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Chased By Skeletons? (Identify Story Read Long Ago?)

Carse

Carse

Ephemeral Spectre
Joined
Jan 31, 2016
Messages
426
I have a memory from childhood of reading in one of those pulpy “unexplained mystery” type books an acount of a man being chased down the road by a group of skeletons. I recall it happening somewhere in the UK, starting with the man hearing an odd sound behind him and culminating in him running hell for leather down the road with a group of human skeletons in hot persuit, Jason and the Argonauts style. As a boy of 6 or 7 I found it terrifying.

All my old books were chucked or given away when I left home. A search on the forum brings up nothing relevant but does this ring a bell with anyone? Any other stories of self-ambulant skeletons would, of course, be gratefully accepted.
 
Off hand, I don't recall any ghost tales or Fortean encounters involving getting chased by skeletons.

On the other hand, being pursued by multiple skeletons is a common trope in books, films, etc. Is there any chance you're recalling a scene from a work of fiction or cartoon and mis-remembering it as something from one of your unexplained mystery books?

The only haunted place with multiple mobile skeletons that comes to mind is the abandoned Khairatabad Science College in Hyderabad. Legend has it that skeletons from bodies used in medical education but not properly interred wander the place. I don't recall hearing or reading anything about the skeletons chasing anyone.
 
It might help narrow it down, @Carse if you tell us roughly when you would have been 6 or 7 so we've got a time base (ie not looking at books published after, say, 1980) and what sort of books you would have been reading at that age? It sounds a pretty horrific tale for a six year old to have been allowed access to, so were you likely to have been reading books aimed at much older readers or would it be possible that it was in a Dorling Kindersley type book?
 
Carse said:
I have a memory from childhood of reading in one of those pulpy “unexplained mystery” type books an acount of a man being chased down the road by a group of skeletons. I recall it happening somewhere in the UK, starting with the man hearing an odd sound behind him and culminating in him running hell for leather down the road with a group of human skeletons in hot persuit, Jason and the Argonauts style. As a boy of 6 or 7 I found it terrifying.

All my old books were chucked or given away when I left home. A search on the forum brings up nothing relevant but does this ring a bell with anyone? Any other stories of self-ambulant skeletons would, of course, be gratefully accepted.
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This reminds me of a story I was told many years ago, by a childhood mate of mine, who insisted that he was chased down the street by a skeleton.

From what I remember, (this would have been in the very early 1980’s) he said he was walking down a residential street, with derelict houses either side, (much of East London was like this back then, as the GLC, was finishing off the slum clearance schemes, that the LCC had started many years before) when he noticed a skeleton leaning out of an abandoned house window watching him as he walked past.

Thinking someone was larking around in fancy dress, he stopped and laughed at the figure, until the figure gave a toothy grin, and started jerkily climbing out of the window and running towards him.

My mate said he ran for it and never looked back.

Obviously, us group of kids raised our eyebrows at the tale, and called him a total bull shitter, but thinking back why would (even a 10 year kid) make up such a random story.

Maybe he’d seen too many Hammer films. :)
 
I think I remember a very old thread - or possibly an IHTM in the magazine - that involved someone seeing a skeleton run around on a hill in Edinburgh.

I seem to recall that the witness was either sitting in a restaurant or café, looking out of the window - or possibly they had just left the establishment and were looking from the street.

I'm pretty sure the street in question was said to be Nicolson Street - or possibly just further up, around South Bridge - and that (rather disappointingly) the geography just didn't work out.

That's all scraped out from a very dim memory - so I do not stand by anything I said, m'lud.
 
Spookdaddy said:
I think I remember a very old thread - or possibly an IHTM in the magazine - that involved someone seeing a skeleton run around on a hill in Edinburgh.

I seem to recall that the witness was either sitting in a restaurant or café, looking out of the window - or possibly they had just left the establishment and were looking from the street.

I'm pretty sure the street in question was said to be Nicolson Street - or possibly just further up, around South Bridge - and that (rather disappointingly) the geography just didn't work out.

That's all scraped out from a very dim memory - so I do not stand by anything I said, m'lud.
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Ah yes, I can remember this - I went and looked and the location for the event seen was not visible from the location claimed.
 
Dick Turpin said:
This reminds me of a story I was told many years ago, by a childhood mate of mine, who insisted that he was chased down the street by a skeleton.

From what I remember, (this would have been in the very early 1980’s) he said he was walking down a residential street, with derelict houses either side, (much of East London was like this back then, as the GLC, was finishing off the slum clearance schemes, that the LCC had started many years before) when he noticed a skeleton leaning out of an abandoned house window watching him as he walked past.

