Chester, City of Ghosts E-Book

Mary Ann Cameron

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 173

Beschreibung

People have lived and died in Chester for over 2,000 years, and stories of ghosts have swirled around the city all that time. What is unusual about the city is the frequency of new sightings – fresh examples of paranormal activity. Chester, City of Ghosts is a handy guide to these hauntings, both past and present, and clearly shows why Chester is in the running for most actively haunted settlement in the country. Read the stories, follow the maps, visit the buildings and soon you will agree – and you might even experience some ghostly activity yourself...

Leseprobe

First published 2021

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Text © Mary Ann Cameron, 2021

The right of Mary Ann Cameron to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9834 5

Typesetting and origination by Typo•glyphix, Burton-on-Trent

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Northgate Street Area

Cathedral Area

Eastgate Street Area

Westgate Street Area

Bridge Street Area

Lower Bridge Street Area

Chester Castle Area

Railway Station Area

Cow Lane Area

Amphitheatre & River Dee Area

Postscript

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Foreword

From ghoulies and ghostiesand long-leggedy beastiesAnd things that go bump in the night,Good Lord, deliver us!

(Traditional Scottish Prayer)

Whether you are a deeply religious person or a complete atheistic sceptic, there is something about ‘ghoulies and ghosties’ that humanity finds fascinating. In a world that seems, sadly, to eschew much of organised religion, there is still a longing for elements that are outside the normal frame of human experience and we call these ‘Things of the Spirit’.

The former Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St John the Baptist Chester brings together a quietness and deep spirituality that have even touched the agnostic or atheist; as Mary Ann Cameron later points out, it has been called the ‘Thin Church’, where the veil between heaven and earth is at its very thinnest.

Certainly, whilst I cannot speak to a ghostly experience in St John’s, I can certainly empathise with ‘things that go bump in the night’, for amidst the quietness of the night I can testify that all sorts of noises make themselves felt as well as heard.

This book takes us through what has been called the most haunted city in England, for Chester does have its multitude of stories and experiences, which come together in the city’s Ghost Tours.

I commend this book.

David Chesters, OBEFRSA, FSA (Scot), BA (Hons) DipTh, Rector of Chester

Preface

I qualified as a Chester Tour Guide in 2005 and during the next ten years I amassed many ghost stories about the city. This led, in 2015, to the publication of the first edition of Chester City of Ghosts. However, new ghost stories continue to be told and therefore it is now time to publish a second edition, incorporating all the new ghost activity.

Most of the tales in this book concern the city centre, not the suburbs where houses can be easily identified. The following two had to stay in the book, though:

‘Let me tell you about the ghost in my flat,’ a young man said after he and his girlfriend had been on one of my ghost tours. From the moment they moved into their flat in a converted old house in a suburb of Chester, they regularly saw a head moving around at floor level. They told nobody, fearing ridicule, until their first Christmas there, when the residents of all the flats in the house came together for a party. Once they were full of Christmas cheer, they told their neighbours the story of the head. There was a stunned silence. Then the people from the flat below them said, ‘We’ve got the body!’

Once people know I am a ghost tour guide, I am often told personal stories. One Christmas I was in a pub in the centre of town, when a lady started chatting to me. When I told her I was a tour guide, she casually remarked: ‘Oh, there’s a ghost in our house.’ She shares her house, she said, with the ghost of an old man. He regularly turned the lights on and off in the breakfast room: it was his favourite room when he was alive and lived there.

People have lived and died in Chester for more than two thousand years during its rich and varied history. They have died peacefully in their beds, accidentally, or violently as a result of a fight or attack. And Chester has certainly been attacked throughout the centuries. First came the Romans, then the Angles and Saxons, the Vikings, William I and the Normans, the Welsh and, finally, Cromwell with his Roundheads. At one point, in the early 900s, Chester was attacked at the same time by Danish, Norwegian and Welsh armies. You will be pleased to know the good people of Chester won that battle, but only thanks to their bees: as a last resort, they threw their beehives over the walls onto the attackers, who promptly fled.

