“For the first time he then looked back and stopped. I felt the effect of that look creep over me like the feeling must be that comes over the prey of the boa-constrictor when it first knows its doom. I trembled…”
(Mr Chester, 1868)
In the spring of 1868, Bradford was in the grip of a ghost fever. A series of bizarre letters to the local newspaper described a mysterious and ghostly red-eyed stranger who wandered round the night streets of the city muttering profundities about the state of humanity. Soon the local police were struggling to control crowds of several thousand as the city was gripped by a riotous ghost hunt mania…
The Stranger
On the Thursday 27 February 1868, a strange letter appeared in the correspondence column of the Bradford Observer. The letter was purportedly written by a Mr T. Chester and concerned the nocturnal wanderings of a mysterious old man. The old man was around five feet tall, aged about sixty with grey hair and was poorly dressed in seedy black clothes and a greasy battered old hat. His eyes were described as red hot and staring. The old man had been seen by many walking the streets of Bradford with his hands in his pockets, red eyes staring straight ahead, chin buried deep in his shirt collar. He never accosted or spoke to anyone and nobody seemed to know who he was or where he lived.
The author of the letter, Mr Chester, said that he had met the old man on many occasions and that he became intrigued by his regular nocturnal ramblings. He went so far as to ask the police if they knew anything of the Stranger (as the letter was subtitled), but drew a blank. Unfortunately, being of portly frame and a poor walker, Mr Chester was unable to keep up with the old man so was unable to follow him. He did the next best thing – he paid a shoeshine boy sixpence to do his detective work for him.
However, the boy got tired after two hours stalking the old man round the streets of Bradford and gave up. He did, though, overhear the man muttering something odd: ‘Five miles to see a clock and then to find it stopped.’
The next day, Mr Chester relates, his own son saw the Stranger at 5am on Tyrell Street. He was muttering to himself: ‘Ten drunken gentlemen, and ten children starved to death. Forty dogs surfeited with dainties and the widow’s two daughters ruined for want of bread.’
Mr Chester signed off by asking whether something should be done to stop the Stranger as he was evidently insane and might hurt someone.[i]
Pity He Marked His Own Grave
A week later, Mr Chester had another letter published in the Bradford Observer. Since the first letter appeared, he wrote, he had been overwhelmed with requests for more information about the mysterious old man, and what’s more, various offers came in to help follow the Stranger to find out who he was and where he lived.
Mr Chester eventually hired an unnamed young man who had been in training for a competitive walking competition. At 7.30 that evening in Well Street, the Stranger appeared and Mr Chester pointed him out to the amateur sleuth, who set off after him.
According to Mr Chester, he heard nothing until 8.30 the next morning when his door burst open. It was the young man, ashen faced and trembling violently. He threw himself into a chair and Chester poured him a brandy, and soon he was recovered enough to relate what had happened to him.
The young man told how he followed the shabbily dressed old man in black along Well Street, noting how he never looked from right to left, his hands always in his pockets. When the Old Man passed the Mechanic’s Institute he stopped, took his hand from his pocket and tipped his hat, saying, ‘To the kind endeavours of good labour.’ When a merchant passed the Old Man, he muttered, ‘Pity he steals; greater pity, shames not to show it.’ The Stranger then headed onto Market Street where he saw some young women being merry in their colourful clothes and mumbled, ‘Coals of fire on the head of virtue.’
The letter continues at some length to describe the Stranger’s route round Bradford and his gnomic mutterings. As he passed through the crowds of Westgate, the amateur sleuth on his tail heard him mumble, ‘Crimes for some, carelessness for others, want of duty for all.’
On passing a woman described as bloated and pimpled with bloodshot eyes, with a dirty face and a torn dishevelled dress who was staggering down the street, he muttered, ‘Two years from purity to filth; pity she was so ugly.’ When a carriage carrying elegantly dressed gentlemen and ladies on their way to a ball drove by, he uttered, ‘Pity that there is deception, but good that the breast is opaque.’
However, it was just after this that the young man lost his quarry in the crowds, and despite diligent searching, could find no trace of him. The young man returned to Market Street hoping the Old Man would pass him here once more. He waited patiently for hours, hearing the clock strike nine, ten, eleven but still no sign of the Stranger. He then returned to Well Street and waited there for a while. He was about to give up in despair, but as the clock struck midnight, the Old Man appeared again. The young man assumed he had finished his nocturnal route and was now heading home, so by following him he was sure to learn where he lived.
