Southowram Ghosts and Ghouls
Southowram Ghosts and Ghouls
Manor House
The Manor House was supposedly haunted by the ghost of Sarah in her white wedding dress who was sometimes seen, standing at the bedroom window
One tale, that was told by an ex-landlord, was that of a brewery worker that came to change the beer lines in the cellar. Kevin (the landlord) took the worker a drink of coffee into the beer cellar and left it on a ledge. A while later the worker rushed up the stairs and crashed through the door and into the pub area. He was white as a sheet and shaking with fright.
Kevin sat the man down and waited for him to calm himself before asking what the problem was. After a lengthy time, the worker calmed himself and described how the cup of coffee had been floating around the cellar on it's own.
Naughty Sarah?
6 Law Lane
On 25th September 1948, this terraced cottage in Southowram, also known as Craggan, was the scene of most brutal murder. The seventy year old occupant, Ernest Hargreaves Westwood, was discovered by his neighbour just before noon of that day, lying on his bed with severe head injuries. He was rushed to Halifax Infirmary but died later in the afternoon. The crime outraged the hilltop village. Westwood had been a well-respected member of the community, serving as organist and choir master at the nearby Methodist church and despite having retired from his main career, he continued to work collecting small debts in the district.
Police did not have to wait long to find their culprit,
who turned himself in the following Monday pleading “I didn’t
mean to kill him. I lost my temper.” The murderer was Arthur George
Osborne, a twenty-eight year old originally from Bognor Regis, who’d
been living locally for several years. He was recently unemployed,
whilst his wife had been committed to Storthes Hall mental hospital
in Kirklees. He claimed that the murder was the result of a burglary
that had gone wrong and he had only killed Westwood accidentally
during a confrontation, striking him on the head several times with
the handle of the screwdriver he’d used to effect entry.
During
the trial, it emerged that not only was Osborne a murderer, he was
also a potential bigamist. A second marriage to a girl in Chichester
had been due to take place on the day of the murder but it was
cancelled when he failed to appear. Despite a recommendation by the
defense that he be charged with the lesser crime of manslaughter, the
jury returned a verdict of murder on December 1st.
At this time, all such verdicts carried a mandatory capital sentence
and whilst the judge appealed for clemency, the Home Secretary saw no
reason to make an exception and Osborne was hanged at Armley Jail on
December 30th
1948.
The house on Law Lane in which the murder had taken place remained empty for a couple of years after the act, during which time it acquired something of an evil reputation amongst local folk, scarcely surprising for a building with such a macabre history and air of abandonment. When Police Constable Vincent Egan moved into the cottage with his wife in 1950, they were fully aware of its past but remained undeterred. Nonetheless, prior to their subsequent departure from the village in January 1954, Mrs. Egan told the Brighouse Echo of a mysterious disturbance she’d experienced during her first week in the house.
It was a dark and stormy night, as is so often the case
in such stories, not to mention in the hilltop village of Southowram.
Her husband had gone out to walk his evening beat so Mrs. Egan was
alone in the house, which still lacked a “warm, occupied
atmosphere”. No sooner had she gone to bed than she her heard a
rapping from above her head and from the corner of her eye saw the
trapdoor into the underdrawing seemingly rise and fall of it own
accord. As it continued to do so, she fled the building to search for
her husband. He assured her that it must be a draught but given the
reputation of the house, many at the time thought otherwise.
Wesleyan Methodist Chapel
An article published in the Evening Courier on 29th June
1983 recounts the story of a mysterious apparition which apparently
manifested following the wedding of Martyn Rhodes and Jacqueline
Longstaff at the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in Southowram. As the
couple departed from the church following the ceremony, they were
filmed by the groom’s uncle, Derek Rhodes, located in the gallery
above and whilst they were posing for photographs at the entrance, an
old woman in black mourning attire including a veil was allegedly
caught on the film, appearing to speak before fading away.
Nobody in the wedding party recalled seeing such a
person, who would surely have been conspicuous in the small chapel,
whilst the church steward of 25 years, Arthur Coates, denies
knowledge of any such woman in the regular congregation. However, it
is interesting that according to the Courier article, nobody other
than Mr. Rhodes – who was “on holiday” at the time – had seen
the film when the report was published and there appears to be no
follow up article. Efforts by author Andy Owen to trace the Rhodes
have proved unsuccessful, whilst the chapel closed due to dwindling
congregations in 2005 and was converted into apartments.
