THE GHOST HIGHWAY
Black dogs, phantom cars, white ladies – folkloric figures which still haunt lonely stretches of road. PAUL DEVEREUX finds that renewed study of this phenomenon may give us an insight into consciousness itself.
As I was travelling south along the almost traffic-free M6 near Birmingham one morning. I glanced sideways at a shabby-looking mini-pickup truck; it looked empty. Puzzled, I sped on. Then, glancing in my rear-view mirror, the motorway appeared deserted. With a primal chill, it dawned on me that I had seen a phantom vehicle. I often travelled the same route at the same time, yet never had a similar experience. It was no trick of the light.
The incident languished at the back of my mind for 20 years until I began researching the history of haunted landscapes for a new book. The belief that we share our environment with ghosts of the dead, wraiths of the living and various elemental spirits is very ancient. Bronze Age rock carvings in Sweden depict footprints coming down from hilltop cemeteries – some are shod, and ancient Norse lore tells that the newly dead wore hel-boots for their trip to the otherworld. Tiny spirit footprints were carved on desert rocks by New Mexican Indians 1,000 years ago. The names of certain fields, woods, hills and tracks in Old Europe marked them as the haunts of boggarts, demons, and the ubiquitous Puck, and there were special pathways – visible and virtual – along which they were supposed to travel. The land is still haunted today. I decided to expand my inquiry to include road ghosts and haunted highways.
I reconsidered my M6 experience. The pickup apparition had not been so odd after all; there were many examples of ghostly lorries bearing down on drivers before fading away. And then there were spectral vintage cars. Where the A6024 rises out of the Longdendale Valley over the bleak moorland of Holme Moss, an old-fashioned black car “in mint condition” appeared out of nowhere behind motorist Andrew Sylvester in 1999. It disappeared. Mr and Mrs Stephen Bale encountered a 1920s black Daimler, one July evening in 1964, near Dartmouth in Devon. It vanished. The predecessors of these ghostly motorised vehicles were that most celebrated of supernatural motifs, phantom stagecoaches. In the 1970s, a young couple saw the “outline” of a stagecoach on Rodborough Common near Stroud in Gloucestershire. Other people in the area have reported headless horsemen, spectral coaches, and ghostly galloping.
Lonely spectres treading the dark highways of the otherworld appear fleetingly in our world. The A23 London-to-Brighton-road is particularly haunted. Patrick and June Geary were driving north one dark, rainy evening in 1976. They saw a girl in a light-coloured raincoat who seemed to have no hands or feet. She ran in front of the Geary’s car… but there was no impact. Eight years earlier, another couple saw a figure in a white trench coat run across the A23 and fade away. One man claims to have encountered a ghostly fellow attired in cricketer’s clothes; others reported a man in shirt-sleeves who staggered in front of a car and vanished on ‘impact’; and two figures in light-coloured clothing who dissolved when headlights were blinked full-beam at them.
Some apparitions appear to be time-warped. Cheryl Straffon, editor of the folklore fanzine Meyn Mamvro, told me that “between 1976-1979” she and a friend were driving one evening towards Calstock, near the Devon–Cornwall border, when they saw a line of men wearing old-fashioned miners’ helmets with candles as lights crossing the road and dissolving into a roadside wall. There were further local reports of miners crossing this same stretch of road.
‘Time-warp’ road phantoms include Civil War soldiers, highwaymen, and World War II airmen, but occasionally they come from more remote times. Respected prehistorian RCC Clay was crossing Bottlebush Down, in Dorset, an area strewn with earthworks, during the winter of 1927–28. A horseman was riding on the Downs in the same direction. Slowing his car, Clay saw that the horseman’s legs were bare and that he wore a long, loose cloak. The horseman turned his face towards Clay and waved a weapon threateningly above his head. Clay realised he was looking at a prehistoric man. Horse and rider abruptly disappeared. Shepherds who used Bottlebush Down had seen a similar spectral figure there. What is interesting is that the prehistoric phantom clearly saw Clay.
A popular sub-category of road ghost is the “phantom hitch-hiker”; it is often associated with the US, but occurs in other countries and preceded the automobile. (A Swedish case, in which the vehicle involved was a sleigh, was recorded as early as 1602. For other reports see: FT10:4, 21:32, 24:13, 33:34, 34:14, 44:73, 46:26, FT56:52, 86:10, 73:27, 81:46, 95:19)
It became obvious that road ghosts fall into distinctive categories – phantom vehicles, roadside spectres, phantom funerals and so forth – and that they possess a part-myth, part-incident ambiguity which seems to apply to landscape spirits in general. The stereotypical Black Dog of folklore is a giant with large, glowing, red eyes; but in most contemporary reports of ghostly experience it appears as a more normal-looking dog – at least at first glance. It is traditionally associated with certain stretches of road, parish boundaries, and other liminal locations like bridges, coastal areas, and cemeteries.