The Old Man headed up Church Bank, and opposite the graveyard, again reverentially raised his hat though did not say anything. Rather, he crossed the road to the cemetery and then climbed over the wall. The intrepid young man followed him. And this is when he finally came face to face with the mysterious stranger that had been haunting the streets of Bradford. According to Mr Chester’s letter, this is how the young man described his encounter in the graveyard:
For the first time he then looked back and stopped. I felt the effect of that look creep over me like the feeling must be that comes over the prey of the boa-constrictor when it first knows its doom. I trembled.
The Old Man with piercing red eyes waved his pursuer back, and he staggered against the cemetery wall, slumped down and wiped the beads of sweat from his brow. When he looked up again, the Old Man had gone.
The young man returned home to try and sleep but could not get the glowering red eyes out of his mind. Finally, he rose at 5am and on going outside, the first person he saw was the Old Man, still walking purposefully and muttering. This time the Old Man brushed past him, lamenting, ‘Pity he marked his own grave…’
The young man was now in fear of his life, assuming that the Old Man was prophesying his death and burial in the cemetery where they had confronted each other the previous night.
The letter finished by reiterating that the account was truthful, and that the Stranger was in need of investigation, before reminding us that his mysterious nighttime wanderings began every night at 7.30 on Well Street.[ii]
It was practically an invitation to a ghost hunt…
The Great Bradford Ghost Hunt
On the evening of Thursday 4 March, crowds began to gather in Well Street and nearby areas, hoping to catch a glimpse of the red-eyed ‘ghost’. Each successive night, the crowds grew bigger, and by Monday 9 March, it numbered seven or eight thousand, according to a police estimate.[iii] Most of the unruly ghost hunters were young men of ‘the lower orders’, though there were both sexes and people of respectability joining the crowds. Young lads tore up sods from the churchyard and threw them at each other and passersby and some windows were smashed. Gangs of youths ran yelling and screaming round the streets, sometimes accosting unfortunate elderly gentlemen who they thought might be the Stranger mentioned in the enigmatic letters. The papers described the scenes as being of extraordinary excitement.
The police tried in vain to get the crowd to go home, but they had lost control. They were eventually saved by the fire brigade who had been using their hoses to clean some warehouse windows. The police turned the hoses on the ghost hunters, drenching them and finally dispersing them.
However, the following night crowds began to gather again, fuelled by a rumour that the ‘real’ ghost would appear, attracting hordes of would be ghost hunters from Bradford and surrounding towns and villages. This time, though, the church gates were locked to prevent youths from running wild in the graveyard and the police manged the crowds. By the next day, the excitement had all but ceased.[iv]
Three young men, William Longbottom, John Forrest and Edward Milnes were summoned to the borough court charged with loitering on Well Street and refusing to move on when told to by the police. P.C. Bradbury told the judge how a crowd of seven or eight thousand had gathered and refused to disperse, until, that is, the firemen’s hoses were turned on them. The three young men got away with just paying costs.[v] Perhaps the judge thought that these three were police scapegoats, given that thousands of others also refuse to move on.
These kinds of ghost flashmobs occurred frequently in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Often a prankster with a scary costume might prance around at night in a spooky location or jump out on a passer-by, and this would lead to wildly exaggerated rumours of people being scared to death or the ghost possessing amazing powers. These would be picked up by the press, and copycat hoaxes would follow, as might attention-seeking fake victims. Often impromptu ghost hunts would ensue, many of them riotous and drunken in nature.
A couple of examples from London towards the end of the nineteenth century bear a remarkable similarity to the events in Bradford in 1868. In 1895, a rumour spread that a ghost was haunting a Hackney churchyard leading to thousands of ghosthunters armed with various weapons running riot in the cemetery and clambering all over the graves. There were false alarms and wild goose chases, friends hoaxing each other and wild screaming and ghost noises from frolicking ghost hunters. The scene was heightened by a violent thunderstorm as thousands dashed madly round the gravestones chasing and scaring each other.[vi]
A few years later in January 1899, one Mr James Chant wrote a letter to the local paper saying he’d seen a ghost by Islington church on Christmas Day and he was going to look for it again that evening at 8 o’clock. As with the Bradford episode, this was practically an invitation to a mass ghost hunt, and that’s exactly what ensued in the churchyard after dark. The police lost control as hundreds of ‘roughs’ conducted a ‘vulgar riot’ among the graves. Many people in the crowd found that their watch, wallet or purse was missing, and there was some speculation that the letter about the ghost had been sent by a pickpocket hoping to cause a large crowd to gather where he could ply his trade.[vii]
In any case, these ghost flashmobs and their riotous exploits usually burned themselves out after a few days, and that’s what happened in Bradford.
