Haunted Huddersfield E-Book

Kai Roberts

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

Seitenzahl: 170

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

From heart-stopping accounts of apparitions, manifestations and related supernatural phenomena to first-hand encounters with ghouls and spirits, this collection contains both new and well-known spooky tales and eyewitness accounts from around the West Yorkshire town of Huddersfield. Featuring a terrifying range of apparitions, from poltergeists and ghosts to ancient spirits, haunted buildings and historical horrors, Haunted Huddersfield is sure to fascinate everyone with an interest in the town's haunted history and is guaranteed to make your blood run cold.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements & Introduction

one The Town Centre & Inner Suburbs

two Towards the Calder

three Crosland Moor to Castle Hill

four The Colne Valley

five The Parishes of Kirkburton and Emley

six The Upper Holme Valley

Bibliography

Copyright

Acknowledgements& Introduction

THE author would like to thank the staff of Huddersfield Local Studies Library, as well as Andy Roberts, Helen Roberts, Phil Roper, Caitlin Sagan and Stephen Wade.

SITUATED at the confluence of the Holme and Colne Valleys, Huddersfield is one of the South Pennines’ largest towns. Like so many settlements in this area, it really began to grow during the Industrial Revolution but whilst many former mill towns have since sidled into stagnation, Huddersfield is still generally acknowledged as one of the most handsome and vibrant destinations in the region. The town itself features countless fine examples of Victorian municipal architecture, whilst the surrounding topography – dominated by the landmark of Castle Hill – is an archetypal Pennine landscape.

To the south and west of the town, the further reaches of the Holme and Colne Valley rise into vast tracts of brooding, grit-stone moorland, forming the northern fringes of the Dark Park. Although this terrain is often forbidding, it possesses an austere beauty and visitors have long been captivated by these wild uplands. The Holme Valley is especially associated with tourism, as for thirty-seven years it was the setting for the popular BBC sitcom Last of the Summer Wine, and the area around Holmfirth is frequently referred to as ‘Summer Wine Country’.

The valleys themselves are dominated by a curious patchwork of ancient seventeenth-century timber-framed halls, eighteenth-century weavers’ cottages, nineteenth-century terraces and modern housing – often all clinging like limpets to the steep flanks. Relics of the Industrial Revolution abound, from renovated mills to derelict factories, whilst both railways and canals snake along the valley floors. Many hillsides are scarred by ancient quarrying and the eastern edge of the area was once home to thriving mining enterprises, the decline of which is still a recent and painful memory.

It is an evocative landscape, in which both untamed countryside and human history press close against modernity. This is precisely the sort of environment in which rumours of the supernatural thrive. Yet unlike neighbouring areas such as Saddleworth and Calderdale, the Huddersfield region has been comparatively overlooked in surveys of the paranormal. The only book to have ever devoted its attention to such matters was Philip Ahier’s well-respected Legends and Traditions of Huddersfield and Its District, published in 1943. Sadly, this tome is long since out of print and unavailable to many.

Of course, in this supposedly rational and enlightened age, some people might question why the lack of such a compendium matters. After all, science has long since banished the supernatural to the realms of fiction and fancy. What value is there in compiling reports of ghostly experiences when, to many, these accounts have little factual merit? Yet much as it is not obligatory to believe in God to study theology, it is not necessary to believe in the supernatural to consider it a topic worthy of discussion, which can reveal a great deal about the human condition and man’s relationship with his environment and past.

The truth is, humans have always had anomalous experiences which they interpret in supernatural terms, and continue to do so even though the religious framework which supported such explanations is no longer a dominant force in many people’s lives. Unless we wish to dismiss the testimony of countless individuals as falsehood, we have to accept that these anomalous experiences do occur and that they are phenomenologically valid. Whilst the experience may not be causally produced by any supernatural agency, the fact that they are consistently understood by the subjects in those terms indicates something significant.

Many sceptics have sneered that a belief in the supernatural represents a longing for a comforting belief in the afterlife. However, whilst this might be a motivation in some cases, it is largely a glib and patronising analysis that says more about the existential concerns of the accuser than the accused. Rather, it seems that ghosts evolve as a response to environmental factors, both conscious and unconscious. They are personifications of the spirit of place, embodying a need to see the past as immanent in the present and our environment as a living, vital presence in our lives.

