, can still be heard in the pass. No doubt there have been many murders in the lonely hills and mountains of Britain down the centuries, some of the victims still lying undiscovered. It is impossible not to wonder whether these tragic victims relive their terrifying last moments for all eternity, albeit rarely seen by any living human.

Do ghosts appear if there is no human being present to see them? Or is the presence of a human consciousness somehow a necessary catalyst for the ghostly manifestation? How much does the eerie mountain atmosphere contribute to the creation of the right circumstances for a ghost to appear – or for the witness to believe that a paranormal event is occurring?

This is particularly relevant to the case of the Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui, the highest mountain in the Cairngorms (Aberdeen/Moray). As Karl Shuker’s article on the previous pages has explained in detail, walkers on the mountain, beginning with Norman Collie in 1890, have reported hearing footsteps following them, and others claimed to have seen giant figures which left no footprints. The mountain is well-known for a distinctly spooky atmosphere on its wild and rocky slopes.

Not far behind in the strangeness stakes are the reports of phantom soldiers, and even whole armies, being seen on hills and mountains throughout Britain. The most famous case was that of Souther Fell in Cumbria, where there were sightings on Midsummer Eve in 1735 and 1737, and again in 1745 before the Scottish Rebellion. A vast army was clearly seen by numerous witnesses in 1745, but a search of the hillside next morning revealed no hoofprints. A spectral army was seen marching across Helvellyn, also in Cumbria, on the eve of the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644.

More recently two men carrying out geological research on Skye in November 1956 saw dozens of men wearing kilts. The scientists were camping in Harta Corrie in the Cuillin Mountains, and it was early one morning when they watched the men scrambling along the mountainside in total silence. One night soon afterwards they saw them again, this time retreating in disorder towards the Bloody Stone which marks the scene of a battle in 1395. When they reported what they had seen to local people, they were told that Harta Corrie was known to be haunted. If it is true that strong emotion can somehow imprint itself onto a landscape, with the focal events of the emotion being replayed to startled witnesses as a ghost sighting, then it is hardly surprising that many of the ghosts are soldiers and murder victims.

But there are also ghosts who do not at the time appear to be anything other than living people, and it is only later that the strangeness of the encounter becomes apparent. University lecturer Kenneth Richmond was climbing Ben Ime in the mountains of Argyll and Bute when he met an old man who was wearing a bowler hat and carrying a large paper parcel. Despite

his age, he did not appear to be out of breath, and Richmond wondered what he was doing there, so he spoke to him. They had a normal conversation, during which the old man said he was going to catch a train, and they parted. When Richmond looked down the snowy slope shortly afterwards, there was no sign of the figure, and on his way down he realised there were no other footprints in the snow, only his own. He also learned there was no train at the time given by the ghost.

Another report of a speaking ghost seen in the uplands comes from the Rhinog mountains near Harlech in Gwynedd, where Redfern Thomas and his son were climbing the ‘Roman steps’ in the late 1920s. The mountaintop was deserted except for sheep and birds; then suddenly they became aware of the presence of a nicely dressed young girl, who approached them and greeted them in Welsh. Mr Thomas replied – and then she suddenly disappeared. Although they searched, they could find no trace of her.

Another Welsh case also featured a young woman, who was seen dancing near the top of Moel Famau, the high point of the Clwydian Hills on the Denbigh/ Flint border. A young couple climbed the hill one evening, being the last people up there. Close to the memorial, they saw a young woman in a light blue dress dancing. They were surprised because it was very cold on the hill. Less than a minute later, they could no longer see her, and despite looking on all sides of the hill, she had completely disappeared. Other walkers have reported seeing people on the hill who then disappeared without trace. Cases like these are very puzzling indeed, but at least hese ghosts are of people. Strange as it may seem, it would appear that inanimate objects can also appear in ghostly form, such as the cottage seen by two reliable witnesses in Scotland in May 1987.

Donald Watt and George Bruce were very experienced climbers, and members of the Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team. While descending Beinn Fhionnlaidh near Cannich (Highland) they noticed a two-storey cottage on the loch shore below. It was made of granite and looked in good condition, and they decided to head for it. They were puzzled because they hadn’t seen it on the map and didn’t know of its existence. They kept it in their sights for some time and then lost view of it. They assumed they would see it when they got over the crest of a hillock, but when they joined the path along the shore there was no cottage to be seen. Despite their best efforts, they were unable to locate it. Afterwards they found that there had been a lodge at the loch, but it was now under water since the area was flooded and dammed in the 1950s. They were very glad that they had been together and could both confirm that they had seen the cottage clearly. As George commented: ‘This has shaken us. I have an open mind but this defies all explanation as far as I’m concerned.’

It would be easy to dismiss all these witnesses as mistaken in what they saw or experienced, but that becomes more difficult when there were two of them, as in the last three cases. However, having myself experienced strange events that defied logical explanation, and with trustworthy friends whose own experiences I have had to take seriously, it is clear that strange and unexpected things do happen, even on Britain’s lonely hills, moors and mountains

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