Horses figure quite prominently in the land-haunting stakes. One Ley Hunter correspondent recalled such an encounter when he set off on a hike from Litton Chaney in Dorset. As he approached a gap in a thick hedge, he became aware of the sound of a horse’s hooves. A dark horse-sized shape began to materialise in the gap. Terrified and bereft of other ideas, he shouted aggressively at it. It melted away into nothing.
A particularly bizarre category of landscape haunting involves spectral houses and scenes. Devon folklorist Theo Brown has recorded many cases; in one, two women saw a house materialise in countryside near the village of Slapton in November 1939. “I knew there was no house there,” informed Brown’s correspondent, who knew the area well. “Although the house was perfect, it had no substance.” A 1938 report described the brief appearance of a whole spectral landscape near the coast at Churston Ferrers, Brixham.
The ‘White Lady’ is one of the most ubiquitous of the old landscape spirits. Like many other outdoor apparitions, it sometimes retreats into pure folklore yet, at other times, people have direct encounters with it. Two Welsh instances illustrate the dichotomy. As late as 1863, people near the village of St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan claimed to have seen a spectral white lady (Ladi Wen), supposedly buried alive there by her enraged husband, who wrongly thought she had been unfaithful. But Ladi Wen was more than old folklore; surfer ‘CP’ was driving through the village of Llangennith to catch the ‘Atlantic roll’ at Rhossili Bay on the Gower Peninsula when he almost collided with a mysterious female covered from head to toe in diaphanous white material. CP knew nothing about White Lady ghosts or that his encounter had been on a stretch of road close to an ancient holy well, a typical location for this type of apparition.
Along with the Black Dog and the White Lady, there is a third major category of landscape spirit: the ‘Black Monk’. A number of reports of these spectral monks have come from the ancient Cotswold town of Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, where they are seen in the aptly-named Cowl Lane near the Abbey. In 1993, a man noticed a robed figure walking in front of him; he glanced at the ground, and when he looked up, the figure had vanished. Cowl Lane reports sometimes mention that the ghosts’ legs cannot be seen, giving them the appearance of floating or walking on a surface lower than the modern one.
Monk-like ghosts have also been reported on roads around Winchcombe (above). Above the town is the Neolithic long barrow of Belas Knap, where Paula C climbed to the top of the ancient mound. From that height she saw a group of hooded figures walking briskly across an adjacent field towards the monument. She couldn’t see their lower limbs and assumed they were walking through tall grass. The hooded and apparently robed figures never seemed to get any closer despite their energetic gait. Concerned that they were about to be disturbed by strangers, Paula climbed down to where her family waited. When no newcomers appeared, she returned to the top of the mound. No one was in sight, but the field looked different – there were fewer trees around it, the path was in a slightly different location, and what had seemed to be a deep dip in the ground was barely apparent.
I had had enough experience with UFO reports to know that people can make crass perceptual errors, and that some readily hoax and lie. But the testimony about landscape spirits had an overall consistency, even though the witnesses were widely separated in time and space… and, of course, I had my own experience. If there was something behind the reports, what was it?
Either apparitions are ghosts of the dead or else the whole business is a mix of hallucination, misperception and hoax. Commonsense was telling me that there could be some truth in both positions. The basic spirit model – that apparitions are the ghosts of the dead – seems, at first glance, the most persuasive approach, but there are problems with it. My phantom mini-pickup truck, for example… there was no driver, just a vehicle. Do cars, trucks and stagecoaches have souls? What about the ghost houses and scenes? It has been suggested that some apparitions are place-memory images, replaying some emotion-charged action time and again. How are such recordings imprinted? And why should only a few actions from the whole history of human activity be replayed? And why only in some places? This theory does not, in any case, account satisfactorily for apparitions of objects and scenes.
I noted accounts of what seemed to be time-slip phenomena – the ghost houses, spectral landscapes, and phantoms in old-fashioned dress. Yet with the phantom houses, at least, it was possible, in some cases, to confirm that no such buildings had ever existed at the haunted locations. What is the ‘half-life’ of a ghost? Historian and folklorist Jeremy Harte pointed out to me that ghosts seldom seem to date from much before the 16th century. Is this because of some intrinsic property of ghosts, or is it because witnesses have a modicum of knowledge of how people looked back to that time, but are hazier the further back they go… unless, like RCC Clay, the witness is a specialist?
