In September 1926, fear, panic and hysteria haunted the West Yorkshire city of Bradford. A giant ghostly figure in a hooded white cloak stalked the night streets terrorising the locals and then vanishing into the labyrinthine ginnels or over the rooftops. Armed mobs of vigilantes roamed the streets hunting for the Bradford Ghost, who was said to resemble a member of the Ku Klux Klan. They never caught him…
The First Sightings
The mysterious hooded figure in white first appeared in front of some young men at midnight on Grafton Street on Sunday 5 September 1926. At least this is what a young man named Walter Wheatley told the Yorkshire Observer.[i]
However, it was on Tuesday 7 May that the drama really began. The Ghost was seen by James O’Brien on Grafton Street and then by a woman walking to work at about 4.30am. The figure in white approached her along the dark street causing her to scream in terror before fleeing and eventually collapsing in a faint. Nearby residents heard the scream and looking out of their bedroom windows, according to press reports, they saw the ghostly figure standing over the prostrate woman. Some men ran to her aid, but by the time they arrived, the ghost had vanished.[ii]
The Ghost was described in the papers as a ‘giant’ of over six feet tall. He wore a white hooded gown with a conical hat that came down over his face with two slits for eyes. Many reports said that he resembled a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He would walk down the centre of the street waving his arms in the air, and it was thought that he wore running shoes or pumps so he could escape swiftly and silently if anyone gave chase to him.[iii]
Local residents were both outraged and terrified. People were afraid to answer their door or to go out into their yards after dark. As stories of the Bradford Ghost spread, so did panic and alarm…
Wild Ghost Chases
Peak ghost hysteria was the weekend of the 10 and 11 September. On both nights crowds gathered in the Manchester Road area of the city and stayed on the streets until the early hours hunting for the ghost. Occasionally, someone would shout ‘There it is!’ and there would be a mad dash in that direction, though without success.
The ghost hunters were armed with a considerable array of weapons including pokers, axes, lead pipes, fender ends and various sticks.[iv] As well as these armed vigilantes there was an ‘army’ of small boys and a ‘mob’ of dogs patrolling the gloomy streets and narrow back alleys.[v] It was rumoured that plain clothes policemen, in particular, those that were running champions, were on the streets wearing shorts ready to give chase to the phantom.[vi]
Some of the ghost hunters set up booby traps made of pyramids of tin cans or glass jars in the dark passages hoping that the Ghost would accidentally kick them over and reveal himself. All that happened were false alarms as the vigilantes walked into the traps themselves leading to more wild ‘ghost’ chases.[vii]
At one point, someone in the mob yelled ‘It’s here’ after glimpsing a flash of white, and hordes of angry ghost hunters tore down the road in the direction of the white figure, only to find that the ghost was in fact a woman shaking the crumbs off her tablecloth. The angry vigilantes collapsed in hysterical laughter.[viii]
A man who took part in the night patrols told the press what it was like:
Shortly after midnight I took up my stand in the district where the ‘ghost’ had been seen. Soon afterwards I heard a sudden shout and saw a crowd of about a hundred rush down Caledonia Street in the wake of a man who had said he had seen the ‘hooded thing’. Police joined in the chase, and I groped my way down a dark passage into a dimly lighted yard overlooking a brewer’s dump. Here everything was in a state of excitement.
I saw him climb on to the roof and get behind a chimney.
Immediately there was a clamber for the roof, and for some minutes the police illuminated every nook and cranny, but it was all to no purpose.[ix]
There seem to have been a number of journalists among the ghost hunters, and their reports play up the spooky and horror elements in their description of Bradford’s back streets. One reporter from London wrote of Bradford’s dark passages, ‘gloomy’ and ‘sepulchral’ yards and its ‘labyrinth of alleys’.[x]
Over this hectic weekend, hundreds of armed would-be ghost busters swarmed over the ‘infected area’ (as some press reports called it), and although a few people claimed to have seen or chased the hooded giant, he was not caught.[xi]
The most common theory among the ghost hunters was that the Ghost was one of their own who was sneaking into a dark corner, putting on his white cloak and hat and terrifying a few people before disposing of the costume or stuffing it in a pocket and then joining the crowds searching the back streets.[xii]
One editorial in the Yorkshire Evening Post opined that the hoax was the ‘morbid outcome of a warped mind,’ and hoped that if he were caught, he would be beaten so mercilessly that he wouldn’t be able to lie on a white sheet, never mind wear one. This came close to happening when a man with bulging pockets attracted the attention of the vigilantes who suspected he was concealing a sheet, though he turned out to be innocent. Nevertheless, some of the women on the ghost hunt declared that if they caught the culprit, they would lynch him.[xiii]
After such a mad weekend, it seems the ghost took a short break, but not for long…
Bradford Ghost Reappears
In the Bierley district of the city on the evening of Friday 17 September, tram driver Harold Fishwick heard a tapping at the glass panel of his back door. He opened it to see a white hooded figure with slits for eyes standing before him. The figure then turned and ran. Strangely, the family’s dog had not barked when the stranger knocked on the door, which was unusual.