Thinking someone was larking around in fancy dress, he stopped and laughed at the figure, until the figure gave a toothy grin, and started jerkily climbing out of the window and running towards him.

My mate said he ran for it and never looked back.

Obviously, us group of kids raised our eyebrows at the tale, and called him a total bull shitter, but thinking back why would (even a 10 year kid) make up such a random story.

Maybe he’d seen too many Hammer films. :)
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As a postscript to the above post, and If I am remembering correctly, the story of being chased by a skeleton happened to a 10 year old boy, but he did not recount his story until a few years later, when he was 15 or perhaps 16 years of age, which makes the story even weirder I think.

I still think he was telling porkies, but still, why would someone make up a story like that.?

He was quite a down to earth type of lad, clever in school and popular with his classmates.

Odd.
 
Dick Turpin said:
As a postscript to the above post, and If I am remembering correctly, the story of being chased by a skeleton happened to a 10 year old boy, but he did not recount his story until a few years later, when he was 15 or perhaps 16 years of age, which makes the story even weirder I think.

I still think he was telling porkies, but still, why would someone make up a story like that.?

He was quite a down to earth type of lad, clever in school and popular with his classmates.

Odd.
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I have a theory, backed up by first hand testimony from my own children, that young children sometimes get dreams and real life mixed up. A dream dreamed at a formative age can sometimes enter memory as though it was a real event, and can be recounted as such after a number of years.
A couple of my children have done this. They told me about the dream at the time, but after a few years they were telling the story as if it really happened. I wonder if this could have been the case here.
 
catseye said:
I have a theory, backed up by first hand testimony from my own children, that young children sometimes get dreams and real life mixed up. A dream dreamed at a formative age can sometimes enter memory as though it was a real event, and can be recounted as such after a number of years.
A couple of my children have done this. They told me about the dream at the time, but after a few years they were telling the story as if it really happened. I wonder if this could have been the case here.
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Definitely. One of my older sisters 'saw' her own reflection as a goblin in a mirror as a young child when she had a fever. She screamed the place down and believed for years she'd actually seen a goblin.

It was a family joke. Sis didn't find it funny though.
 
Any other stories of self-ambulant skeletons would, of course, be gratefully accepted.
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OK, There is a bit of Sussex folklore that might fill yer boots in regards to the above. Namely The Midsummer Oak at Broadwater, Worthing.

Local legend has it that skeletons rose on Midsummer Eve and danced hand in hand around the tree until cock crow. The tree’s site is now a triangle of land in the road intersection at the end of Broadwater Green. The story is well established enough that there is a little metal sign by the tree. This video shows both the tree and the sign.

Interestingly, from an archaeological perspective, Skeletons do turn up under trees or found entangled in the roots of uprooted trees from time to time.

Mr P
 
Someone showed me this, isn't it splendid?


skeleton mountain.jpg
 
escargot said:
Someone showed me this, isn't it splendid?


View attachment 34016
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There used to be a fairground ride at Blackpool, something to do with goldmines I think. Anyway, we went on a bus trip there when I was very young and I was crying in fear at the giant skeleton on the outside of the ride.
It looked massive, and the ride itself seemed to me like a mountainside.
 
David Plankton said:
There used to be a fairground ride at Blackpool, something to do with goldmines I think. Anyway, we went on a bus trip there when I was very young and I was crying in fear at the giant skeleton on the outside of the ride.
It looked massive, and the ride itself seemed to me like a mountainside.
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Have I brought it all back? o_O
:chuckle:
 
David Plankton said:
There used to be a fairground ride at Blackpool, something to do with goldmines I think. Anyway, we went on a bus trip there when I was very young and I was crying in fear at the giant skeleton on the outside of the ride.
It looked massive, and the ride itself seemed to me like a mountainside.
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download.jpeg

This fella!
The goldmine.
Sadly no more it's now a Wallace and Gromit ride.
 
There's a great Ray Bradbury horror short story called Skeleton. It doesn't involve being chased by one, though.
 