Such sensibilities are being increasingly eroded by the ceaseless march of modernity and for many, a belief in the supernatural is one response to a process which severs man from his natural habitat and modes of thought. As such, ghost stories tell us how people feel about a place, how they respond to the myriad subtle inputs which create the ineffable atmosphere of any given location; and even if we do not accept the existence of the supernatural, we can recognise a ghost as a valuable anthropomorphic symbol of its supposed haunt.

A great deal can be inferred about our psychological preoccupations from the motifs that people continue to attach to the supernatural. Some have suggested that the frequency of these images supports there being some objective truth to the supernatural experiences in question. However, a more circumspect explanation is that the recurrence of certain iconography in the stories collected here suggests that these archetypes persist in the collective unconscious as culturally appropriate symbols associated with fringe experiences.

Of course, tragic death is the trope most commonly connected with hauntings but the precise mode of such death is instructive. In an area where industry was such a dominant force in people’s lives, it is scarcely surprising to find that industrial accidents loom large in many of these narratives. Equally, bitterly fought conflicts such as the English Civil Wars and the Luddite uprising have clearly left a psychic mark on the region. We also find numerous instances of nationally common motifs, such as White Ladies, spectral horsemen, ghost flyers and headless or faceless apparitions.

Ultimately, it seems that no matter how much paranormal speculation may be discredited in the eyes of modern science, people will continue to have experiences which they feel can only be described as supernatural. As humans, we cannot escape our own history and environment, nor can we healthily suppress the need to personify it in accordance to enduring archetypes. To quote Julian Wolfrey, ‘All forms of narrative are spectral to some extent … to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns.’ And as another wise man once said, you do not need to believe in ghosts to be afraid of them.

Kai Roberts, 2012

1

The Town Centre& Inner Suburbs

Church of St Thomas, Longroyd Bridge

The Church of St Thomas on Manchester Road is far from an ancient structure. It was erected between 1857 and 1859 according to a design by Sir George Gilbert Scott, one of the most prolific architects of the nineteenth century. In 1929, when the following events occurred, it would’ve been even younger. Yet evidently the connection between churches and the supernatural in our collective psyche is strong enough for even the most modern examples to seem an appropriate focus for spiritual manifestations.

During the early weeks of September 1929, rumours began to circulate that every evening an apparition of a White Lady ‘appeared at the west door of St Thomas’s Church’. These reports were so prevalent that increasingly crowds began to gather outside the church, and by the night of 11 September, a horde of almost 2,000 people assembled between nine o’clock and midnight. The throng was so large that it obstructed traffic on Manchester Road and the police were forced to intervene to maintain order.

Contemporary accounts indicate that men, women and children of all ages were present; some curious, some terrified, some sceptical and some bullish. The atmosphere was described as ‘strained’, but the amassed onlookers were not disappointed and the ghost duly put in an appearance. One journalist reported seeing, ‘A figure in white … it swayed backwards and forwards exercising a wonderful fascination over the gaping crowd,’ whilst a spectator commented, ‘If it wasn’t a ghost it was for all the world like one. It looked like the figure of a woman dressed in white. It was really weird.’

The crowd’s reaction was mass hysteria. Some even threw stones at the vision, although what they expected such an act to achieve against an incorporeal entity is not clear. The following day, Mr Hampshire, the church sexton, was furious at the damage caused. ‘It is a lot of nonsense and I am surprised there should be such a lot of silly people about,’ he said. As far as Mr Hampshire was concerned, the ‘ghost’ was nothing more than an optical illusion created by a gas lamp on Bankfield Road shining through trees onto the western door.

This prosaic explanation notwithstanding, an even larger crowd congregated the following night. Traffic was again obstructed, whilst one man fainted and a child was knocked down in the chaos. Perhaps shy of this increased attention, the apparition did not satisfy its audience again and soon children were daring each other to approach the church, whilst young men stalked the graveyard in an effort to impress their girlfriends. To persuade the crowd to disperse, the police began showing people up to the door and allowing them to touch it, in order to reassure them that nothing untoward was lurking in the shadows.

Church of St Thomas, Longroyd Bridge.

The authorities and local press publicly emphasised the ‘optical illusion’ explanation, and on subsequent nights the crowds dwindled. However, it was not entirely the end of the matter and ‘ghost-hunting’ in the vicinity of the church remained a popular local pastime for some while thereafter. The following week a thirty-six-year-old labourer called Edwin Taylor was arrested for disorderly conduct after attacking a man named James Speight in the churchyard, believing him to be the ghost.

