When Hubert met Sally…
The Christmas Eve visitation…. (She was always headed for a fall)…
The Travellers Rest at Brough, Hope Valley, is said to have a resident ghost.. a stern faced lady, her hair in a bun, a chatelaine of keys hanging off the belt of her ankle length dress..she floats along the corridor of the bedrooms and was last seen by an American tourist staying there in the 1980s!
The much nicer, more traditional ghost though is the poor Farm girl, who called in to celebrate Christmas Eve one year… (early 1800s perhaps), got pestered by a drunken reveller, or her over attentive farm master… fled up, (or down) the staircase to get away from him… missed her footing and plunged headlong to her death.. (broken neck presumably)… doomed to re enact the tragedy every Christmas eve at midnight in recurrent residual haunting ever since.. (Her footsteps and crumpling fall is heard in phantom fashion… reputedly)..
I couldn’t find a thing written about the “accident” frustratingly… no mention of it in the “Bradwell Ancient and Modern” chapter on “Tragic Deaths Chronology”…{and they list interesting accidental deaths from 1685}. Actually I have a bit of a theory around that.. in those brutish days of poorly paid, back breaking work practices where dismissal without references would see you and your dependents toiling away in a workhouse you wouldn’t be casting the remotest aspersion of blame at your masters door… the tragic events would be swept under the carpet.. the girl got drunk and fell.. less said the better..
The landlady of the Travellers always reckons that she doesn’t believe in ghosts, and her family have had the place for ever… none of the regulars seemed bothered either so the only thing to do was a surreptitious series of pendulum divining sessions.. and that I did over a period of months in the run up to the festive season.. getting little response at first.. until eventually starting to make a connection with some form of energy… When Christmas eve came around I was disappointed to find the pub deserted of clientele… bad news because the sole barman on duty was clamouring to shut the pub early for the night, midnight is the falling down time remember.. Anyway I managed to get a really good response that quiet early night, sat alone at a table with a schooner of cream sherry, using just the pendulum and a simple ‘Paratek’ word generator app.. I was quite intrigued when “device” “leaven” cropped up.. I was running the app at full speed so I assumed something wanted me to modify the pace which I adjusted to slow.. whereupon a very, very rude word flickered onto the display.. hardly lady like language.. though I suppose if she had been a farm girl she would have known a colourful term of phrase or two possibly..
words like “lash” “fear” “knee” “phantom”.. I was getting quite thrilled I must admit… attracting the attention of the bored barman.. who had been polishing the same glass for about ten minutes.. unbelievably he didn’t know the haunted tale and I
scared him half to death when I related the lurid fabled details to him … As I did the name “Sally” cropped up on the device…I was cock a hoop! So maybe there was some substance to the tale after all?
Maybe Sally actually was the poor farm maid who’s premature demise was hushed up and forgotten in order to preserve some rich drunken farmer/squires/landlords reputation??
I’ve not been in since March, if I and the Travellers Rest survive Covid I shall go back to see if Sally remembers me…
Hubert Hobux 