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Fortean Places In Leeds?

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Anonymous

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Do you know of anywhere in Leeds or the surrounding areas which are known for strangeness (not Elland Road!) , cryptozoological sightings, hauntings, places of note, general Forteana etc?


Thanks.
 
nothing specific but the walk from near the stationto the craft market which takes you unde the station arches, through the dark bits and then over the roaring canal (still under the arches) gggives me and a nimber of sensible friends the shudders!

Kath
 
Too right !!!!
It's like something from an old Hammer Horror movie.Any second you expect some kind of ghoul to emerge from behind the archways.
 
Stonedoggy, I 100% agree with you about the arches/canal:eek!!!!:

There's a fantastic book of real ghost stories that I've got called Ghosts Over Britain by Peter Moss... absolutely rammed with original 1st person accounts. It's pretty old (70s) and comes up frequently on ebay.

One of the accounts is from a bloke who used to play as a kid in semi-demolished houses during the slum clearances of the 60s. One time, he was looking out of a bedroom window and instead of a wasteland which should have been there, saw a well-kept garden with an old man pruning roses. The kid legged it sharpish because he was afraid of being caught, only realising later that what he saw couldn't have been there. This happened where the Merrion Centre now stands, I think.
 
stonedoggy said:
nothing specific but the walk from near the stationto the craft market which takes you unde the station arches, through the dark bits and then over the roaring canal (still under the arches) gggives me and a nimber of sensible friends the shudders!

Kath
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Yup, agreed. A few years ago I was larking around there at about 3am having escaped from a bad rock club. Just looking across that black water torrent into the filthy tunnels gave me a real chill - considering one is nearly standing below a modern city centre, that place can psychologically take you back well over a century. I'd be most suprised if the locale hasn't served as a setting or inspiration for some kind of modern fiction in the magical realism vein...
(hate tht label but nevermind)

:cool:
 
Off the top of me head...

Leeds Library has a ghost.
Calverley has the ghost of Sir Walter, and the woods there are said to contain a lost stone circle and a few neolithic carved rocks.
Temple Newsam (mansion and grounds) was owned by the Knights Templars and has a notoriously haunted room.
An ABC has regularly been reported from the Shadwell/Roundhay area.
Meanwood Park has a 'Witches stone' shown on very old maps. Thought to be part of a long-demolished circle. Also the scene of UFO activity.
Adel Woods is said to be the site of the Idol Stone, where the tales say ritual sacrifice took place in days of yore...
A carved 'Celtic' head found in a suburb now resides in the city museum.
I don't know if it's true, but Kirkstall Abbey is said to have been in the closing scenes of one of the 'Omen' films. It's certainly spooky enough! :p

No doubt I'll remember some more later...
 
not "ritual sacrifice in the days of youre"?????? yeeeee----HA :D



I've woeked on more than one site where the first digger to come up with something which could believavly be labelled "of unknown but ritual use" got free beer.

Never took long... not if your mind works in the right way anyway.

Glad others knew about the arches and canal... reading back my description I realised that it sounded too daft to be true!

Kath
 
stonedoggy said:
not "ritual sacrifice in the days of youre"?????? yeeeee----HA :D



I've woeked on more than one site where the first digger to come up with something which could believavly be labelled "of unknown but ritual use" got free beer.

Never took long... not if your mind works in the right way anyway.

Glad others knew about the arches and canal... reading back my description I realised that it sounded too daft to be true!

Kath
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There was a particularly barmy old vicar in the 1800's who wrote allsorts of stuff like that about Leeds!

The 'Dark Arches' as we call them used to terrify me as a kid. I used to stand on the platform at the mouths of the tunnels, under the hotel, dark water surging below me, and peer into them. There was always a slight, cold breeze coming out which I found disconcerting! I daren't look into them for long...
:eek!!!!:
 
some stuff here

in brief:
Man in the Cellar; Golden Lion public house, North Street
Pianist; City Palace of Varieties
Carriage; Potternewton Hall
Abbot; Kirkstall Abbey
Unhappy Butler; Carnegie College
Gabble Retchets; general area
Blue Lady; Temple Newsam
CCTV Figure; East Ardsley Conservative Club
 
David - there's a def "jump, jump now" feeling about it for me..... which, actually, might be fortean come to think of it!


still, cracking craft market!