The earliest evidence that has been found of people living on this site is that of Iron Age families, but there is nothing to show who they were or how they lived, although they probably belonged to the local tribe, the Cornovii.

Whoever was there in the second half of the AD 70s, though, soon disappeared when 6,000 Romans, members of the 2nd Legion Adiutrix, arrived and built the first fortress. It was constructed in the usual Roman fortress style of a rectangle with rounded corners, made with a turf and earth rampart and topped by a wooden palisade. This was replaced by the 20th Legion, Legio XX Valeria Victrix, who arrived in AD 90 and stayed until 410. These soldiers built the biggest fortress in the country, 60 acres instead of the normal 50, and the biggest amphitheatre, both of solid, strong, red sandstone. The basic street pattern of this Fortress Deva, named after the Celtic name for the River Dee, is the basic street pattern of the City of Chester today. As you walk along the four main streets, you are walking where Roman soldiers marched centuries ago.

They chose a good site: Chester gives easy access to Wales and the west, and was a good marching distance to other fortresses, such as the present city of York. The Fortress Deva was built at the mouth of the River Dee, which is tidal up to and beyond Chester, so ships from Italy and elsewhere could easily reach the fortress’s port along the then very wide estuary.

There were two main changes to the appearance of Chester after the Romans left. The river silted up over the centuries and moved from the base of the Wall in the present-day Nuns Road to its current position at the far side of the racecourse. And at the beginning of the tenth century, Chester’s walls were extended down to the river, wrapping around and offering protection to the houses that had been established outside the fortress walls.

In 1070, William Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror, William I of England arrived in Chester and built a castle, a symbol of dominance and a centre of power in the region for two hundred years. There followed a period of growth, trade and stability in Chester, until the Civil War fighting damaged or destroyed nearly every building within the walls. It did lead to some superb rebuilding in the Georgian era and style, though. And from then on Chester grew as a place to visit, shop, eat and hunt for ghosts.

A question I am often asked is: What do ghosts look like? They make their presence felt in a number of ways. Some, known by the German word poltergeist, move things around; others make noises, create an icy atmosphere or a leave a smell. Some appear as though they are a living, breathing person until they do something that startles, such as walk through a wall. I have worked with a colleague whose husband regularly saw ghosts. He was once in a hotel with an open fire. He was sitting by it, reading, when a lady came to put more logs on the fire. It took a while for him to realise that she could not actually pick up the logs, as her hands kept passing through them. On another occasion, my colleague’s husband was in a hotel room, preparing for a meeting, when he saw a monk walk through one wall, cross the room, and walk through the wall opposite. The next day he asked the receptionist about the history of the hotel. She just looked at him and said, ‘You’ve seen the monk, haven’t you?’ Apparently the hotel was built on the site of a monastery, destroyed after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century.

I am also asked if I have ever seen a ghost. My honest answer is that I do not know whether I have or not. Perhaps I have and simply did not realise. I have been told I can accurately detect their presence, though. I was once in a house in North Wales that the owner told me was haunted. As I moved around the rooms, I successfully detected which rooms were haunted and which were not. On my second visit, I told the owner that I had felt someone walk past me. ‘Yes,’ came the reply. ‘It was the ghost of the housekeeper. Didn’t you see her?’

What is special about Chester is the number of new and current sightings of ghost activity. As this book will show, Chester can easily claim to be the most actively haunted town in the country. Indeed, a Celtic Christian has described St John the Baptist’s Church in Chester, one of the final stops in this book, as ‘a thin church, where the veil between Heaven and Earth is at its thinnest; a deeply Spiritual place’. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, this book and its journey through the streets of the city centre will make you wonder and question. And possibly look over your shoulder. As Samuel Johnson said, ‘all argument is against it; but all belief is for it’. Or, as Shakespeare wrote:

‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.

