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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752487052 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 05/30/2012 |
| Series: | Haunted |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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Haunted Salisbury
By Frogg Moody, Richard Nash
The History Press
Copyright © 2012 Frogg Moody & Richard NashAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-8705-2
CHAPTER 1
Ales, Wines and Sprits
The Haunted Pubs of Salisbury
The famous Haunch of Venison sits in Minster Street, almost opposite the Poultry Cross. The inn was first built in 1320, apparently to provide lodgings for those employed in adding the spire to the cathedral.
Whether you are looking at it from street level or ensconced in one of its odd little rooms, the Haunch feels as if it were haphazardly built on an indeterminate number of levels, with odd passages leading here and there, and it seems to creak – and even sometimes sway – like an old ship. Indeed, some of the building's oak beams are thought to have been salvaged from sailing vessels.
The odd arrangement of the rooms is attributed to the original use of the building, as the more senior masons and foremen occupied the upper floors, with the lower class of labourer living below. An upper floor retains the name 'The House Of Lords' as a result of this tradition.
Tiles in the bar of the inn are said to have once been part of the fabric of the cathedral, and the pewter bar top is thought to be the last surviving complete example of its kind in England. The fireplace of the main dining room bears the date of the Spanish Armada – 1588.
A number of interesting sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artefacts have been discovered when work has been carried out on the building at various times: a Queen Elizabeth silver groat, two playing cards (the queen and ten of clubs), a stoneware wine flagon (bearing a cipher of three hearts), a rodent trap, a shoe showing signs of having been gnawed by a rat, a lady's shoe and a half-pint pewter pot engraved with the name of a landlady, Louisa Potts. A number of these items were donated to what has become the Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum.
In the spring of 1944 the Haunch's smallest bar, to the immediate right of the Minster Street entrance, was used by Winston Churchill and General Dwight Eisenhower during their preparations for the impending invasion of Europe. A rather public place for such a sensitive plan one might have thought – but on the other hand two such large characters armed with sheaves of maps of the Normandy coastline would have left little space in this tiny room for any flapping ears or tongues.
In any case, given the long established extent of military installations around the city, the citizens of Salisbury were perhaps simply used to the sight of top brass and manoeuvres in the area. Roy Nash, an inquisitive Highbury Avenue schoolboy at the time of the D-Day preparations, recalls that all the local playing fields and woods were completely filled with personnel, equipment, machinery and ammunition – but the general populace had no idea of what was about to happen.
The ghosts that haunt the Haunch are not linked to these historical events. The most celebrated has been dubbed 'The Demented Whist Player' although the real name of the individual involved in the story is not recorded. One evening in the 1820s this man arrived in Salisbury, whilst travelling from Southampton to an unknown destination, and sought lodgings at the Haunch of Venison.
The Haunch was renowned as 'An Old English Chop House', a title that, in earlier times, had only been given to very high-class eating establishments. What happened there on this particular evening would put a whole new slant on the meaning of 'chop'. These events were recorded in a ballad entitled 'The Hand at the Haunch'.
The regular patrons were drinking, talking heartily, playing cards and shove ha'penny but, as the stranger entered the room, the throng fell dead silent, in the best traditions of a true 'local'. Unmoved, the stranger strode to the bar and ordered a tankard of ale, which he drank straight down. He then tossed a gold coin to the pot boy and ordered more ale for all. This eased the tension and the stranger was invited to join a card game.
After a few rounds of 'win some and lose some', the stranger's luck began to improve and he started to win hand on hand. Silence returned to the room. Soon the stranger had won the price of his lodgings for the night ... and five times the cost of the round of drinks he had bought.
A butcher, with a seat at the game quite close to the stranger, was growing both suspicious and angry. He drew a blade and with a single expert chop struck off the man's right hand. With the stranger screaming in pain and shock, the other players looked to the rush-strewn floor where the hand had fallen ... and saw that it held five aces.
In 1903 a mummified hand, holding playing cards, was found by builders working at the Haunch and was preserved in a glass cabinet. Although this is traditionally believed to have been the extremity removed from the stranger, it was not holding a winning hand from any recognisable card game, and theories have also been put forward that it could have been a 'Hand of Glory'.
A Hand of Glory was a candle made from, or sitting in, a dead man's hand, and would be used in the practice of witchcraft or sorcery. A 'recipe' for the device was published in France in 1772: the hand would be obtained from a hanged felon whilst the body was still on the gibbet. It was then wrapped in part of a funeral pall before being squeezed to obtain the pulp, which was then refashioned into the shape of a hand, containing a wick that, once lit, had great secret power.
The Haunch made international headlines when the hand was stolen in 2010. Following the publicity, the artefact was returned in a bubble envelope, courtesy of the Royal Mail. Manager Justina Miller recalls that, 'The girl who opened it had a shock. We were expecting a pump for the beer – she opened it and just screamed "Oh my God! The hand!"'
