“Old Calverley, Old Calverley, I have thee by th’ ears

I’ll cut thee in collops unless thou appears…”

(Chant to raise the spirit of executed child killer, Walter Calverley)

The West Yorkshire village of Calverley became the centre of public attention at Christmas 1904 after reports of a mysterious phantom were widely published. However, the Christmas ghost of Calverley has a long history, involving tales of schoolboys raising the dead, headless horses, exorcism and haunted preachers. The story begins, though, with a horrifying Jacobean murder spree that spawned a grim piece of gory theatre that William Shakespeare may have had a hand in…

A Yorkshire Tragedy

In the West Yorkshire village of Calverley, between Leeds and Bradford, stands Calverley Old Hall, once the family home of the illustrious Yorkshire family that gave their name to the village and the ancient house. It was in the oak-panelled bedroom of this house that Walter Calverley committed his infamous murders in April 1605.

Much of what we know about the Calverley murders comes from an anonymous pamphlet published in 1605 titled Master Calverley’s Unnatural and Bloody Murder. The pamphlet also formed the basis for a Jacobean domestic drama called A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) which was once attributed to William Shakespeare, though most modern scholars consider Shakespeare’s contemporary Thomas Middleton to be the true author.[1] In any case, the gory drama is perhaps the Jacobean equivalent of a sensational modern serial killer docudrama or true crime show.

Walter Calverley had been one of Yorkshire’s most eligible bachelors, but after marrying Phillipa Brooke he frittered away his fortune on gambling, riotous parties and various unnamed vices. He took to brooding and raving, blaming his family for his ruinous finances. Deep in debt, despairing and horrified by the thought of his wife and children in penury, he brutally murdered two of his infant sons and attempted to stab his wife to death, though she was saved when her whalebone corset deflected the blade. Calverley was on his way to murder his youngest son who was out to wet nurse, but his horse stumbled and he was caught.

Although he was undoubtedly guilty of the heinous crime, Calverley refused to enter a plea, meaning that his surviving family would not forfeit his estate to the crown. Calverley therefore was sentenced to be pressed to death, a slow and agonising form of execution reserved for prisoners who refused to plead guilty or not guilty. He was stretched out naked with his wrists and ankles tied to a post with a board placed over him. Weights were gradually added to the board to try and force a plea from him. Local lore has it that Calverley defiantly cried, ‘A pound more weight – lig on, lig on’ – ‘lig’ being Yorkshire for ‘lie’. It’s said that a loyal servant took pity on his master and ended his suffering by standing on the board and hastening Calverley’s end. The servant was duly hanged.

Local legend holds that the bloodstains on the floor of the murder room could never be washed clean, no matter how hard they were scrubbed.  The notorious murders committed in Calverley Hall would echo down the centuries, as the tragic events were retold and embellished and local legends developed.

A Night in the Murder Room ~ The Preacher’s Tale

As the village of Calvery shuddered under the early January snow one Saturday evening in 1777, renowned methodist preacher Richard ‘Dickie’ Burdsall came to deliver a sermon at Calverley Hall.[2]  Afterwards, Burdsall stayed as a guest in the murder room and recorded what happened in his 1797 autobiography.[3]

This is what he wrote:

…and after being asleep some little time, I thought something crept upon me up to my breast, pressing me much; I was greatly agitated and struggled to awake.

Not only was something crawling onto his chest and crushing the life out of him, his bed seemed to swing such that he was thrown upon the floor. He got to his knees and gave thanks that he was unhurt. Fearing for his sanity, he checked there was nothing unusual about the bed before summoning up the courage to get into it again. Twice more, he was violently tumbled onto the floor.

By now it was one in the morning, and Burdsall decided that he would not lie down on the bed again and got dressed. On several occasions he went to the bedroom door as if to leave the room, and he was often about to cry out and wake the household, but he finally decided to face his waking nightmare alone. At a loss to explain what was happening to him in this gloomy oak panelled room, he could only conclude that Satan himself was testing his faith. This is how Burdsall described his agonising wait until daybreak:

I longed to see the light of the morning, and had I been immured in a dungeon and heavily fettered in irons I think I could not have been more desirous of my liberty than I was for the return of the morning.

When the wintry light eventually crept through the window of the oak-panelled bed chamber with the dark stains on the floor, Burdsall saw that his room adjoined the churchyard, and below him, under ancient yew trees were the melancholy snow-covered graves of many past inhabitants of this great Yorkshire hall.

Of course, when Burdsall related his nocturnal adventure to his hosts, they informed him of the Calverley murders of 1605. They would also have told him about Walter Calverley’s agonising execution – a demise that seems eerily similar to the preacher’s experience of something crushing his chest.

However, if you’ve ever experienced sleep paralysis, a fairly common sleep disorder, you might recognise elements of Burdsall’s night of terror. When sleep paralysis strikes, nightmarish hallucinations often accompany the feeling that someone – or something – is crushing one’s chest. These waking nightmares feel utterly real, and being paralysed and unable to escape adds to the terror. Perhaps Burdsall suffered an episode of sleep paralysis, and later interpreted it in the light of the murders that had been committed in the room in which he had slept.

Furthermore, we don’t really know how much Burdsall embellished his experience. Historian and Calverley resident Edward Garnett points out that Burdsall somewhat spoiled his story by saying his room looked out onto the graveyard. There is no view of the graveyard from Calverley Hall.[4]

It seems likely that news of Burdsall’s adventure would have spread quickly through the community, and those of a certain age might remember stories their grandparents told them of ‘Owd Calverley’ and his monstrous deeds. And so ghostly legends and traditions, and eventually a Christmas connection, began to emerge.

