The Wansdyke & District Forums

Plug for my own patch, but a genuine question too. I run the ghost walks out of Honeystreet and the Barge is the jewel: canalside, crop-circle central, and properly haunted into the bargain. The stories: a drowned bargeman seen on the towpath, footsteps in the empty skittle alley, a cold corner in the old bar, and a landlady decades back who would not go down to the cellar alone. I have had cameras die in there and fresh batteries drain in an hour, which the sceptics will say is the cold and they may be right. But I have also had grown men walk out of that cellar white. What I want for the walk is the OLDEST version of each story, not the stuff that has grown up since the pub got famous. Can any of the old Honeystreet families help me sort the genuine old hauntings from the tourist embroidery?

Moored at the Barge more nights than I can count, and I will give you this much, Mick: the towpath by there is not a comfortable walk after dark, and I am not a fanciful man, forty years on the cut. It is not a ghost as such. It is more that the water goes very quiet and very black just on that stretch and you feel watched, and the dog will not walk it, sits down and will not be led. Dogs know a thing before we do. Make of it what you like. I tie up the other side of the bridge now and tell myself it is the better mooring, which it is, conveniently.

The dog detail is gold, Pat, thank you, and it is the genuine article precisely because you are not trying to sell me anything. The animals refusing a spot comes up again and again in the old accounts and it is always the bit that gives me the proper chill, because a dog has no investment in a ghost story. I will use that, with your leave, and not embroider it. The plain version is always the frightening one.

I walked that towpath with the rods once, Mick, after you mentioned it on the walk, and I do not mind telling you they crossed hard, right at the spot Pat means, and stayed crossed for a good ten yards. I make no claims about what it is. Water, the old course of something, a grief in the ground, I cannot say. But there is a line there; the rods found it twice. The dog and the rods agree even if the sceptics do not. Three of us now, counting the dog.