Half an hour later, Fishwick’s neighbour, Mrs Robinson was having a bath when she heard knocking. She dressed and went downstairs to find her visiting friend Mrs Walker and Mr and Mrs Mills, the young couple she shared the house with, upset and anxious. Mrs Walker had heard the knocking too and through the glass panels of her door had seen a figure in white slowly waving his arms above his head. Mr Mills opened the door and caught a glimpse of the figure before it vanished into the night. Mrs Mills was said to have been taken ill due to the shock.
Mr Mills told another neighbour, Alfred Winch, what had happened and he elected to stay up and wait on the back steps of his house to see if the Ghost would return. At 1.30am, he was about to give up and go to bed when he saw a white figure waiting near the bottom of his garden. Mr Winch ran after the Ghost, but it broke into a swift and silent sprint and escaped into a building site.
The whole neighbourhood was said to be greatly alarmed.[xiv]
And then the Ghost was gone…
Playing The Ghost
What the people of Bradford had experienced was a rather late example of a phenomenon that was extremely common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the Ghost Panic.
These often started with a joker donning a white sheet or perhaps more elaborate scary costume and then prancing around graveyards or other spooky locations after dark or perhaps leaping out and terrifying hapless pedestrians out after dark. This odd but widespread behaviour was dubbed ‘playing the ghost’ by the press. As stories of the ‘ghost’ spread, copycat hoaxers might join in the fun, and to complicate matters further, attention-seekers would invent stories of having encountered the ghost. Each retelling would be exaggerated, and the locals would become outraged and form vigilante patrols to catch the culprit.
Many of these nocturnal ghost hunts were chaotic, rowdy or even an excuse for drunken larks and practical jokes involving flashmobs of hundreds or perhaps thousands. Sometimes innocent bystanders who were in the wrong place at the wrong time would find themselves surrounded by an angry mob suspecting they were the ghost and would be badly beaten, dumped in the nearest body of water or worse.
Epilogue
Frequently, these panics dwindled to nothing, before springing up again in a nearby area. This is exactly what happened in Bradford in 1926. In early November at Heckmondwike, about eight miles south of Bradford, a group of women were ‘scratting coal’ from a waste tip in the early hours when they saw ‘a white formless thing that made no sound as it advanced slowly towards them.’
They threw down their buckets of coal and fled in terror. When they returned later, the ghost was gone – as was their coal.[xv]
I’ve been researching and writing a book about these strange ghost hoaxes, ghost hunts and ghost panics, and in the process exhumed a number of forgotten Bradford episodes – more soon.
Interestingly, in a short article about the 1926 scare for Halloween 2020, the Bradford Telegraph and Argus told us (with no source) that the Ghost was due to reappear in 2026…[xvi]
For more ghost hoaxes, see below:
[i] ‘Ghost Hunt in Bradford’, Yorkshire Observer, 11 September 1926. Reproduced in Mike Dash (1996) ‘Spring Heeled Jack’, Fortean Studies, vol.3, pp.99-100
[ii] Ibid; ‘Bradford Ghost’, Hull Daily Mail, 11 September 1926, p.1
[iii] Ibid
[iv] ‘Bradford Ghost’, Hull Daily Mail, 11 September 1926, p.1; ‘Vain Vigil for the Ghost’, Nottingham Evening Post, 13 September 1926, p.4
[v] ‘Ghost Hunting’, Leeds Mercury, 24 September 1926, p.4
[vii] Ibid
[viii] ‘Vain Vigil for the Ghost’, Nottingham Evening Post, 13 September 1926, p.4
[ix] ‘Ghostly Hooded Giant’, Birmingham Weekly Mercury, 19 September 1926, p.5
[x] ‘Hue and Cry for a Giant Ghost’, The People, 19 September 1926, p.3
[xi] ‘Bradford Ghost Hunt Thrills Well-armed Searchers’, Bradford Daily Telegraph, 11 September 1926. 11 September 1926. Reproduced in Mike Dash (1996) ‘Spring Heeled Jack’, Fortean Studies, vol.3, pp.99-100
[xii] Ibid; ‘Bradford Ghost’, Hull Daily Mail, 11 September 1926, p.1
[xiii] ‘Ghostly Hooded Giant’, Birmingham Weekly Mercury, 19 September 1926, p.5
[xiv] ‘Bradford Ghost Reappears’, Bradford Daily Telegraph, 17 September 1926, Reproduced in Mike Dash (1996) ‘Spring Heeled Jack’, Fortean Studies, vol.3, pp.100-101
[xv] ‘Ghost with an Eye for the Main Chance’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 4 November 1926, p.9
[xvi] https://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/18837326.manchester-road-ghost-prowl/
Paul Weatherhead 