Ghosts of Sheffield S6: Haunted Hillsborough, Loxley and Bradfield
Most of Sheffield’s famous ghosts live in the middle of the city: Mary Queen of Scots at the Turret House, the pubs on West Street, the Park Ghost of 1873. The northwest corner, postcode S6, gets less attention, which is odd, because it has everything a ghost story needs: open common land that was used for hanging bodies in chains, a Victorian cemetery that started a riot, a mental hospital in the trees, and a reservoir that once emptied itself down the valley in the dark. This is a guide to the hauntings on that ground, from Hillsborough and Owlerton out to Stannington, Bradfield and the moor edge at Strines. Where a story is a documented event, it says so. Where it is a legend, or one person’s account, it says that too. For the places themselves, see the field guide to Sheffield S6; for the city-wide legends (the Dragon of Wantley, Spring-Heeled Jack), see Sheffield folklore.
Loxley Common: the gibbet and the gamekeeper’s wife
Loxley Common and Wadsley Common run together on the high ground between Wadsley, Worrall and Loxley. Today it is managed heathland and dog walkers. Two hundred years ago it was the kind of empty place where the law put things it wanted people to see.
In 1782 Francis “Frank” Fearn murdered a Sheffield watchmaker, Nathan Andrews, on the road across the common, having talked him into walking out to a watch club at High Bradfield with a bag of stock to show. Fearn was hanged at York. The judge thought the crime bad enough to skip the usual dissection: the body was carried the sixty miles back and hung in chains on Loxley Common, close to where Andrews died. It stayed there until Christmas Day 1797, when the last of the bones fell out of the irons. The post itself was not taken down until 1807. A few years before that, John Oxley, an accomplice of the highwayman Spence Broughton, broke out of prison and hid on the same common. When he was spotted, he killed himself rather than end up in chains beside Fearn.
The ghost belongs to a house. Around 1740 Thomas Halliday built Cave House on Loxley Common, over the mouth of a cave that became part of the rooms, with a table and a mantelpiece cut out of the living rock. It was the gamekeeper’s cottage. On the evening of 30 December 1812, Mary Revill, the gamekeeper’s wife, was murdered there. Her husband, Lomas Revill, hadn’t come home that night; he had been seen at the inn and was found the next morning in the gamekeeper’s cabin in the woods. Snow had fallen in the night, and the footprints leading away from the cottage are said to have gone into a cave on the ridge and stopped. Lomas Revill aged fast after that and turned strange. One New Year’s Eve, when nobody had seen him for a few days, a party of men walked up to the cottage and found him hanging from a rafter in an outbuilding.
Cave House was lived in until the late 1920s and then pulled down. The spectre of a white lady is still said to walk the common. The land itself was given to the people of Sheffield in 1913, which is why you can walk it now.
Wardsend Cemetery: the riot and the boy
Wardsend Cemetery sits on the hillside above the Don at Owlerton, and it is the most atmospheric place in S6 by a distance: a Victorian cemetery of more than 29,000 graves, consecrated in 1859, closed to burials in 1968, and slowly going back to woodland since. A railway line, no longer worked, runs straight through the middle of it. Victims of the 1864 flood are buried here, and an obelisk remembers the soldiers of Hillsborough Barracks.
In 1862 the man renting the cemetery lodge complained of a smell coming up through the floor of his coach house, and accused the sexton of digging up the dead to sell to the medical school. On 3 June 1862 a crowd of angry Sheffield people rioted in the cemetery. The rumours turned out to be false. What the vicar, John Livesey, and the sexton, Isaac Howard, had actually done was reuse graves to save space, and they were fined for it at York Assizes; both were later compensated for the damage the riot did to their property.
The ghost grew out of the rumour rather than the facts. Local legend says Wardsend is haunted by a boy whose body was snatched in 1862, a story the Paranormal Database records while noting that the body-snatching was disproved. It is a good example of how a haunting gets made: the crowd was wrong about what happened, and the ghost kept the crowd’s version anyway.
Middlewood: the old lady of Ward Eight
The South Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum opened at Wadsley Park in 1872, served as Wharncliffe War Hospital in the First World War, and closed as Middlewood Hospital in 1996 (the S6 field guide has its history). A building that size, with that past, was always going to collect a ghost. The one on record, in the Paranormal Database, is an old lady seen during the twentieth century wandering the former Ward Eight, who disappears by walking through a wall. The wards are flats now, part of Wadsley Park Village. Nobody has reported her there, or at least nobody has said so.
