the haunted style

The Haunted StyleAuthor(s): B. C. SpoonerSource: Folklore, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Summer, 1968), pp. 135-139Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1258322 .

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The Haunted Style by B. C. SPOONER

THERE are both field and church stiles. And both are haunted. The first field stiles were as ephemeral as their own hedges of

hurdles or stake-and-brushwood. One of them is mentioned in the Oseney Abbey Cartulary of the first half of the thirteenth century: when a certain field in Hampton Poyle in Oxfordshire fell fallow, the brecca or breach in its enclosure was to be left open for the free passage of the canons' cattle. But when the field was to be tilled 'then a stile shall be made in the aforesaid brecca by which the men and servants of the said canons can always pass without hindrance along the path of that field."

The church-stile, like the enclosure it pierced, was the more lasting. It might be of stone steps going up towards the crest of the enclosing wall and the actual stile, and then, if need be, down again into the churchyard. Or it might be a ground-level cattle-grid of granite steps set at right angles to the walls of the enclosure. Both steps and grid might have flanking stone seats and in the centre, between them, a long 'lich' stone to rest the corpse upon till the priest came. In the Order of the Burial of the Dead in Edward VI's Prayer Book of 1549, there is a rubric directing what the priest shall say on 'metying the Corpse at the Church Style'.

There must be tales of the haunting of stiles all over England. But I have only four, and three of these I owe to Mrs Lake Barnett. It was her gardener who told her that in his native Hampshire 'there were bogies at the stiles of Lichfield and Swanwick, just beyond Fareham'; it was she who found out about the Manx 'Keimah who haunted the churchyard stiles (Keim) and guarded the graves'." It was she who handed on to me the Manx tale she had read, 'of the man who after crossing the fields "came to the

1 Oseney Cartulary, vi, 83. Quoted by G. Caspar Homans in English Villages of the Thirteenth Century, Harvard University, 1942, p. 64.

2 A. W. Moore, The Folklore of the Isle of Man, Nutt, 1891, p. 52.

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stile, and the lane behind the Big Mill". And there was the "Buggane waiting for him, as big and black as a house".'3 This big Mill, she added, 'is the one in which Dr Gardner has set up his Museum of Witchcraft at Castleton.'

But Cornwall is my hunting-ground. The road up Cornwall to Launceston in the north, goes by way

of Slate Quarry Hill and at the foot of the hill, to the right, there is a stile: a ghost sits on it at midnight. Headless.4

Summercourt, in mid-Cornwall, was once famous for its fairs. The inn is the 'London'; but whether it got this name from a wish to hint at the metropolis or from the family surname 'London', I do not know. Nor whether it was from inn or surname, or neither, that the stile of an old Summercourt farm got called 'Lunnon [or London] brown'. People avoided this stile after dark for fear of seeing 'Ole 'Bett Nitty sitting there, knitting'. There is no story.5

St Levan parish is near the Land's End. And there was an old lady of Raftra in St Levan who seldom came home from her card- playing with friends in a neighbouring hamlet till the small hours of the morning. Between her and home, on the way back to Raftra, there was a haunted stile called Goonproynter. So it was arranged that a man-servant should make a white ghost of himself with a sheet and wait there, to teach her a lesson. He sat, two, three, hours; then she came. She sat down, and after a while said quite casually: ' "Hallo! Bucca-gwidden (white spirit) what cheer! And what in the world dost thee do here with Bucca-dhu close behind thee?" This cool address so frightened Bucca-gwidden that he ran off as fast as he could lay feet to ground, the old lady scampering after, clapping her hands, and calling "Good boy, Bucca-dhu; now thee west catch Bucca-gwidden and take 'n away with thee!" '6 The gist of this story of the mock ghost chased by the real 'black' spirit, is also told in Lancashire - minus the stile.

'Wild' Harris lived at Kenegie, near Penzance. His ghost would be seen by Kenegie gate with its coat-of-arms and the lions, rigid and glaring. Or he would sit by the 'church-way stile' farther up the hill and people would be 'made aware of the spirit being near

3 Fairy Tales of the Isle of Man. Puffin Book, p. 78. 4 Oral. s Old Cornwall (magazine of the O.C. Federation), Vol. 2, No. 1, 1931, p. 44. * Bottrell, Traditions & Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall, z870, p. 143.

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though invisible, by a sulphurous smell which pervaded the place'.7 But there was far worse for those who tried to cross the stile on

the pathway to Stithians church-town: they underwent a sort of mild, involuntary levitation. When they approached they found themselves 'lifted from the ground and carried over like feathers in the wind, they didn't know how. Except that they knew An' Jenny Hendy haunted it of an evening sitting on the far side, even if she wasn't visible.8

The exact opposite of this would happen at field stiles in Shrop- shire. People found they couldn't cross them at all - until they had turned something they wore inside out. And the belief in this was so strong that the recorder of it in Notes and Queries had known women deliberately turn their gowns before crossing. It is the piskey-led, who turn garments in Cornwall.