The stranger's restless spirit – sinister by virtue of both its very presence and, presumably, its enforced left-handedness – has walked the myriad floors of the Haunch for nigh on two centuries. Perhaps to attempt to prove his innocence, perhaps to warn other visitors to curb any urge to cheat the men of Salisbury, or perhaps to simply take his revenge and retrieve his winnings and 'personalised' deck of cards ... and his hand of course.
Whatever his motives, the spirit hides objects, moves glasses across tables, opens and closes doors and switches taps, lights and electric appliances on and off. These actions are usually accompanied by a strong smell of freshly turned earth.
Dave Taylor lodged at the Haunch in around 1980, in two rooms at the top of the building – rumoured locally to have been where Sir Walter Raleigh wrote his gallows speech whilst in transit to the Tower of London. Dave recalls how even on a very warm night the top bar of the inn would suddenly turn cold:
... as if something extremely chilly had just shot across the room from one corner and out of the door. Nothing was visible but most people in the room would stop and look at each other as if to say 'What was that?'
Also, on the second set of stairs – leading off the kitchen area – there was always a fairly rank smell of fat until you got to the middle of the stairs, where in a very small, localised area there was a smell of freshly turned earth and grass – a definite smell of 'the outside'. I say 'localised' because this smell occupied a definite space – shoe box sort of sized – that if you put your head in you could smell it and if you moved your head back a few inches you could smell the kitchen again.
The current manager of the Haunch, Justina Miller, now lives in the same flat at the top of the building:
One night I woke up and saw a middle-aged guy stood by my bed with his arms crossed like this [across his chest], just watching, in old brown trousers and a shirt.
I have a shelf on the wall with a box on it, and I had an angel in there. A couple of months later I heard a very big bang. I woke up and my boyfriend said 'Don't worry, it was just the wind', but the next day he said, 'I didn't want to scare you but there was a guy stood by the bed' – and we exactly, step-by-step, described the same guy. It was impossible that the box would have fallen off the shelf from the wind, but the box was on the floor and the angel had the head snapped off. Another lady living here saw the same guy – legend has it that it is the card player – he always has his arms crossed so you can't see his hands.
Justina has had many odd experiences during her five years at the Haunch:
Just little things like knocking sounds, and the door handles turning and feeling like something is walking with you or is around you – you know you are not alone. Sometimes you don't hear anything for months, and then it kicks off again.
One night I locked up the restaurant – it was all set up with the white napkins. Next morning I unlocked the door – I had been alone in the building, but suddenly the napkins were red. Another time three whisky glasses had appeared on the floor of the restaurant.
A second, more innocent and pitiful, ghost is also often seen at the Haunch. Around the cusp of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, a young boy was sent by his mother to buy bottles of drink at the inn. It is not known whether the lad ran away, was kidnapped or murdered, or simply met with an accident – but he never came home again.
When the boy's mother later came to the inn to ask about her son, she was told he had never arrived. Each day she would walk around the area looking for the child until, eventually, she became ill and met her own death. Since that time her spirit, clad in a white shawl, has continued the search both in the pub and along Minster Street.
Justina Miller remembers an incident from her earliest days at the Haunch:
I woke up and saw a lady in my room. She was just walking past. She had a long white dress and black hair – she just glided across the room like a swan. I told Dave, the cleaner, in the morning that I thought I was going crazy, but he said, 'Oh she probably just came to say hello' and told me all the stories. The last time I saw her was on Christmas Day [2011] – just walking down the stairs. She had her hair up and I followed her thinking one of the customers had got lost – and then I realised there were no ladies in the bar.
Dave is like a friend to the ghost. He has seen her so many times just in passing: in the gents toilets, in this room, in the kitchen and quite often in the restaurant. He also sayshe can smell her when she comes in, and another customer who has drunk here for twenty years is always saying about the smell – like the smell of flowers or something.
One sceptical customer saw the lady at about 1 a.m. one Christmas morning. The woman had asked Justina about the stories surrounding the inn, but scoffed at what she was told. However, after a visit to the ladies' toilets she returned shaking and sobbing, having seen the spirit of the lady in white sat in the corner of the House of Lords.
James Beret, an early eighteenth-century landlord of the Haunch of Venison, is said to have turned raving mad. This eventuality could quite possibly have arisen from his having drunk too much of his own cheap gin. However, his descent into madness might have been accelerated by regular sightings of the grey lady who walks among the graves of the nearby churchyard.
A door at the rear of the inn leads onto an alley, beyond which is the church of St Thomas à Becket. The original church on this site was one of the very first buildings to be built in the city of New Sarum. Originally constructed of wood, the church was especially built to allow workmen, camping in nearby meadows while they worked on the new cathedral, to have a place of worship.
The Haunch of Venison is thought to have once formed part of the incumbent's church house. There is also a rumour that (for the benefit of the reputation of the clergy) an underground tunnel once ran between the church and the inn, which at that particular time was, reputedly, hosting a brothel.
