Peak Experience

Headless ghost somehow reading a book  Stoke Hall  Is this the headless ghost of Stoke Hall?  Headlessly haunted Shady Lane

A headless horseman rides the road from Onecote over Butterton Moor to Warslow.  It may be a pedlar’s ghost.  He was murdered by robbers, who cut off his head and placed his body on a horse.  Or perhaps it is the spirit of a knight killed in battle with the Scots, brought home headless by his horse.

Several visitors to Stoke Hall have seen this headless ghost.  One lady visiting in the 1880s saw late at night, ‘a lady in a beautiful dress coming down the staircase’.  The ghostly beauty had no head and disappeared as the watcher screamed and fell.

Beware the 12 ghostly men bearing a coffin along Shady Lane, near Thornbridge Hall.  The coffin-bearers are headless and the coffin is empty.  For this vacant coffin is intended for the unfortunate person who meets the strange funeral cortege.  So local people avoid travelling down Shady Lane at dusk or dawn.

 

Tradition says that on moonlit nights a phantom white horse gallops along the Manifold Valley bearing a headless rider.  One country fellow who saw the ghost at a crossroads in the 1930s described it as ‘a man on a horse without a yedon, an awful gory sight!’

 

You can walk to Wenley Hill SK208635, from Youlgrave and Middleton by Youlgrave.  Here a headless man and his dog lurk.

 

A Methodist local preacher, a miner at Wenley Hill, once met an elderly man, who told him about the phantom.  He invited the old man to come and chat while he worked.  But the elder refused. ‘Not likely lad, Ah’m not coming up theer.  It’s haunted.’  For many years ago he and his brother had been walking up this lane when the figure of a headless man appeared in front of them.  As suddenly as he had appeared, he disappeared.