As Halloween approaches, our thoughts often turn to ghostly matters. I’ve long been fascinated by the forgotten phenomenon of ‘playing the ghost’ – dressing as a ghost and hanging out in spooky locations to scare the wits out of passersby. Sometimes the pranksters wore just a white sheet over their heads, though some would use devil masks, animal skins, outlandish clothes and luminous paint to create more imaginative spooks.

Often gangs of young men would patrol the streets hoping to catch the ghost and give him a well-deserved drubbing. These ghost hunts would frequently degenerate into a drunken riot with the ghost hunters dressed as women hoping to honey trap the ghost into attacking them.

This strange hobby of playing the ghost was rife throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and some of the episodes were immortalised by images from the tabloid known as Britain’s worst newspaper, The Illustrated Police News.

Giant Ghosty Scares the Postie: The Garstang Ghost (1881)

In September 1881, an unnamed postman was on his way to pick up the mail that was arriving on the night train to Garstang, near Preston in Lancashire. As he walked down the dark country lane, a white ghostly figure appeared before him. It was, according to press reports, of ‘abnormal stature’ and a ‘horrid pallor of hue’. The figure seemed to be giving mysterious and portentous signs in a ‘variety of terror-striking gestures….’

The moment is captured in a drawing from the Illustrated Police News depicting the poor ‘palpitating postman’ dropping his letters as the giant spectre looms over him.

The postman took the ghost’s gestures as a warning not to proceed and he turned and fled. So terrified was he that he gave up his job rather than risk encountering this fearsome vision again.

The ghost was also encountered by a young servant girl. She described its fearsome height, its white robes and ominous gestures. She threw her apron over her head and ran home. We are told that she has not spoken since and retired to bed in shock.

Each night gangs of young men armed themselves with stout cudgels and patrolled the streets of the town, though it seems it was never caught. Lucky for him. When ghost hoaxers like this were caught, they were often badly beaten and dumped in the nearest canal, river… or sewer.

The press reported a few days later that the ghost had disappeared, and that the suspect was a resident of nearby Barnacre.[i]

Ghost Gets Stoned: The Woolwich Ghost (1897)

As Halloween approached in 1897, the children attending the schools in the grounds of Saint James’ Church, Plumstead in London got the fright of their lives. A ghostly figure in white was seen by several pupils who were so scared they had taken to their beds.

As news spread, a gaggle of around 100 young lads turned up on subsequent nights waiting for the ghost to reappear. When it did, the boys employed ‘the usual tactics of Plumstead lads’, in other words, ‘throwing stones and bad language’. The stone throwing broke several windows in the grounds.

Three constables soon arrived and arrested the ringleaders of the boys who were later charged with disorderly conduct, and the ghost fled the scene.

Later, the ghost was seen in similar white attire up a tree in the garden of Mr Jolly a Justice of the Peace. The culprit turned out to be a cycle maker who was committed to an asylum by his friends for his own safety before he could be arrested. The man was described as being of Herculean strength and it took several police officers to get him out of his house.[ii]

Impromptu ghost hunts like this were often carnivalesque and transgressive. It would have been very tempting for many of the boys to deliberately miss the ghost and put a rock through the school window as an act of rebellion.

Naked Lady Ghost Gets Stoned (1887)

Exactly 10 years earlier, there was another ghost stoning in the Woolwich area. Rumours spread that a naked lady ghost was appearing in the upstairs window of a shop on the corner of Ogleby Street.

Hundreds gathered around the shop, including gangs of young lads. When someone shouted ‘there she is!’, the boys unleashed a volley of stones at the window. Hundreds more gathered and blocked the whole street the following night and the police found it difficult to keep order, especially when the cry of ‘there she is’ rang out and the gangs of youths began hurling stones.

These episodes continued for a week, with the region said to be in a ‘perpetual ferment’ over the naked lady ghost and the rock-throwing youths. Eventually, two teenage boys who were taken to be the ringleaders were arrested and charged with disorderly behaviour. They were given seven days in prison.

Mrs Marsh, the landlady of the shop, said that if anyone was seen in the windows it was probably one of her lodgers, though they denied any trickery.  Mrs Marsh also told the press that someone had come into her house and walked along the corridor moaning in a ghostly fashion.

There’s some indication that Mrs Marsh and her lodgers didn’t get on, so it’s quite possible the episode was caused by one of them pretending to be a ghost in front of the upstairs window. More plausibly, based on the press accounts, the rumours may have been maliciously started by the gangs of stone throwing teenagers.[iii]

Epilogue

Did I mention I’ve got a new book out? It’s called Phantoms of Christmas Past: Festive Ghost Hunts, Ghost Hoaxes and Ghost Panics. It features forgotten true stories of Christmas ghost hoaxes that are dark, comic, tragic and bizarre.

And it’s never too early to start your Christmas shopping!

Available wherever you get your books from, or online here.

[i] ‘A Troublesome Ghost’, Staffordshire Sentinel, 5 September 1881, p.4:  ‘The Ghost at Garstang’, Preston Chronicle, 10 September 1881, p.6; ‘A Ghost at Large’, Illustrated Police News, 10 September 1881, p.4: ‘Disappearance of the Garstang Ghost’, Lancaster Gazette, 21 September 1881, p.2;

[ii] ‘A Ghost at Plumstead’, Brockley News, 29 October 1897, p.4; ‘A Ghost Appears Near Woolwich’, Illustrated Police News, 6 November 1897, p.6

[iii] ‘Woolwich Ghost’, Greenwich and Deptford Observer, 12 August 1887, p.5; ‘A Ghost Story at Woolwich’, Kentish Mercury, 12 August 1887, p.5; ‘Stoning the Woolwich Ghost’, Greenwich and Deptford Observer, 19 August 1887, p.2