People tend to see what they know. I was pretty sure that genuine apparitions were indeed hallucinations – a fusion of subjective and objective qualities – but how could they be place-related hallucinations? Why should a particular stretch of, say, the A23 be haunted over decades?
Around 10pm on 26 August 1998, hospital anæsthetist Guy Routh was driving along the B4068 near Naunton, Gloucestershire, (above) when he saw in his headlights a woman in a cream-coloured dress standing on the verge (reported in FT137: . She waved, and Routh stopped to make sure she was all right, but she vanished in the brief moment he took to pull up his car. The aroma of wood smoke filled the vehicle; outside, it was imperceptible. He looked in vain for the woman in the pale dress. Late one evening in April 2000, a night security guard was driving to work on the same stretch of road. “A figure all in white appeared in front of the car out of nowhere,” he reported. “It looked like a monk and was six feet [1.8m] tall.” His car plunged right through the figure before he could stop; no trace of it could be found. Another report from that stretch of road tells of a car stopping inexplicably and its occupants feeling as if water were seeping up over their feet. Why should that stretch of country road produce three different hauntings, when to my certain knowledge none of the roads for many miles around produce unusual reports?
This place-related characteristic shows up in some subtle ways. In a study of over 70 haunted road locations in Dorset (The Ley Hunter 121, 1994), Jeremy Harte found that 54 per cent of his cases occurred within a tenth of a mile of a parish boundary. By chance alone, no more than 20 per cent of the cases should show such a pattern. “Some places have repeated hauntings, others are quiet at night,” Harte observed. “Is this simply a reaction of psychology – an acknowledgement that some places feel spookier than others? The evidence suggests not.” As an example, he refers to a White Lady haunting reported for over 50 years at a location called Washer’s Pit. He notes that many other places in the parish were as dark and lonely as Washer’s Pit, yet no one credited them with a ghost. “It is strange that people should see ghosts at all, but that they should always see them in the same place is very strange indeed,” Harte concluded. “After all ghosts are spiritual things, while location is a property of matter.”
That is precisely the conundrum. I began to wonder whether the roads were haunted, or if they were located in “zones of disturbance”. The lane between Nunney and Frome, in Wiltshire (shown left), has been notorious as a haunted road since 1977, when the local press reported that a motorist picked up a phantom hitch-hiker. Investigating the location in his excellent study, The Evidence for Phantom Hitch-Hikers (1984), Michael Goss found that a number of motorists had told the local police of similar encounters. Goss found reports of the Nunney-Frome lane ghost dating back years before the press coverage, and discovered that the rumour of the road being haunted went back at least a couple of generations. It may indeed be more ancient than Goss supposed, because an area of land adjacent to the lane was once named ‘Pook Fields’, suggesting that the old land spirit Puck had been known to haunt there since at least Anglo Saxon times.
Although the Stocksbridge bypass (A616) near Sheffield is relatively new, it has been the scene of many traffic accidents and boasts some eerie hauntings. In his fine study of the area (Supernatural Peak District, 2000), folklorist David Clarke points out that a spectral ‘monk’, ‘dancing children’ or fairies and other apparitions reported on or by the road were already known in the area before the bypass was constructed. It is not just roads that develop a reputation for being haunted; a coastal rock outcrop on the Scottish island of Islay and Hound Tor on Dartmoor share it.
I don’t know why certain places promote apparitions. Initially, I wondered if some geophysical anomaly could trigger hallucinations in susceptible individuals. It seemed likely in the case of three apparition reports in the space of a fortnight, in 1980, along a 100-yard stretch of road beside the Rollright stone circle on the Oxfordshire-Warwickshire border (see my book Places of Power, 1990). They were reported to me by people who did not know one another. One witness (now a county archæologist) saw a huge dog pass alongside his van and vanish; another (now a retired Oxford University surveyor) witnessed a car with two occupants disappear. The third case involved the brief apparition of a traditional-style gypsy caravan. What I knew (but the witnesses did not at the time) was that that stretch of road – and that stretch alone – exhibited a high level of natural radioactivity, presumably due to particularly active granite in its foundation.
