Research source

I am still near, Watching the smiles I prized on earth, Your converse mild, your blameless mirth.[64

Date of account: Late nineteenth-century compilation
Source: The Ghost World
Reference: The Ghost World · selected passage 90
Rights: public_domain
Language: English
Record updated: 2026-08-24

Record summary

Many spots where suicides have been buried are supposed to be haunted by headless ghosts attired in white grave-clothes

Published source text

Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.

Source passage

Source text · mention only

Many spots where suicides have been buried are supposed to be haunted by headless ghosts attired in white grave-clothes. Some few years ago, as a peasant was passing in a waggon with three horses a 'four-lane-end' in Lyneal Lane, Ellesmere, Shropshire, where a man was buried with a forked stake run through the body to keep it down, a woman was seen without a head. The horses took fright, and started off, overturning the waggon, and pitching the man into the Drumby Hole, where the waggon and shaft-horse fell upon him. The other horses broke loose and galloped home, where they arrived covered with foam, and on a search being made, the dead body of the waggoner was found in the hole.[152] Exactly twelve months afterwards, his son, it is said, was killed by the same horses on the same spot. As Miss Jackson points out, the headless ghost in this story is of a different sex from the person whose death is supposed to cause its restlessness. The same, she adds, is the case 'with the ghost of the Mary Way, a now almost forgotten spectre of more than a hundred years ago.

Historical context

Contextual commentary · mention only

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Modern context

Contextual commentary · mention only

Lattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.

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