Old Leathery Coit Rides Again… in the 1970s

Delivering newspapers on a dark winter morning in Elland in the late 1970s, a young lad had a terrifying encounter with one of Calderdale’s best known spooks – Old Leathery Coit. This forgotten ghostly adventure only came to light after I discussed Leathery Coit on BBC Radio Leeds in August. Listen to the interview here.

But first a quick recap…

According to legend, Old Leathery Coit is a headless horseman who drives a carriage pulled by headless horses from a barn behind the Fleece Inn in Elland. As midnight strikes, the barn door supposedly opens without the aid of human hands, and then an icy blast of wind whips through the streets before the phantom thunders by in the battered and bloody old leather coat that gives him his name.

Some say he’s the spirit of a traveller murdered at the notoriously riotous Fleece Inn – his indelible blood stains still visible until recent times.

Icy wind whistles up the skirts

Even today, when an icy wind whistles up the skirts or trouser legs of the good folk of Elland, they might be heard to mutter, ‘There goes Old Leathery Coit’….

The first mention of Elland’s headless horseman in print seems to be Olde Elland by Lucy Hamerton, published in 1901. She relates two anonymous and rather vague anecdotes about supposed sightings of Old Leathery, which presumably were doing the rounds at the end of the nineteenth century.[i]

The first involved a husband and wife returning home late from visiting a sick relative. They felt the ominous rush of wind before Old Leathery whooshed by. The second sighting was by Lucy Hamerton’s uncles when they were children. They claimed they had seen Leathery and his headless horses ride past their house in Northowram. The fact they were none too afraid of this grim apparition may be cause for scepticism!

But as Kai Roberts noted in his Haunted Halifax and District, Leathery seems to be the kind of ghost that is well-known as rumour but rarely witnessed.[ii] Apart from Hamerton’s dubious and anonymous accounts, the only other reference to an actual encounter with Leathery was a vague comment in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner from 1973 that the last time anyone had seen Leathery Coit was 1966.[iii]

Because of all this, I was surprised and delighted to hear of a more recent meeting with Elland’s most distinguished phantom.

Return of Old Leathery Coit

Jon Whitehead got in touch with me after hearing my radio interview to say that his dad’s friend’s son, Andrew Johnson, had seen the ‘full apparition’ one morning on his paper round in the 70s and was badly shaken by the episode.

I got in touch with Andrew and asked him what he could remember:

It was a dark morning in the winter,  1977-9.

I was delivering a newspaper to the Fleece, and as I came around a corner to walk across the front I saw a dark figure, slightly hunched over.

It turned and walked around the opposite corner.

I ran (not sure why) toward the corner. When I followed around the same corner there was nothing there.

The figure was hunched over, and no head was visible, but unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately!) there were no headless horses.

In any case, Andrew abandoned his paper round and fled in terror. His father, caretaker at a local school, took the boy’s story seriously as he was clearly in shock.

Looking back over four decades later, Andrew takes a sceptical attitude. Although his fear and the fight or flight response he felt were real, he now thinks that he knew the story of Leathery Coit and his mind and the dark spooky atmosphere surrounding the reputedly haunted old pub did the rest. ‘I knew about the ghost so I saw one’, he told me.

The story clearly spread among Andrew’s friends and relatives and deserves its place in weird Calderdale history. Andrew is, as far as I know, the only named person to have an encounter with Leathery Coit. Even if he doesn’t now believe he saw the ghost, at the time he and his family and friends assumed that Andrew had met with Old Leathery – such was the power of the legend.

It’s interesting that the ambiguous figure Andrew saw was assumed to be Old Leathery when many of his distinguishing characteristics were absent. No headless horses or carriage. No blast of icy wind. It’s not even clear that the figure was headless or simply hunched over. But the Leathery Coit legend was closely linked to the Fleece Inn, so it’s understandable that Andrew and the people he told about his adventure would naturally think of Elland’s infamous spook.

Although no specific sightings are ever mentioned, the story of Leathery Coit appeared regularly in both local and national press from the 1930s onwards.[iv] The legend was also trotted out in local press in 1978 – around the time of Andrew’s sighting – which surely would have helped to keep Old Leathery’s name in the public mind.[v]

The sceptic in me thinks that perhaps the hunched figure Andrew saw was the silhouette of a deer at a confusing angle that nimbly disappeared before he got round the corner. Or perhaps it was just a figment of his imagination on that spooky winter morning, as Andrew himself suspected.

Or could it have been Old Leathery Coit putting his headless horses to rest before turning in after a hard night’s haunting?

Thanks to Gayle Lofthouse, Jon Whitehead and Andrew Johnson.

Image of Leathery Coit by Larisa Moskaleva

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[i] Lucy Hamerton, Olde Elland (1901), p.104

[ii] Kai Roberts, Haunted Halifax and District, (The History Press: 2014), p.56

[iii] Denis Kilcommons, ‘Hallowe’en Legends to Chill Your Very Soul’, Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 31 October 1973, p.7

[iv] See for example ‘Ghost Hunting at Elland’, Yorkshire Evening Post , 16 May 1933,p.9

[v] ‘Spirits Galore at the Old Fleece Inn, Elland’, Huddersfield and Holmfirth Examiner,  25 May 1978, p.26