Ghosts and Place

Image by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay 

I'm going to start this Halloween week with a huge 'thank you' to Lindsay Weston who broadcasts "Gibraltar Stories", a series of podcasts about Gibraltar from the people who make this such an interesting, warm, friendly, unique place. Lindsay interviewed me a few weeks ago to talk about Gibraltar's ghosts and why I find the stories so fascinating. I thoroughly enjoyed chatting to her about my current favourite topic. Here is the link to the podcast and I hope you enjoy listening too. We chatted in a noisy cafe - always the safest spot when talking about ghosts!

Gibraltar Ghost Stories with Jackie Anderson


The ghost stories of a place often reflect the history of that place. Take the old legends that refer to the sound of armour jangling, hobnails from thousands of boots ringing on the stone slabs of an ancient road, the shadows that pass bearing the crests of Roman legionaries - as do old stories that abound from the towns and villages along the length of the old Roman Road, Watling Street, now the A2 in England.

Image by Manfred Richter from Pixabay 

I used to live close to Strood, and remember people occasionally talking about hearing the sound of the Roman army on the march just on the north side of the Medway, where the A2 leads uphill and away from the river, always in the early hours of the morning, just as daylight was creeping along the edges of the estuary to the east. Strood lies north of the River Medway from Rochester, which was once the Roman settlement of Durobrivae. The ghosts of marching legionaries is not too distant from the truth of Roman legions marching through this city pressing northwards the Roman advance.

And staying in my old stomping grounds in Kent - a gloriously haunted place - Chatham was, like Gibraltar, a military place, with its naval dockyard (where Lord Nelson started his naval career) and its numerous barracks, and, during Napoleonic times, its Forts: Fort Luton, Fort Amherst, Fort Pitt etc.with their ghost soldiers of various wars and ghostly drummer boys beating the march to death. Inevitably, military installations come accompanied with violence and violent ends to some lives, and these leave behind 'imprints'. Believers will consider those imprints to be some form of residual energy left behind by the electro-magnetic field of the person or persons who died or suffered trauma (when energies flow from the body, apparently). Those of a more skeptical nature (myself included) will see that 'imprint' in the stories that are left behind, a way of retaining memory and recalling an event, if not in detail, then in essence, and that is often more about the moral of a story than the actual original facts. Ghosts of invading and conquering armies will abound all over the world, a tribute to the trauma of war and the trauma of being vanquished.

This picture was borrowed from the Essex Ghost Hunters website - thank you! - link to the site here:
Essex Ghost Hunters

Not far from Chatham is Rainham, where tales of ghosts in the Berengrave and Bloors Lane areas abound, from wandering shades seen in the fields and orchards heading towards the river bank to the east, to the screams and thundering of bolting horses pulling a carriage where rides the headless body of Sir Christopher Bloor somewhere near the junction with Childscroft Road. The Berengrave area was used as a cemetery by the Romans who settled in the area, and later by the Saxons - hence the stories of shades, shadows and misty ghosts lurking in the corners. And Sir Christopher Bloor, a genuine philanderer of a couple of hundred years ago, was beheaded by a group of cuckolded husbands enraged at his seduction of their wives. If nothing else, these entertaining stories were ways of warning people not to wander around graves that contained diseased and rotting corpses - very unhygienic - and not to mess around with other men's wives lest your head be struck off your shoulders. Ghost stories usually carry some form of moral.

I'm not so sure about the tale of the old woman who sits outside her cottage (no longer there but apparently she is heard calling out to passers by in the dead hours of night) at Queen's Court also in Rainham. She is said to have been in league with the devil and disposed of in a rather brutal form during the witch-hunts of the seventeenth century, and if you see or hear her and she calls out your name, you will die within the day. As it happens, Queen's Court had been the site of an ancient alms house set up by Queen Alianore, wife of Henry III in the thirteenth century, and this links the area to illness, disease, death and with 'wise' women known to be able to use herbology to cure illness. In the absence of medical science, there was prayer and there was ancient wisdom for treating disease, which Christianity liked to link to the devil and witchcraft so that they could continue to rule over the superstitions of the uneducated peasantry. Hence the story of the witch of Queens Court.

Old photo of Berengrave Lane borrowed from History of Rainham website - thank you! - link to the site here:
History of Rainham Kent

My favourite haunted spot is probably Dode Church in Luddesdown also in Kent. It has stood for centuries in a quiet corner on a hill deep in the Kent countryside, abandoned since the thirteenth century after the people of the village it served died of plague, leaving just one girl, locked into the church, the only survivor, to die alone, of starvation. Her voice is apparently still heard, crying thinly for her parents, sometimes mistaken for the bleak cry of a bird taking flight, sometimes for the whistle of the wind in the trees that surround the church. I wrote about her in my last collection of short stories: The Last Lullaby. The story is called When will they come for me? It's accompanied by one called Dead Man's Tree - a tree that stands not so far from Dode Church...but that story is for another time.

The Last Lullaby

Places in Gibraltar are full of these stories: tunnels haunted by lost soldiers, caves filled with the moans of those dying of disease and starvation during the sieges and epidemics, graveyards haunted by those executed in error, injustice harshly meted out, pubs populated by drunks lingering long after their deaths... I am very much enjoying hearing about them. If you have a local ghost legend to tell, contact me - I'd love to hear it and maybe I might be able to include it in my anthology! Comment below or email here: jackiegirl@hotmail.co.uk

Blessed Samhain,

Happy Halloween