Ghost Tales

If you were riding across Greengates Beck Bottom in Calverley after dark in the early nineteenth century, you might feel someone leap onto the back of your horse and not leave you until the beck was crossed. This was the ghost of Owd Calverley, according to local ghostlore.

There were also stories that Calverley’s spirit would gallop around the village of a night clutching his bloodied dagger on a headless horse. Sometimes he might be accompanied by the faithful servant who had put an end to his master’s sufferings and paid with his own life. He too, of course, would be on a headless horse. There seems to be no particular reason why the horses were headless, apart from, perhaps, it creates a striking ghostly image.

In any case, as Owd Calverley’s ghost atop his headless horse galloped through Calverley woods, it would cry ‘A pound more weight – lig on, lig on!’ Of course, if the ghost confined itself to the woods, he wasn’t much bother, but he created great consternation if he rode his ghastly horse into the village. Locals say that a skilful exorcist cast a charm that prevented Owd Calverley from passing the church as long as the holly grew green in Calverley Woods.[5]

Nevertheless, many of the village children believed that the murderer’s evil spirit could be raised if you performed a certain ritual. An anonymous correspondent reminisced about his childhood ghost hunts in the Bradford Observer.[6] In order to summon Old Calverley’s spirit, first the children would pile their caps in a pyramid in the churchyard and some pins and breadcrumbs leftover from tea were scattered about. Then the children would hold hands to form a circle around their caps and recite the magic words:

       Old Calverley, Old Calverley, I have thee by th’ ears,

       I’ll cut thee in collops unless thou appears.[7]

Collops are cutlets or slices of bacon.

At the same time as the recitation was being chanted, some of the braver boys would go and whistle through the keyhole of the church door before repeating the rhyme. The correspondent claimed that on one occasion he and his friends saw – or thought they saw – a pale and ghostly figure appear, though they did not stay to have a proper look but fell over themselves in a mad dash to escape the graveyard.

The ghost of Owd Calverley was also thought to have been responsible for a campanological mystery. Around Christmas 1872 the bell in the church tower at Calverley began tolling in the early hours of the morning. They continued ringing for a long time, and the villagers came running from their warm beds into the cold night to see what the matter was. The door to the empty church was locked, but still the bells tolled. For a long time the bells rang on as the villagers searched in vain for the key to the church door. When it was finally located, the bells stopped the instant the key was put in the lock.[8]

Perhaps it was the Preacher’s winter adventure, or the mysterious tolling of the church bells in December 1872 that first connected Calverley’s ghost with Christmas. Or perhaps it’s his name being associated with holly that makes him a seasonal ghost, for the exorcist’s charm made the murderer’s shade avoid the village while the holly trees grew green in Calverley Wood. Or it could just be that everyone loves a ghost story at Christmas.

The Horsforth Man’s Tale

In 1904, some boys started a fire that left twenty acres of the holly trees in Calverley Wood burned black. Could this be why the ghost of Old Calverley chose the Christmas of that year to make his presence known again?

On Sunday 18 December 1904, a gentleman referred to only as ‘the Horsforth Man’ (after a village near Calverley) was walking home past the church yard. It was a cloudy night, though at times pale moonlight peered through the darkness. According to the Yorkshire Evening Post, this is what happened next:

…without any preliminary warnings there was a flash and a phantom-like form floated before the astonished pedestrian. He was all alone, the villagers having long since retired to bed. The apparition then disappeared, and all was quiet again.[9]

The next day the Horsforth Man told a friend who was acquainted with local folklore about his experience. When he heard about the Yorkshire Tragedy, he became convinced that he had seen the ghost of Owd Calverley himself.[10] Of course, the story was widely reported in the local and national media, and many locals embarked on nocturnal ghost hunts in the hope of catching Calverley’s restless spirit.[11]

Epilogue

There was some scepticism about the Horsforth Man’s story, and the anonymity of the witness suggests it may have been a journalistic joke, ‘trading on the credulity of a number of London journals,’ as the Leeds Mercury put it.[12] The Mercury suggested the mysterious Horsforth Man didn’t even exist – and if he did, his spooky experience was a case of one too many festive tipples down the pub.

Calverley Hall is now holiday lets.

The Yorkshire Tragedy lives on as a gory curio in Shakespeare’s apocrypha.

This is an edited excerpt from Phantoms of Christmas Past: Festive Ghost Hoaxes, Ghost Hunts and Ghost Panics by Paul Weatherhead (6^th Books).

First published in Northern Life Magazine

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[1] R. V. Holdsworth ‘Middleton’s Authorship of A Yorkshire Tragedy’, The Review of English Studies, 45:177 (1994), pp.1-25

[2] ‘A Christmas Ghost’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 21 December 1904, p.4.

[3] Richard Burdsall, Memoirs of the Life of Richard Burdsall, (York, 1797), pp. 118-123

[4] Garnett, (1991) p.75

[5] ‘Tragical Story’, Christian World, 1 December 1868, p.10; ‘More about the Calverley Ghost’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 24 December 1904, p.4

[6] ‘Calverley Forty Years Ago’, Bradford Observer, 28 March 1874, p.7

[7] Ibid

[8] John H. Ingram, The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain (London: Gibbings and Company, 1897), p.399

[9] ‘A Christmas Ghost’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 21 December 1904, p.4

[10] ‘A Christmas Ghost’, Cheshire Daily Echo, 21 December 1904, p.3

[11] ‘More about the Calverley Ghost, Yorkshire Evening Post, 24 December 1904, p.4

[12] ‘Alleged Apparition at Horsforth’, Leeds Mercury, 24 December 1904, p.13