Epilogue
Of course, most people who read Mr Chester’s letters about the strange old man and his wanderings and gnomic pronouncements would have realised it was a joke, intended as satire. These kinds of surreal, rambling and ironic letters were rather common in the papers of the time, but the particular description of the Old Man from the graveyard and his comments on contemporary society struck a chord with the people of Bradford, and the fact that a specific location and time were mentioned (Well Street at 7.30) meant that many would be tempted to turn up and see what happened.
The press at the time assumed that because Bradfordians turned out in their thousands to see the ghost, they must have taken Mr Chester’s satirical letter literally.[viii] I’m not so sure. Judging by what happened at other similar ghost flashmobs occurring around graveyards, it seems more likely that as the talk of the mysterious stranger spread, many just turned up to have a laugh with their mates and engage in some carnivalesque tomfoolery and pranking that sometimes got out of control. The Bradford ghost hunt was, like the many other mass Victorian ghost hunts, both transgressive and carnivalesque.
As for the letter that started it all, there are some clues that the whole thing was meant as a joke. Firstly, the author is named Mr T. Chester which seems to be a play on words with ‘jester’. The second clue comes in a final letter from Mr Chester, published in the Bradford Observer on 2 April 1868.[ix]
In this missive, Mr Chester writes that he met the mysterious Old Man once again in the Park area of the city in broad daylight while he was enjoying a cigar. The Stranger appeared beside him as if out of nowhere and he was so startled, he made for a bench and sat down. The Stranger stared ahead, breathing heavily and then took out a strange looking pouch and pipe and began to smoke. The heady aroma filled the air, and the Old Man demanded that Chester speak, but he was unable to. The Old Man went on, ‘Better perhaps to be silent, for lying goes about from mouth to mouth like the exhaled air.’
Eventually, according to the letter, Chester plucked up the courage to speak and ask the Stranger who he was and why he was wandering round Bradford at night. The man replied:
Seek not to know, for direful would be your knowledge. What I am I cannot tell, what I have been – listen! A phantom, a Nemesis, a murder undiscovered; a bad deed dropped on the past and sprung into a man. I am a magician; behold!
At this point, the Old Man held up a mirror, and as Mr Chester’s eyes were drawn inextricably towards it, he saw his whole like flash before him in the glass.
…bad, bold and heinous; the good, overshadowed and dim. I trembled and tried to shut my eyes, but they would not close, and I feared I was going mad…
Finally, the Old Man said, ‘Adieu, forget it again, and again shall I appear. To everyone shall I appear, my mission is to all!’
And then the vision in the mirror vanished and when Mr Chester looked round, the Stranger was no more.
The date of this strange meeting, Mr Chester informs the reader, was the first of April.
[i] T. Chester, ‘A Stranger’, Bradford Observer, 27 February 1868, p.7
[ii] T. Chester, ‘A Stranger’, Bradford Observer, 5 March 1868, p.7
[iii] ‘A Ghost in Bradford’, Bradford Review, 14 March 1868, p.5; ‘The Well Street Ghost’, Bradford Observer, 19 March 1868, p.5
[iv] ‘A Ghost in Yorkshire’, Liverpool Mercury, 13 March 1868, p.8; ‘A Ghost in Bradford’, Bradford Review, 14 March 1868, p.5 ; ‘The Well Street Ghost’, Bradford Observer, 19 March 1868, p.5
[v] ‘The Well Street Ghost’, Bradford Observer, 19 March 1868, p.5
[vi] ‘The Hackney Ghost’, Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 23 August 1895, p.2; ‘Hackney Ghost Hunters’, Morning Leader, 22 August 1895, p.3; ‘A Hackney Ghost’, Shields Daily Gazette, 23 August 1895, p.3; ‘The Hackney Ghost Hunt’, London Evening News, 23 August 1895, p.3; ‘The Hackney Ghost’, Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 23 August 1895, p.2
[vii] James Chant, ‘A Ghost at St Mary’s Churchyard’, Islington Gazette, 3 January 1899, p.3; ‘The Ghost Trick’, Islington Gazette, 4 January 1899, p.2; ‘Looking for a Ghost’, Echo, 1 January 1899, p.2; ‘Ghost Scare at Islington’, Globe, 4 January 1899, p.5; ‘Stupid Ghost Hoax’, Bingley Echo, 4 January 1899, p.8; ‘Waiting for a Ghost’, Westminster Gazette, 4 January 1899, p.5; ‘Islington Ghost Scare’, Islington Gazette, 5 January 1899, p.3
[viii] ‘A Ghost in Bradford’, Bradford Review, 14 March 1868, p.5
[ix] ‘The Stranger Departs This Time’, Bradford Observer, 2 April 1868, p.7
Paul Weatherhead 