Whether it was an authentic apparition or merely a simulacrum, few ghosts in Huddersfield history have caused such a fuss.

The Grand Picture Theatre, Manchester Road

Today, only the façade of this distinguished building remains, but it still presents an imposing sight at the junction of Manchester Road with the town centre ring road. It was originally constructed in 1921 as a cinema and in 1929 became only the second of Huddersfield’s many film houses to be wired for sound. However, following the decline in the popularity of such establishments, it was transformed into a bingo hall known as Sheridan Rooms around 1957.

Perhaps the building’s most famous and fondly remembered incarnation came in 1972, when it was converted into a venue and nightclub called Ivanhoe’s. On Christmas Day 1977, it was the scene of two concerts by legendary punk band, the Sex Pistols, the first of which was a matinee performance played as a benefit gig for the children of striking fire fighters! The evening show, meanwhile, proved to be the band’s final British appearance with their original line-up, although nobody knew it at the time.

Not many months after this celebrated event, Ivanhoe’s was drawing attention for an altogether different reason. In April 1978, reports began to circulate that the building was haunted by a ghost that only harassed men. One night after closing, two bouncers – scarcely the most suggestible of people – heard footsteps from the balcony and, fearing a customer had been locked in, conducted a thorough search of the venue but failed to find anything.

Some time later, the bouncers heard the footsteps again but still they failed to find their source. When they heard the sound a third time, they began to suspect that somebody was deliberately hiding in the building and called the police. However, despite the use of a sniffer dog, the police search did not locate an intruder either. More curiously still, the normally obedient police dog refused all directions and incentives to enter the balcony area.

The Grand Theatre.

Owner Paul Davies and promoter Derek Parkin subsequently heard the balcony footsteps whilst they were working alone in the building one evening. Mr Parkin told the Huddersfield Daily Examiner:

We went all over the building but could find nothing. Since then I have avoided the place and only go up there during the day. The previous owner, Ken Sewell, told me he has heard footsteps too. If I have to go up there for anything when the place is empty I now take a girl with me because the story is that a female has never heard it.

Days later, the theory that only men could sense the ghost was rebutted by cleaner Madeline Dannatt. She informed the local press that she had heard the phenomenon on many occasions, especially on the balcony, as had a woman who worked in an office on the same floor. Mysterious footsteps were a regular occurrence, but Mrs Dannatt also described seeing doors open and close by themselves, and once hearing the sound of breaking glass without any obvious source.

Rumours amongst employees at Ivanhoe’s attributed the disturbances to one of two individuals. The first was a cinema projectionist who had died on the balcony whilst showing a reel; the second was a bingo winner who had passed away before she’d been able to receive her prize money. Staff gossip held that this elderly lady had scored such a large win that the company was unable to pay out for several days, during which period she died and now haunted the former bingo hall, still waiting to collect her due.

Mrs Dannatt also wondered if the ghost might not have become more active in protest at what was being done to that once bustling area of the town, as many surrounding buildings were lost beneath the new ring road layout. She said, ‘There used to be a thriving community here and the people were known as Top Enders. But it was all demolished to make way for redevelopment.’ Mrs Dannatt even suggested that it may have been the ghost of St Thomas’s Church itself, returned to express its displeasure.

The Zetland Hotel, Queensgate

Named in honour of the Earl of Zetland, this handsome edifice was erected on Queensgate in 1847 and subsequently lent its name to an adjoining street, at the junction of which it still stands. Although it has long been known as a haunt of students rather than spirits, the ghostly experiences reported at the hostelry are particularly interesting in that they come from two independent witnesses, almost half a century apart, neither of whom could have known of the other’s account. Such material gives credence to the supposition that supernatural encounters are the result of some objective, anomalous phenomenon.

The first public report occurred in 1996, when, for a brief period, the Zetland was masquerading as a faux-Irish bar called O’Neill’s. Barman Paul Booth described the sort of run-of-the-mill poltergeist activity common to many pubs, including strange noises after closing, finding all the ashtrays turned upside down overnight, and chairs mysteriously stacked on the stairs. In its own right, this is relatively uninteresting fare; it only acquires significance in view of another report some fourteen years later.