:)
 
there is a program on one of the discovery/ history type channels on sky the is repeated quite often, Ghost hunters or something like that (probably filmed in the late 70's early 80's). similar to the arthur c clark programs.

that seems to have a lot of its material centered around north and west yorkshire.
 
Is that the one narrated by William Woolard?

Kath
 
I think those arches even get a mention in Frederick Engels' "Conditions of the Working Classes of England" now I think about it! I think there were peole living nearby who were almost always flooded (if my porous memory serves)

David... isn't Sir Walter meant to be summoned by a rhyme? Something like "Oh Calverly, oh Calverly (something, something, something) we'll cut thee into collops unless thee appear"
 
not sure stonedoggy, the style looks dated now though.

last time i watched it there was a story about the spirit of a monk haunting a road in upper wortley. but the descriptions sounded more like the stick men described elsewhere on these boards.


I had a wierd experience in Garforth in Leeds a couple of years ago. mentioned it before but can't remember where.

As i was driving home at around 11.30pm and had just checked the time and phoned home when all the street light started to switch off, the one car in front lights went off and my car started to lose power, like a sudden loss off power. everthing went almost to dark then started up again.

When i got home my wife asked why it had taken me over an hour to get home. i didn't think it had, it was a journey i did daily and knew it took exactly 35mins at that time of night.

i didn't believe her until we checked the 1471 service and got the time of my call and then the current time, just over an hour to get home. my watch had lost half hour and my phone needed the time setting as though the battery had been removed.
 
Number 8 Rokeby Gardens was the focus for a two year experiment to create a tulpa or thought form in the shape of a giant spider.
 
Did the experiment work?
 
Didn't you see? It was in all the big papers...
 
lordmongrove said:
Number 8 Rokeby Gardens was the focus for a two year experiment to create a tulpa or thought form in the shape of a giant spider.
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It escaped and is responsible for all those times when you drop a book or other heavy object on it but when you move the object there is no body.
 
Hi, I'm Richard Freeman.

It was me who did the two year experiment in thought form creation. It was in the basment of a student house in Rokeby Gardens. I can't recall the number now, but I think it was number 8. I used meditation and strobe lights to get into altered mental states and visulized the giant spider on the altar. As well as this I placed an old biscuit tin in a crawl space behind a tiny wooden door in the wall of my room. In the book was an account of an occultist who had foud some cursed tome in an old book shop in Hebbdon Bridge and summoned up an inter-dimensional spider god, Atlach-Nacha, mentioned by Clark Ashton Smith in his story The Seven Geases. The occultist goes mad and says he is going to kill himself out on the moors. The gateway is left open in the cellar. I did this in the hope some future tennant (not David) would read it, become alarmed and go down into the cellar and find the playpen of evil!

The party Crazy Jane mentioned [see thread] was the second one where I got everyone chanting its name round the altar like that scene in the Dr Who story Planet of the Spider with Jon Pertwee - where the monks chant to summon up giant psychic spiders. The idea was to feed the tulpa or thought form. During the first year I was doing this, there was a swarm of huge house spiders in Leeds! I twice saw a vistion of a white spider four feet across, once in the altar room and once at the bottom of the stairs leading down into the cellar. It seemed flat and two dimentional. I didn't think it had any objective form outside of my mind. Before O left i rigged the cellar light to explode, left the altar in situ together with a white mask covered in dead flies and walls bedecked with symbols and pages from surrealist artist Max Urnst's Seven Days of Kindness.

Years later i bumped into a guy I used to share the house with. He told me that a born-again Christian had opened the little door, found the little alcove, seen the little box and read the horrid little book! He raced down to the basement and in the flash of an exploding lightbulb saw the spider god's lair.

Apparently two priests exorcised the house and the altar was burnt in the back yard. RESULT!!!! [Yith: minor typos and spacing corrected for clarity]

http://www.secretleeds.com/forum/Messag ... tMessage=0
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Oh right, so it's a load of old tosh then. Not an actual spider.
 
Why something as horrific as a giant spider? If it worked it would completely freak you and probably drive you insane. Or insaner, should I say, if you are the sort to try this in the first place
 
Yeah, how about something you could all enjoy like a giant doughnut?
 
You know, if I could just create stuff by imagining it, I'd never leave the house to go shopping. :D
 
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