Gloucestershire’s hidden places are seething with spooks and some of them will be accompanying storytellers and writers Anthony Nanson and Kirsty Hartsiotis to The Wilson, Cheltenham’s art gallery and museum on Wednesday 9 December at 6pm. If you’d like to join us (and the spooks!), you can get your tickets here, or directly from The Wilson on 01242 237431 or artgallery@cheltenhamtrust.org.uk.

After all, it is the season for ghost tales, but we’ll be going one better than just telling ghost tales at Christmas – we’ll be sharing tales of the real Christmas ghosts of Gloucestershire alongside some of the county’s scariest spooks. Expect to be chilled, moved and amused as we imaginatively bring to life the county’s ghosts from the Severn Vale to the Upper Thames, from the Cotswolds to Cheltenham.

The stories all come from our newly released book, Gloucestershire Ghost Tales (The History Press, 2015).  Having told stories up and down the country for many years, we have found that the ghost story is one of the most living of folktale genres. Often, when we’re telling local stories, audience members share their own tales with us … and they are nearly always ghost tales. Perhaps you too have had an experience you can’t explain – or know someone else who has. People are still fascinated by the ghosts of their locality, their family, even the building they live in. When you listen to ghost stories the world suddenly becomes a more unnerving place.

There are many, many ghost tales in Gloucestershire, as we discovered when Anthony was researching his previous book for The History Press, Gloucestershire Folk Tales (2012) – and you’ll find a sprinkling of ghost tales in that book, as well as Cheltenham tale of Maude’s Elm. So how did we choose which tales to include in the new book – and to tell for our audiences? Ultimately, we chose those which most caught our imagination, though we’ve tried to provide a good spread of geography, theme,and of gloomier as well as more cheerful tales.  On 9 December you’ll hear just a sample – cheerful and gloomy – but the book will be available for sale if you are thirsting for more … or are looking for a local stocking filler (and there are lots more nice stocking fillers in The Wilson’s shop as well!)

And who are we? These days, we live in Stroud, but we met at the Bath Storytelling Circle that Anthony founded 16 years ago this December. We are members of Fire Springs, a storytelling company, and have  performed widely in Britain and beyond. For some years we ran Stroud Story Cabaret, and we remain active members of Gloucestershire’s storytelling scene. Anthony teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University and is also the author of Exotic Excursions, Storytelling and Ecology and Words of Re-enchantment, and his new novel Deep Time came out this year. He is also the co-editor of Storytelling for a Greener World. Kirsty is the author of Wiltshire Folk Tales and Suffolk Folk Tales and she also just happens to be the Curator of Decorative Art and Designated Collection at The Wilson – a different kind of storytelling!

Kirsty Hartsiotis and Anthony Nanson

Image of Kirsty and Anthony © Fire Springs

Images Gloucestershire Folk Tales and Gloucestershire Ghost Tales covers © The History Press

Here’s some evidence of me and the other readers at Stroud Short Stories:

http://stroudshortstories.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-sva-was-crammed-as-usual-for-stroud.html

The story I submitted to Stroud Short Stories (see this blog to find out more about the night) was The Woman’s Wraith. This is, I think, one of the most spooky tales in the book, and is also one of the very first I chose to do.  The story of the woman and … what she meets by a lonely bridge stayed with me long after I read the snippet from which we gleaned the tale.

The story comes from a story collected by Adin Williams in his Lays and Legends of Gloucestershire, 1878, a delightful volume of, um, questionable verse capturing some of the south-east of the county’s folklore, history and art. For example, this is Oswyn from Hero Hengstan:

He was like a knotted oak,                                                                                                            White with years that time had seared,                                                                                               Strong to give and take the stroke,                                                                                               When the battle fiercely neared.

Adin Williams was from Lechlade, and was a school master in Kempsford and Lechlade.  He seems to have been a keen amateur historian and folklore collector, ‘the collection of curious local legends and histories, as far as old people can help to that end, has been the employment of his spare time’ , as it says in the preface to Lays and Legends. The Woman’s Wraith is one of a couple of collected tales in the end of the book from the ‘rich store of pathos and humour which is afloat in village gossip, but which,’ the publisher, CH Savory, says – and this is 1878, mark you! –  ‘is fast wearing out before the stride of education and newspapers.’  Though not from Williams’ own teaching it seems – he was severely criticised for the quality of his teaching in Kempsford, where the Lays and Legends was written!

Williams says The Woman’s Wraith is ‘literally true’ – and who are we to doubt him? – and occurred within living memory of his writing – pushing it back to the 1810s or 20s. It’s set on the canal, which in this case can only be the Thames and Severn Canal, which meets the Thames just along from Kempsford at Lechlade. The Thames and Severn was completed in 1789, but even by the time of the story was starting its long decline, with trade taken by the Kennet and Avon which ran directly to the mouth of the Avon. When Williams was writing it may have been a quiet place indeed, just the sort of place where lonely, scary things might happen…

Today, the canal is gone. You can see it at the basin at Lechlade, and Inglesham lock, and imagine what it was like, but there is nothing left at Kempsford save tell-tale strips of grass near the church where you can see the line of the canal. But some of the infrastructure still remains – there’s the wharf house at Kempsford, and, out of the village, and marooned all alone in the fields is Oatlands Bridge.

There is something surreal about a bridge all alone in a field with no hint of water anywhere around. Something slightly … spooky … in its forlorn and overgrown state. It’s all too easy to imagine something lurking there, isn’t it? Perhaps the story was ‘literally true’, after all?

Note: information about Adin Williams comes from David Vasiey’s ‘Connections: Gloucestershire, the Bodleian Library, and the Adventures of Roger Plowman’ in Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, vol. 111, 1993.