Northgate Street Area

Northgate Street leads from its junction with Eastgate Street, past the Town Hall Square, up to the Northgate and on towards the Wirral, the peninsula between the River Dee and the Mersey estuary. The road and the gate both follow the original Roman routes: Northgate Street was the fortress’s Via Decumani and the Northgate its Porta Decumani, the word decumani indicating that it was the least important of the fortress’s gates and streets, away from the main, prestigious entrance. Nonetheless, it was heavily fortified and, being situated on the highest point of the fortress, gave a good view of the surrounding area.

What you see now is not Roman, though: there is a beautifully graceful arch crossing Northgate Street and linking the left and right sides of the walls. It was designed in 1810 by Thomas Harrison, an architect who was very busy in Chester in the nineteenth century for over forty years. He designed the law courts at Chester Castle, the Commercial News Room off Northgate Street, and the Grosvenor Bridge, as well as a number of beautiful houses. If you stand on the Northgate and look west towards the Welsh hills, you will see another of his designs. On top of the tallest hill, Moel Famau, there are the ruins of the Jubilee Tower, built in 1810 to celebrate George III’s jubilee. Sadly, a huge storm in 1896 blew it down, but the ruins are still visible from Chester and still attract walkers.

The present red sandstone gate replaced the medieval gate, a huge construction that included high towers, a portcullis, a gaol, dungeons carved into the rock, and a very narrow gate through which traffic struggled to pass. Until the nineteenth century this was fit for purpose: it was the least important entrance and it provided a suitably forbidding sight for locals, a place of incarceration and execution. It was therefore the last of the gates to be replaced, but by the time of its demolition in 1808, traffic through it had increased with the building of overspill housing to the north of the city. And the authorities had been shamed by a damning report describing the conditions in the gaol. It needed to go. But look over the parapet on the Northgate, down to the pavement below – underneath, the dark, airless dungeons still remain.

Until recently, the city wall to the left of the Northgate was completely hidden from sight and the elements by huge sheets of plastic. In 2011 it was discovered that a flight of steps leading up to the walls, built during the Georgian era, had started to move. Scaffolding was erected to support them and to allow engineers to measure their movement. It was not the first time the steps had moved: in the nineteenth century, it seems, the gap between the inner wall and the steps had simply been filled in. In 2011, to the authorities’ horror, though, the engineers discovered that the flight of steps was not actually tied to the inner wall – for the simple reason that the Georgian builders had actually removed the inner wall along the whole of that stretch. Cue a mad rush to erect a network of scaffolding to tie the whole remaining structure to the outer wall, close off the steps, and call in the archaeologists.

Within the walls of Chester, archaeologists must be allowed to examine whenever the ground is disturbed. What they found at this site was truly amazing: the huge sandstone base of the West Tower of the fortress, built by the Legio XX Valeria Victrix, the 20th Legion, about the end of the first century. Even some of the original mortar was visible. What was even more astounding was the discovery of the mud bank erected by the first Romans to set up camp, the Legio II Adiutrix, the 2nd Legion. In the AD 70s, when the 2nd Legion arrived, they quickly established a secure military base with a turf and earth rampart, topped by a timber palisade. The timber has gone, but the rampart is still clearly visible here. These wonderful findings triggered years of checking, planning, designing, careful rebuilding and negotiations with archaeologists, engineers, builders, planners, historians, designers and people holding the purse strings. Work finished in 2020, the walls made safe and secure and have now been reopened. And, of course, the steps have been reinstated for pedestrians – this time securely fixed to an inner wall.

Before you leave the top of the Northgate, look to your left. Along the stretch of the walls leading westwards are Morgan’s Mount, Pembertons Parlour and, at the corner where the walls turn to head south, the Water Tower. Old stories relate how Royalist soldiers from the Civil War still man their cannon at Morgan’s Mount; genteel ladies take the air at Pemberton’s Parlour. And Roundheads at the Water Tower can sometimes still be heard celebrating their victorious siege of the city in 1646.

