Ghost Tales by the Fireside - True Ghost Stories Podcast

In early 1975, a signalman working at OA&GB Junction near Ashton Moss heard footsteps climbing the stairs to his signal box. He saw an unfamiliar man carrying a bag reach the top — but when he opened the door, nobody was there.

One week later, a mysterious figure appeared beside the railway. This time, two signalmen saw him from separate locations and approached from opposite directions. The man should have been trapped between them.
Instead, he vanished.

In this episode of Ghost Tales by the Fireside, we explore the history of the Oldham, Ashton and Guide Bridge Railway and one of Greater Manchester's quietly disturbing railway ghost stories.

Was the mysterious visitor simply a trespasser who somehow escaped unnoticed, or had an old railwayman returned to a place he once knew?

Battle Abbey stands on the site of one of the most famous battles in English history, where King Harold fell and William the Conqueror defeated the English army in 1066.

But the ghosts said to haunt Battle Abbey are not only the dead of the Battle of Hastings.

There are sightings of mysterious monks wandering the medieval ruins, a silent horseman crossing the battlefield, unexplained sounds from empty rooms and the unidentified Woman in Red. In 2002, a teacher and two pupils reportedly saw a monk they believed was a costumed interpreter — only to discover that nobody was dressed as a monk that day.

There is also the extraordinary curse supposedly placed upon Sir Anthony Browne after the Dissolution of the Monasteries: a warning that his family would perish by fire and water.

And after heavy rain, the battlefield itself can appear to bleed.

In this episode of Ghost Tales by the Fireside, we explore the history, folklore, ghost stories and reported paranormal encounters surrounding Battle Abbey and the battlefield of 1066.

Everyone knows the nursery rhyme. Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after.

But in the Somerset village of Kilmersdon, an old local legend gives those familiar words a much darker meaning.

Here, Jack and Jill are remembered not as children, but as young lovers. The story tells of a secret pregnancy, a fatal falling stone, a child left behind and a local surname supposedly born from the tragedy.

And Kilmersdon has something else.

A real Jack and Jill Hill — and at the top of it, a genuine medieval well.

So could one of Britain's best-known nursery rhymes preserve the memory of a real Somerset tragedy?

In this episode of Ghost Tales by the Fireside: Dark Folklore, we follow the old path through Kilmersdon and discover where history ends and one of Somerset's strangest legends begins.

Website: www.ghosttales.co.uk

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In August 1977, strange events began inside an ordinary council house at 284 Green Street, Enfield.
Peggy Hodgson's children claimed their beds were moving. Knocking sounds came from the walls. Furniture appeared to move by itself. Neighbours were called into the house, followed by the police and WPC Carolyn Heeps later reported seeing an armchair move across the living-room floor.

What followed became one of Britain's most famous and controversial paranormal cases.
Investigators Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair spent months at Green Street, witnessing and recording extraordinary phenomena. Objects were reportedly thrown, furniture moved, and eleven-year-old Janet Hodgson began producing a strange, deep voice that claimed to belong to a former resident named Bill Wilkins.

But there is another side to the story.

Janet and her sister were caught faking some incidents, and several famous pieces of evidence have much simpler possible explanations.

Sceptics have argued that the entire case can be explained by tricks, exaggeration and credulous investigators.

Yet some incidents were reportedly witnessed by neighbours, journalists, police officers and others outside the Hodgson family.

So what really happened at 284 Green Street?

This episode of Ghost Tales by the Fireside goes back to the original Enfield Poltergeist case, separating the documented events from the mythology that has grown around them and asking the question that still hangs over Green Street nearly fifty years later:

If some of it was faked… was all of it?

Out on the lonely marshes near Faversham, Kent, stands the Shipwrights Arms — an isolated old pub with a ghost story that has lingered for generations.

Local tradition tells of a sailor whose ship foundered in the Swale on a bitter winter night.

Somehow he survived the wreck and struggled across the freezing mudflats towards the lights of the pub. He reached the door and knocked... but nobody let him in.

By morning, he was dead on the doorstep.
And according to the old story, he never really left.

Landlords, landladies and customers have reportedly encountered a thickset, bearded sailor wearing a heavy reefer jacket and peaked cap. Sometimes his arrival is announced only by a sudden chill — and the unmistakable smell of rum, tar and tobacco.

This is the strange story of the ghost of the Shipwrights Arms near Faversham.