• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Village Folklore?

A

Anonymous

Guest
When I was little (5 or 6, I suppose, so we're looking at the late 70's/early 80's) we lived in a small village in East Yorkshire (my parents are still there). There wasn't much housing development at that time, so consequently all my mates were local lads, most of them older than me.

Being the little girl of the gang, you can imagine the stick I used to get. Any practical jokes tended to be played on me, and they delighted in scaring the crap out of me by pretending to be ghosts and chasing me.

http://www.forteantimes.com/happened/village.shtml

Link is dead. See post below for complete text.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I don't get it! Why WOULDN'T the labourers have told the locals about the two skeletons they found? It would only have had to be passed down three generations when you heard it and in small villages a cat dying of natural causes gets folklored as much as eight or nine generations later! Unless you could prove that the labourers hadn't been able to tell anyone about the skeletons and that the knowledge couldn't have come from anybody else there at the time then why would you assume it might be folklore from pre-history? Nice idea though.

It's like Bill Bryson claiming that eenie meenie minie mo is classed as official evidence, somewhere by someone - see his book Mother Tongue - of the first pre-historic counting system and the words used in ancient Britain.
 
village folklore

I'm not disputing the fact that it was common knowledge in the village over the years (although I've never heard anyone mention it) it was more how did we, as kids (and young ones at that) know about this? I suppose it could "just" be coincidence - I guess we all have our spooky spots as children, and it's probable skeletons figure in a fair few of them.
Actually, just to chuck in summat vaguely related, in the next village there's a track known as Boggle Lane. This has been the scene of several supposedly mysterious goings on, including the likes of ghostly figures and (especially) weird lights like headlamps that disappear as you round the corner (this once happened to my parents along with others). Coincidence again that up here a boggle is a mischievous sprite or polt type?
What do you think?
 
Surely all it takes is one kid to hear such a creepy story, and then it gets disseminated pretty quickly? I remember that any sort of gossip, scary stories, etc. seemed to go through my old school like wildfire, so I don't really see why the process behind this IHTM is considered so unusual...
 
The link in post #1 is long dead. Here's the complete text, salvaged from the Wayback Machine ...

-------------------------------------------
VILLAGE FOLKLORE?

Brooke

When I was little (5 or 6, I suppose, so we're looking at the late 70's/early 80's) we lived in a small village in East Yorkshire (my parents are still there). There wasn't much housing development at that time, so consequently all my mates were local lads, most of them older than me.

Being the little girl of the gang, you can imagine the stick I used to get. Any practical jokes tended to be played on me, and they delighted in scaring the crap out of me by pretending to be ghosts and chasing me. You know, the usual stupid things that boys do (some things never change!). Anyway, our usual "hang out" was what we simply called "the conker tree". This was indeed a conker tree set in a small clearing in a marshy field behind Graysgarth House, a mansion type place built in the early 1800's.

I vividly remember it being said that the conker tree spot was haunted by two ghosts (skeletons, to be precise). The story was that these two were buried underneath the tree in the very distant past and would come back at Halloween (of course!) every year. Even the lads were convinced of this, though who told us it was haunted we never knew. It was just one of those things that you KNOW, probably without anyone having to tell you. Or the boys might've just been taking the piss - it's certainly a possibility.

When my little sis and brother came along, we still used to play down there and a new load of kids were being scared witless by the conker tree ghosts. I don't recall anything actually happening (apparitions or anything, I mean), but there was certainly an atmosphere. We all loved feeling spooked - still do - and relished the thought of these skellies turning up one day.

It's probably this love of old bones and stuff that led me into archaeology at about the age of 13. I got really into it, and ended up studying it at Nottingham Uni. I specialised in prehistory, and when it came to doing my dissertation the obvious choice for me was to concentrate on the Bronze and Iron Age in Holderness (where our village is). I thoroughly enjoyed doing it, and came back up here a lot to trawl the Sites and Monuments Records and the dusty back rooms of Hull's archaeology museum.

So, here we come to the weird bit. Scouring a battered copy of Loughlin and Miller's Archaeological Sites of Humberside, I came across an entry under the heading of our village. Glancing through it, I saw the words "gold rings" and "Graysgarth". To cut a long story short, it turns out that when the labourers were digging the foundations of the house, they uncovered two skeletons buried next to each other, both with gold jewellery. This is in the early 19th century! When I checked the O.S. reference, it was on practically the same site as, yes, you guessed it, "our" conker tree......

I've thought about this a fair bit. Is it a bit of village gossip passed down through umpteen generations? Or could it be something a bit more Fortean - some sort of collective memory of a prehistoric burial (I don't think it could be any later than the Iron Age, though I could be wrong!)? Any ideas would be welcomed.

PS That field was sold a few years ago to some housing developers who bulldozed it and stuck a load of "executive properties" on it. The tree's still there though - wonder if those executives have had any spooky goings on in their new homes? Hmmmmm....

--------------------------------------------

SALVAGED FROM: https://web.archive.org/web/20031211073236/http://forteantimes.com:80/happened/village.shtml
 
There's something strangely fascinating about the stories we tell each other as kids. The urban legends which spread and pass on to entire new generations, sometimes without any real understanding of the original context.

Curious that with this one there may actually have been some element of truth in it.
 
I'm guessing that the OP's real topic of strangeness is why did the older generation not talk about the 'conker tree ghosts' to the younger generations? So it became a story among the kids, but not among the older people? That's the only even vaguely odd thing here. You'd think 'the time they found those skeletons under that old tree' would be a topic of conversation, even just in passing.
 
catseye said:
I'm guessing that the OP's real topic of strangeness is why did the older generation not talk about the 'conker tree ghosts' to the younger generations? ... .
Click to expand...

The story was probably heard (or overhead) from an older generation and then took on a life of its own among the kids.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top