I took Geiger-counter readings at a few other reported haunted road locations (with David Clarke monitoring the Stocksbridge bypass), but logged nothing abnormal. While this line of enquiry deserves further detailed study, I found myself looking for another approach to the subjective-objective, hallucination-place conundrum. I had noticed two recurring factors. First, ghosts can provide legendary motifs, yet also display the same characteristics in reported actual occurrences. Secondly, there was the unsettling impression that ghosts were more like ideas than individual phenomena. There were the pristine vintage black cars, the hooded figures, the black dogs and the white ladies. And, again, there were cases like the A23, a road which over many years was haunted by different figures, but almost all were in pale dress, as if a theme were being spectrally displayed.
Ghosts are often reported as headless or incomplete, like unfinished sketches; and even where one appears solid, the feeling of it being an idea persists. I asked Guy Routh to describe the apparition he had encountered on the Naunton road; he said she had average mousy hair, neither short nor long; was neither young nor old; her face was more or less average; and her cream-coloured dress was calf-length (so not particularly long or short) and was not of any distinctive style, but rather a simple, classical cut. In other words, the figure was non-specific and more like a stereotype, a norm, an idea, than some relic of a specific individual.
I concluded that these outdoor ghosts are essentially archetypes, a possibility also considered by a handful of other ghost researchers. At its simplest level, CG Jung’s concept of an archetype is that it is a primordial pattern embedded in the human psyche which generates images and concepts upon which our conscious mental activities embroider ever more complex interpretations; they are so stable and enduring that they can evolve without losing their inherent integrity.
While each of us builds up our own personal store of memories through our lives, Jung felt that archetypes exist within the inherited collective unconscious mind as distillations of all the recurrent experiences of humanity across countless generations and cultural boundaries, and even encoded experiential material from our pre-human origins. Archetypes are unconscious entities; we can never know them directly, Jung argued, but only through the images, ideas and symbolism they provide the model for.
The archetypal nature of landscape spirits would also explain their ambiguity. My confidence in the archetype approach increased when I delved deeper into ‘Black Monk’ apparitions around Winchcombe and in the Cotswolds generally. Cirencester museum has a locally-found Romano-British slab of rock about a foot across with three hooded figures carved in relief on it (below).
They stride purposefully from left to right. They are genii cucullati (“hooded spirits”), pagan cult images found in various locations around Europe. The two main English cult centres were around Hadrian’s Wall, in northern England, and on the Cotswolds. The folklorist Hilda Ellis Davidson notes that genii cucullati give an impression of supernatural power. Could the supposed monkish spectres seen today be a phenomenon which was ancient, even to the Romans?
One of the most common apparitions reported by sufferers of the involuntary altered mind state sometimes known as ASP (“Aware Sleep Paralysis”) or RISP (Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis) is a cowled figure. During ASP/RISP episodes, the figure appears completely solid and real, and percipients’ descriptions do not differ from those of witnesses of Black Monk ghosts.
Funerary wagons have been found in early steppe, Celtic, and Norse tombs; they were obviously thought capable of transporting the dead to the afterlife, as Alby Stone has suggested (see Fortean Studies 5, 199 . He argues that this is the deeply-rooted archetypal-symbolic foundation for phantom coaches. Ghost vehicles are an archetype as old as the wheel. I was by now satisfied that the prime categories of outdoor ghosts were archetypal and appeared in witnesses’ perceptions by means of brain-mind mechanisms similar to those that produce hallucinations. But how did this mindstuff get out there on the haunted highways?
Jung considered archetypes to be the confluence of spirit and matter, and stated that the collective unconscious – where archetypes lurk – sinks down into the very chemistry and physics – the molecules and atoms – of the brain. The neuroscience and the quantum (sub-atomic) physics of his day had not yet advanced sufficiently to accommodate his great insight. Serious scientific effort is now being made in probing how consciousness arises in the brain. Numerous investigators are confident that quantum-level conditions – perhaps represented by ‘the Dao’ in Chinese philosophy – underpin mental and physical reality. They are earnestly trying to identify the brain architecture where the primary organisation of mind and matter takes place. Archetypes emerge from that alchemical quantum-interface zone, for the immaterial mind is as inseparable from the material brain as the grasp is from the hand. Consciousness is the ‘interior’ of physical reality.
The archetype-quantum explanation for ghosts of the great outdoors may seem like a cop-out to people unfamiliar with the current studies of the mind-matter interface at the sub-atomic, quantum levels, but it isn’t. It is true to say, though, that it is currently something of a halfway house, for it relies on ongoing research. It is enough here to note the irony that the ancient spirits of the land could be leading us towards some profound revelations about the very fabric of reality.
PAUL DEVEREUX is the respected author of over 20 books and a respected expert on subjects such as earthlights, leys and spirit paths. He is an occasional FT columnist, a well know lecturer and a contributor to television documentaries.
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