  George and Dragon

But it is time to begin your exploration of Chester’s ghosts, starting with a reassuring word. The George and Dragon is a pub and hotel, clearly visible from the Northgate on the other side of Fountains Roundabout. It is a half-timbered building, erected in the late Victorian era: the inside has been modernised more than once over the years but the outside remains a mock-Tudor extravaganza. It was built over one of the sites where Roman soldiers were buried, as no burials were allowed within the fortress walls. Stories abound of Roman soldier ghosts walking through the bedrooms, a sentry ghost guarding the honoured dead. But not in this book.

When a Chester tour guide, one of the group who started the original Chester ghost tours a good few decades ago, learnt in 2015 that I was writing the first edition of Chester City of Ghosts, she was quick to inform me that she and the other ghost guides had invented that story. It was promptly removed from the book. All the ghost stories in this book, I can assure you, are researched and genuine. But who knows, perhaps recent sightings are also genuine …

  11 Upper Northgate Street

This building nestles next to what was obviously a coaching inn before the arrival of the railways. Coaches could draw in under the shelter of the overhanging first-floor bedrooms, so the ladies and gentlemen passengers could alight without getting wet. Both it and 11 Northgate Street were built in the mid-eighteenth century, but it is only number 11 that has a history of ghostly activity. It now houses the Bombay Palace, a very highly rated Asian restaurant.

In December 2013, the owner of the Bombay Palace was alone in the restaurant at 3 a.m. when he heard a noise, a door banging, in the gentlemen’s lavatory. He knew the waiter was upstairs in the flat and his family had all gone home, so, fearing a burglar and wanting evidence in case of a future prosecution, he went into the room and took a photo before turning the light on. When he did turn the light on, he could see nobody there. However, when he looked at the photo he had taken, a man’s face could clearly be seen in the mirror on the lavatory wall. Customers, a workman and staff had long discussed a feeling of a presence at the back of the restaurant, and an empty coffin had been found in the cellar in the 1980s – whether there is any connection with the man in the lavatory we will probably never know.

  Blue Coat School

On the same side of the street, near the Northgate, is the Blue Coat School, Chester’s first charity school, established to educate boys from poor families. It was built in 1717 and replaced the Little St John’s Hospital, founded in 1190 by Earl Ranulph of Chester, with the aim of providing accommodation for ‘13 poor and feeble men’ and with the impressive full title of St John the Baptist without the Northgate and the Hospital of John the Baptist. The building should have crumbled under the weight of that lengthy name but it was only demolished in 1644, just before the Siege of Chester during the Civil War, with the aim of stopping the Roundheads from using it as a base to attack the city.

Above the central entrance arch is a statue of one of the pupils wearing the uniform of the school, with its distinctive blue coat. The school closed in 1949, and by the beginning of this century it was occupied by the History and Archaeology Department of the University of Chester. When the school had been enlarged in the mid-1850s, almshouses were built in a lovely quadrangle behind it, to replace those at the previous hospital. Entrance for the residents was, and is still, under the central arch, which is also the site of the entrances to both wings of the Blue Coat School.

Another entrance to the school was built in 1793, though, but only for those prisoners emerging from the dungeons of the Northgate gaol on the day of their execution. They were allowed to make a short, sad journey along Northgate Street to the school’s Chapel of St John the Baptist, to say their last prayers before they were hanged. Too many of them were rescued by friends, however, as they made their way along the street to the chapel, so a slim sandstone bridge was built from the prison directly into the side of the chapel. This bridge, originally with high, cast-iron railings to prevent escape attempts, became known as the Bridge of Sighs.

While the University of Chester occupied the building, the chapel was used as administrative offices, and when I was at a meeting there once, I insisted on visiting the offices – after all, I was a ghost guide so I was bound to be able to sense a ghostly atmosphere in the room where all those distraught prisoners had said their last goodbyes. But there was nothing and so, noting my disappointment, the lecturer who was showing me round offered to show me the headmaster’s study, then being used as a seminar room. It was a beautiful oak-panelled room but in one corner there was a wooden box about five feet high, divided in two, each half with a square cut out at face level, the holes filled with spaced vertical wooden rods. ‘What is that?’ I asked. It was, I was told, where the headmaster put the naughty boys.