Were the grey lady's services among the specialties of the house and does she, having been banished from the church by a red-faced customer, walk the grounds awaiting her revenge? Or does her eternal torment simply arise from her having been one of the innumerable everyday mortal sinners who have sat in the church and recognised the inevitable result of their own actions, so graphically set out in the famous Doom Painting?
Dating from around 1475, the painting is arranged around the chancel arch and shows Christ on the day of judgement, sending the souls of the righteous to Heaven and those of the wicked to Hell. The Damned are portrayed on the right side of the arch, watched over by the Devil. The tip of the Prince of Darkness' clawed foot is the only element that projects out of the main area of the picture. It creeps across the otherwise bare stone of the tracery ... beckoning ... reminding all who watch that, even in the house of God, the Devil need not obey the rules.
The Devil has his arms around a 'dishonest ale-wife', who is holding a jug – perhaps obtained at the Haunch of Venison. Below, a group of chained souls, including one wearing a bishop's mitre and two wearing crowns, is dragged into the mouth of Hell, held agape by two horned devils. Also depicted is a miser with his money bags, dragged along by another devil, whose touch has left black burn-marks on the miser's shoulder.
Below is a depiction of a figure believed to be St Osmund, the Patron Saint of Salisbury, and a Latin scroll Nulla est Redemptio – 'There is no Redemption'. The wording of the scroll leaves no room for doubt when read in its normal context – In Inferno Nulla est Redemptio – 'In Hell There is no Redemption'.
Considering the age of many of the inns in Salisbury (and indeed the number that there once were) it is perhaps surprising that few of them seem to have had ghost stories handed down.
The Raid'Or – once also known as the Star, in Brown Street, is said to house five friendly ghosts. The name of the premises has recently reverted to the name it went by in the Middle Ages. The present building was built in the sixteenth century, as a reconstruction of the original thirteenth-century tavern built, as so many buildings in and around the city centre were, for the benefit of workmen engaged in the building of Salisbury Cathedral.
The tavern's most famous tenant was probably Agnes Bottenham, who also ran a brothel from the premises, at a time when the nearby Love Lane was at the centre of the city's whoring trade. In 1370 Agnes gave land in Trinity Street, behind the tavern, for the foundation of Trinity Hospital as penance for her sins and to house retired prostitutes.
In 1998 a tunnel was discovered under the bar of the Rai d'Or, leading from the back of the building towards the cathedral – perhaps, as with the Haunch, this allowed the clergy to enter the premises without being seen. The corner tenement of the modern building retains traces of an external double staircase with a balcony, where the prostitutes would have displayed their charms. The building also retains a fine inglenook fireplace, where 'The Doctor' – one of the resident ghosts – can sometimes be seen.
The streets and alleyways around the old part of the city were the scene of skirmishes during the English Civil War, and no book of supernatural phenomena would be complete without at least one Cavalier story. A Royalist phantom is said to haunt the old Catherine Wheel public house, to the east of the Market Place in Milford Street – now known as The City Lodge.
Salisbury, as a city, was inclined to Parliament, whilst the cathedral was inclined to the King, and at various times Roundhead soldiers or Cavalier soldiers would be seen around the town, depending on which side was having the upper hand.
Salisbury historian George Fleming believes that:
Cavaliers would not have been popular with the good people of Salisbury, and Cavalier officers in particular were much worse behaved than Parliamentarian officers. Parliament, very early in the game decided that it needed discipline in its army – bible reading, no gambling, no swearing, no whoring – whereas the Cavalier lot were the opposite.
It is said that a bunch of Cavalier officers were once sitting in the Catherine Wheel, getting drunk and talking in a lewd and ungodly way. One of them was particularly outrageous and one of his friends warned that the Devil would surely take him one of these days, to which he replied along the lines of 'Damn me, if the Devil appeared now I would pull his ears' or something similar that showed great disrespect, whereupon, it is said, there was a clap of thunder and suddenly a large figure appeared, grabbed the offending Cavalier and flew out the window, never to be seen again.
It occurred to me that one possible explanation might be that it was a gun-powder accident – distressingly common in those days. They may have been mucking about with cartridges – for instance drying out damp cartridges by the fire – that was a common mistake. Another thing, if you were trying to show off, was throwing cartridges in to the fire. So it's possible that some Jack-the-Lad Cavalier blew himself up playing the fool with gunpowder and in later retellings the smoke, the bang and the dead Cavalier all became 'The Devil'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Haunted Salisbury by Frogg Moody, Richard Nash. Copyright © 2012 Frogg Moody & Richard Nash. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword,Introduction,
one Ales, Wines and Spirits,
two Noble Executions,
three Bound for the Gallows,
four Spellbound,
five Villages of the Damned,
six The Children who Never Grew,
seven An Uncomfortable Waiting Room,
eight The Man who would be King,
nine Close Encounters,
Where we Heard our Stories,
About the Authors,