Blaithroyd Farm
In his 1983 book “Yorkshire’s
Ghosts and Legends,” Terrence Whitaker relates the story of a
haunting at a property near Bank Top (the area of Southowram before
the hill descends towards Halifax) in February 1962. The tenant Mr.
John Harris was alone in the house whilst his wife was in hospital
after having a baby. and one night at around eleven o’ clock
when suddenly he heard “a resounding crash… the cat leapt up and
appeared to fly around the room several inches from the ground,
howling in terror,” followed by the sound of “giant footsteps
crossing the room overhead, from one corner to the other, slowly and
very loud”. Harris investigated but found nothing which might
account for the phenomena. Upon discussing the experience with his
neighbour the following morning he was told that he would have to get
used to such disturbances, as she had heard them herself many times
over the years.
Subsequent research by Mr.
Harris revealed that the house he occupied had once been part of
Blaithroyd Farm, formerly Blaithe Rood, where accordingly to John
Crabtree in his “Concise History of the Parish and Vicarage of
Halifax” occupancy dates back to at least the 14th Century.
Crabtree goes on to claim that in the late 16th Century, during the
reign of Elizabeth I when the practice of Catholicism was banned,
papists would gather to worship there in secrecy. He also says “a
little distant from the house was also some ground in the delph-brow
called the burying-place”. In apparent confirmation, Whitaker
writes that builders excavating land behind the house prior to the
tenancy of Mr. Harris had in fact disturbed a mass burial site which
they took for a plague pit or an internment following the 1643 Civil
War skirmish at Bloody Field on the lower flanks of Beacon Hill
nearby. Such history is certainly ripe with potential for unquiet
spirits.
Boggart House
Standing all alone at the end of Ashday Lane which runs down from Southowram and overlooking Cromwell Bottom, Boggart House is certainly evocatively located. In an article from the Brighouse Echo dated 11th September 1981, even their bluff local history correspondent “Rowan” is moved to admit “the magnificent sweep of land up to Ashday… (has) a peculiar brooding beauty”. It is also interesting to note that in other columns pertaining to his childhood in the early 20th Century, Rowan refers to this small tributary valley as the “Fairy Glen”. Whether this name suggests any authentic local tradition or just an Edwardian penchant for artificial romanticism is not clear.
Boggart House was originally constructed in the early
19th Century to serve as a gatehouse for Ashday Hall, which stands
some little way above it. Ashday Hall itself is a venerable
structure, with land connected to the de Astay family first recorded
there in 1275. In the 14th Century, the tenancy fell into the hands
of the Holdsworth Family and the present Hall was constructed by
William Holdsworth between 1713 and 1738. Due to debt, it passed into
the hands of the Drake family in 1792 and it was Thomas Drake who in
the 1830s improved the estate, erecting the residence today known as
Boggart House and an observatory on the hill behind it. Rowan recalls
the house standing derelict by the 1920s and remained so until 1961
when it was purchased by Mr. Peter Turner and renovated.
It is uncertain exactly when Boggart House gained a reputation for being haunted. The recollections of Barry Chapman in “Childhood Memories of Southowram Village in the 1950s” suggest it was certainly known to children as such in that decade, whilst an entry in a series entitled “Country Walks Around Brighouse” first published in the Echo by the Brighouse Civic Trust in the early 1970s claims the house “once had a reputation for being haunted.” Equally, the exact nature of the haunting is vague. Speaking in the 1981 Echo article, Rowan blithely describes it as “a house legend claims is shared with spectres, goblins and bogeymen,” whilst Peter Turner revealed that a relative had witnessed a “little man with a ginger beard” in a cupboard and describes “strange noises which I have been unable to trace and lights going on and off for no apparent reason”.
However, perhaps the name of the house suggests an even
older provenance. “Boggart” is an ancient Yorkshire dialect word
for a capricious household spirit (a cousin of the Scottish brownie)
who would help with domestic chores providing they were rewarded with
a bowl of milk each night. But if the boggart felt unappreciated it
would often take umbrage and start to display poltergeist-like
characteristics, whilst several regional folk tales emphasise just
how hard they were to get rid of. As a result “boggart” tended to
be used idiomatically to describe any sort of unusual activity from
the structure of a house settling at night to a horse inexplicably
taking fright. Certainly, there are no shortage of boggart place
names in the Calder Valley, including a Boggart Chair at Ellen Royde
in Midgley, the Boggart Stones above Widdop and Boggart Well near
Ogden Reservoir.
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