A Cornish friend of mine, who has read this, tells me that in her childhood she might go into certain fields, 'but don't 'ee whatever, go over the stile: they piskies'll get 'ee!' And the old tellers believed this.

In Shropshire the Devil haunts stiles. In Cornwall, too, for that matter.

He hunts lost souls over the desolate piece of moor in St Just in Penwith that men call An Woon Gumpus, or 'the Gump'. He hunts them to an old stile and there he catches them; they cannot get over. According to a Welsh story there should have been safety on the other side of the stile: mortals who climbed one and found the Welsh coblynau at play in a field, were chased back over the stile again, but the angry coblynau goblins themselves went no farther than the stile.9

This idea that the stile could lead to sanctuary, is voiced in that Stithians story of An' Jenny Hendy. One of the characters says:

'You know the Old One can't pass the stile and put his hoof on con- secrated ground; that's the way he and his hounds are mostly keepan watch at the gates, or beatan round some place near. Now that's the reason why the poor sperats can't venture to go over the churchyard wall, where I have often seen them perched as close together as they could stick, grinning at Old Nick, and his hounds without heads, for if

Bottrell. 8 Ibid., x870. ' Wirt Sikes, British Goblins, x88o, p. 28.

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they lean over the least bit they are picked off on his horns and away they go - you know where, don't 'ee?'

That is from Bottrell, in 1870. It is repeated in the story of Ludgvan church near Penzance and

Betsy Friggins. There are at least two versions of this, but the rough outline of them as told by descendants is, that Betsy was a widow who lived in a cottage in the hamlet of Trezelah in Gulval and had been cheated out of some money by a forged will. The spirit of her dead husband appeared, to put things right. Four times. The fourth time he whisked her away over the tops of Trazza Trees - where she lost a shoe - and put her down to sit on the church stile at Ludgvan, daring her to move from it. On the one side of her she saw good spirits, and on the other, bad. There was apparently some sort of mysterious spirit consultation from which she learned how to get her rights; but after she was whisked home again she would never tell what she had heard. Except that her husband had said she must make payment, either with hearing or sight; she chose hearing, and was deaf from that day. Her lost shoe was found later high up in the branches of Trazza Trees.10 These stories of air transportation are not uncommon: there is one of a Welsh lad's garter" dropped high up in a tree-top near a church, and another of a girl air-borne right over a Welsh moun- tain and back again who would, also, never say what she had seen and heard. She paid with her reason.

But if stiles are so haunted, why? What started the idea? On the face of it, perhaps, it was the associations stirred up by the word 'lich', meaning corpse. Or else the belief that the ghost of the last person to be buried must guard the churchyard entrance until relieved by the ghost of the next to be buried. But that does not answer for the field stile.

Then what did they have in common? This: the entry they both offered into an enclosure whether of field or churchyard, was a restricted and selective one, impassable to the unwanted - animal or evil. Again, they both filled breaches in the boundaries and are therefore the vulnerable spots.

10 Old Cornwall, No. 3, 1926 (G. Doble); also Courtney, Cornish Feasts & Folklore.

11 Wirt Sikes.

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Boundaries themselves, like thresholds, have great significance:

'boundaries between territories, like boundaries between seasons, are lines along which the supernatural intrudes through the surface of existence... the fact that unbaptized children used to be buried at boundary fences suggests that these lines, like the unbaptized child, did not really belong to this world. Stiles were favourite perches for ghosts'.12

And one of those seasonal boundaries marks the end of Autumn and the beginning of winter: it is the Welsh Samain; our Hallow- e'en. Then no property is safe - for it is one of the 'Mischief Nights'; there is no sex, for men and women go disguised as each other; the hidden haunts of the fairies become visible and the

ghosts and the spirits go roaming, for all bounds are broken. It is chaos.

That is the night on which ghosts haunt the Welsh stiles; though Cornwall remembers no particular season. On that night 'there was a ghost or goblin in every furrow or brake'.13 And 'a Bogie on every stile' in Cardiganshire, says Rhys. But in North Wales, he says, it was 'A cutty black sow On every stile, Spinning and carding Every all Hallow's Eve'.

And this is the 'black short-tailed sow' of the bonfire (not stile) mentioned by William Owen, in i8o6, in his paper on Welsh Bards.14

It was the Hallowe'en, the Samain, bonfire. When the flames had died out, says Rhys, there went up the cry in Carnarvonshire Welsh: 'Y'r hwch du gwta a gipio'r ola'! That is, 'May the Black Sow without a tail seize the hindmost!' Immediately every man ran for his life into the night. And into what black darkness of myth did they run?

Once again; though both field and church stiles are built to keep out the unwanted, there are times when they are the more vulnerable for being the stop-gaps of boundaries breached to make them. Especially on Hallowe'en: and on Welsh evidence.

12 A. and B. Rees, Celtic Heritage, p. 94. 13 Howells, I83I. 14 In Sir R. Colt Hoare's translation of Giraldus de Barri's Itinerary of

Archbishop Baldwin through Wales, i8o6, p. 307.

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the haunted style

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