David Plankton said:
There used to be a fairground ride at Blackpool, something to do with goldmines I think. Anyway, we went on a bus trip there when I was very young and I was crying in fear at the giant skeleton on the outside of the ride.
It looked massive, and the ride itself seemed to me like a mountainside.
Click to expand...
the ride hasn't even begun.jpg
 
One of my hobbies, as I've mentioned elsewhere, is finding/correcting/expanding the sources of John Keel's Strange Creatures from Time and Space. And if we're still looking for bare bone walking, here's an old classic:

[SCFTAS p. 25] Another Unbelievable had the poor taste to show up uninvited at the wedding dance of King Alexander of Scotland in 1293. This poor fellow was not afire, he was simply stark naked. Worse still, he had neglected to wear any flesh. He appeared in nothing but his bare bones, according to the court records, and managed to put quite a damper on the wedding festivities.

Keel apparently took this (and several other items) from Harold T. Wilkin's Strange Mysteries of Time and Space:

[Wilkins p. 198] We may pass on to the year 1293, of which Raphael Holinshed, or Hollingshead, son of an old and decayed family of Cophurst, Cheshire, and who travelled all over England collecting curious items told, in his Chronicle published in 1577, at the "signe of the Starre, in Aldersgate," a very singular thriller, and horrifying story:

circa 1293: "At a solemnization of the second marriage of King Alexander of Scotland, after the 31st year of his reigne . . . as the bridegroom was leading the bride in a dance, a great number of lords and ladies following them, there appeared, close in the rear, a creature resembling death, all naked and flesh and lire (?) with bare bones, right dreadful to behold, which spectacle the king and the residue of all the companie were sore astonished by, and put in such fear that they quickly made an end of their dance for that time."

Quiet folk of today, who live near public dance-halls, would like to hear that a phenomenon of this sort was around at midnight, or after!

Wilkins’ transcription is somewhat inaccurate, but just about every version of every medieval manuscript varies from the original, since all were written by hand. A recent collection of Scottish legends provides a better version:

Westwood, Jennifer, and Sophia Kingshill. Lore of Scotland: A Guide to Scottish Legends (London: Random House, 2009), pp. 249-50:

JEDBURGH, ROXBURGHSHIRE​

Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death” was inspired by macabre events said to have occurred at Jedburgh Castle in 1290 during the wedding of Alexander III. Holinshed’s Scottish Chronicle (1576), in the English version by William Harrison, gives the legend:

"In the solemnization of the second marriage of King Alexander, as the bridegroome (according to the manner) led the bride in a dance, a great number of lords and ladies following them in the same dance, there appeared to their sight, as it were closing up the hindermost of the dancers, a creature resembling death, all naked and flesh and lire [meat] with bare bones right dreadfull to behold. Through which spectacle the king and the residue of all the companie were so astonished, and put in such fear, that they had quickly made an end of their dance for that time."

In Poe’s tale, the skeletal figure is a personification of a fatal disease which soon claims the courtiers. Poe (and several other writers) may have been misled by Holinshed’s account, which runs together a mention of “the first coming of the pestilence into Scotland” with a report of the marriage celebration, although the outbreak of plague occurred around eleven years earlier than the wedding. Such an apparition, however, could not but portend disaster. That same year, as the king was galloping along the cliffs at Kinghorn, he fell from his horse and broke his neck.
 
My formative years were spent being overlooked by a place called Skeleton Wood - or Skellybob Wood, as it is known to the locals.

To add to the eldritch aura the name gives the place, the wood is situated on a 'low' - which is another (satisfyingly contronymic) local term for a hill, when said hill is crowned with a tumulus; which is probably where the skeleton came from in the first place.

The wood sits on the skyline above the town, visible from much of the local area: fat and green in summer - thicker one end than the other - in winter it turns into a skeletal behemoth in the act of raising itself out of the earth. It stared over at us through the kitchen window while we ate our cornflakes when staying over at my grandad’s house; it was visible from the classrooms and playgrounds of my primary and secondary schools; it sat bang smack in the middle of the view from my first ever girlfriend’s bedroom window; it can be seen from most of the approaches into town and peeps down at you between the buildings when you’re doing your shopping.

And, if that wasn’t enough, there’s a bloody big black cross on another hill another side of town, and a stumpy tower named after an Old Testament King on yet another: Old Testament, New Testament and Ancient Untestamented symbols nailed into our horizon, surrounding the innocent populace with a geomantic triangle of ritual power. Or something.

Christ on a bike – it’s a wonder we ever got to sleep at night!

Folk horror? Bollocks to that pal - it was called everyday life where I were fetched up.
 
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The original post reminds me of a Mr Logic strip in Viz where the title character is menaced by supernatural beings and calmly looks at a walking skeleton and points out that it is preposterous that a skeleton can walk without any cartilage or connective tissue, but then leaps out of bed screaming and fouling his pyjamas when it continues to do so.
 
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