In 2010, a popular nostalgic periodical published the recollections of Mike Silkstone, who had worked behind the bar at the Zetland in the late 1950s. In those days, it was something of a riotous establishment presided over by an alcoholic landlady named Mary but affectionately referred to as ‘Mummy’. The writer recalls that she often used to emerge from errands in the cellar sobbing and telling anybody who’d listen that she’d seen ‘him’ again. After a drink to calm her nerves, she’d explain that ‘he’ was ‘a young solider. He’s very unhappy – but he likes to talk to Mummy’. However, she could never be drawn on the topics of their conversations.

The Zetland Hotel.

Instructively, the grand building next door to the Zetland had once been home to many a soldier. It was constructed in 1846 as a riding school and for several months of the year styled itself the Theatre Royal, accommodating touring circuses and shows. More relevantly, it was also used as a base for the 2nd West Yorkshire Yeoman Cavalry and subsequently the 6th West Yorkshire Rifle Volunteers, who held their armoury there from 1861 until 1901. Could ‘Mummy’s’ soldier have had his origin in either of these two regiments?

The building went through many further changes after that. In 1902, it was purchased by the Northern Theatre Company and used exclusively as a music hall known as the New Hipperdrome and Opera House. It became the Tudor Cinema in 1930 and the Cannon Cinema thereafter, finally closing its doors in 1998 due to bankruptcy. It has since housed nightclubs such as the Rat & Parrot and Livingstone’s, but at the time of writing, this historic structure stands boarded-up and empty.

Following the closure of the cinema in 1998, the building was the site of a vigil by a team of paranormal investigators who’d received reports of supernatural activity from several people who’d worked there. More than a decade later, Mike Silkstone also mentions that during the 1950s, the ghost of a music hall performer who’d often taken the stage at the Theatre Royal and had died whilst enjoying a pre-show tipple in a pub nearby, had sometimes been seen in the area. The correspondences keep accumulating.

Beast Market

Huddersfield’s weekly market was established in 1671 by royal charter from King Charles II, and over the next couple of decades various ‘speciality’ markets became associated with different areas of the town. The street known today as Beast Market was the site of the cattle market until 1881, when a new location was found. Doubtless the area has seen many disputes over ownership down the years, but perhaps the most extraordinary came in March 1976, when two neighbouring businesses quarrelled over possession of a ghost.

It began when staff at the Buccaneer Fish Bar and Restaurant (long since closed) reported a number of strange occurrences to the Huddersfield Daily Examiner. They described typical poltergeist activity such as displaced objects, slamming doors and flickering lights. Many employees noticed cold spots in the building, whilst on one occasion manageress Sadie Cahill and a waitresses were overcome by a profound sense of despair, which led the latter to sob uncontrollably.

There were also more sinister disturbances. Waitress Betty Liddle received a shock when she was setting the tables and discovered a perfectly normal fork she’d laid out only moments before had been bent violently out of shape. The sound of ‘dragging footsteps’ was regularly heard from empty rooms and one girl even felt an incorporeal hand placed on her shoulder.

Beast Market.

Mrs Calhill was forced to admit, ‘The last fortnight has been worse than ever… One night I called the police to search the place but they found nothing. The girls are terrified.’ In desperation, owner Barrie Naylor contacted a medium to ‘exorcise’ the premises. The press recorded that he visited the restaurant and conducted a vigil until three o’clock in the morning, although he did not take any further action on that occasion.

Following the report of the medium’s visit, the Huddersfield Daily Examiner was contacted by Joan Broadbent, proprietor of Ioan Wholesalers in Kirkgate, which backed on to the Buccaneer. She told them, ‘That’s our ghost! We have been having incidents like that for years – hearing footsteps and noises when there is no one there, hearing bumps and crashes upstairs at night.’ Mrs Broadbent added that several employees had also seen the ghost and they all described a grey-haired old man.

Many people would’ve been glad to see the back of such a noisy spirit, but not Mrs Broadbent. She was positively dismayed at the prospect of the exorcism at the Buccaneer: ‘I have heard that the staff there have got a medium in, but I hope they don’t frighten him away. He’s a very nice old ghost and has never done us any harm.’ Sadly, it is not documented whether the mooted exorcism went ahead, nor whether the spectre continued its residency in Beast Market or returned to the bosom of its former home in Kirkgate.

The Cloth Hall