Hillsborough Park Cinema: Alfrid
The Hillsborough Park Cinema opened on 10 February 1921 and showed its last film on 29 October 1967. A week later it was a Star Bingo club, and since then it has been a Willis Discount store, a Netto and, from 2011, an Asda. On the Cinema Treasures site, a former manager from the Willis years described the upstairs of the building: a passage past the old balcony entrance to a fire door, which everyone had to walk every morning and evening, and where “you always felt like someone was watching you”. The staff had a name for what was watching. They called him Alfrid, a man in a black suit and a wide-brimmed black hat. The same poster said that staff in the supermarket years still found the upstairs uneasy. Other retellings, gathered in Icy Sedgwick’s round-up of Sheffield folklore, add a woman, a cold draught and the smell of violets. It is one of the few S6 ghosts you can go and stand underneath while doing your shopping.
Stannington: the hounds in the air
The Gabriel Hounds are the Peak District’s version of the Wild Hunt, a pack heard passing overhead in the dark that means somebody is about to die. They get a full section in the Peak District folklore guide, but S6 has its own claim on them. The Sheffield folklorist Sidney Oldall Addy described them as “a peculiar noise in the air”, and Stannington is one of the places they were said to be heard: when the hounds went over the neighbourhood, a death followed. The journalist John Holland, who heard them himself, compared the sound to a dozen beagles in full cry but quieter, and then, in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph in 1869, explained them away as migrating geese. He also wrote a sonnet about them, which suggests the explanation didn’t entirely satisfy him either.
Bradfield and the Strines: the moor edge
S6 runs further west than most people realise, right out to the reservoirs and the moor. At High Bradfield, the churchyard has a watch house by its gates, built (by the usual account, 1745; a church leaflet says 1831) so that families could sit up with guns over fresh graves and keep the body snatchers off. It is the only one left in Yorkshire. Victims of the 1864 flood lie in the same churchyard, among them William Horsfield, the man who found the crack in the Dale Dyke dam the night it gave way.
Further out still, on Mortimer Road, is the Strines Inn, probably the most remote pub in Sheffield and still an S6 address. The Worrall family built a manor house here in 1275; it was rebuilt around 1560, and became an inn in about 1771 when John Morton bought it as the new turnpike road came through. The bar is said to be haunted by a grey lady. Nobody seems to know who she was, which, for a building that has had seven hundred years to lose track, is fair enough.
One more, just over the postcode line in S35: Boggard Lane, between Worrall and Oughtibridge, is said to be named after the boggards (the local spelling of boggart) that lived down it, and a private house on the lane has a reputation for a phantom woodworker.
From Sheffield to Hellsborough
Hellsborough, the dark-matter Sheffield at the centre of Demonspawn’s fiction and games, sits on exactly this ground, and its ghosts are this ground’s ghosts pushed further. The Gabriel Hounds come over as the gabbleratchets, a pack of flying dogs that are very much not geese. The boggarts of Boggard Lane are still there, and Pip Rippon’s diary puts one near the Asplands. The black dog of Yorkshire folklore walks beside Pip as a barghest called Shad. The empty commons above Loxley and Wadsley have the Bracken Man of Wadsley Common, a thing of briar and ash that waits by the standing stones. And where Sheffield has ghosts, Hellsborough has the murk’s versions of them: the murk wraith and the syncarid. The whole bestiary is in the Bestiary of the Dark Peak, and if you want to walk that ground yourself, Foked is a free solo RPG set on it. For the wider genre all of this belongs to, start at the dark fantasy and folk horror field guide.
Sources: Loxley Common and Cave House from Andy Hemingway’s Loxley Common history and Sheffield History; Wardsend from Wikipedia; the Wardsend boy, Middlewood, Stannington, Strines and Boggard Lane entries from the Paranormal Database; the cinema from Cinema Treasures and Icy Sedgwick; the Gabriel Hounds from the Sheffield Tribune; Bradfield from Wikipedia; the Strines Inn from Mysterious Britain.
Free eBooks & Games
