On my tour of Derbyshire I decided to start my ghostly journey in the historic and very paranormally active town of Ashbourne. It's reputedly haunted by many a spectre. I started my walk about at St. Oswald’s Church, you can't miss its imposing spire that towers above the rest of the buildings, apparently there is supposed to be a ghost that haunts the graveyard. The entrance to the church gives you the creeps even before you set foot into the graveyard, with its tall iron gates and stone pillars and overhanging stone skulls, reminding you that 'dead people live there'!!
I was minding my own business taking photos amongst the graves and asking out for any spirits when I felt someone staring at me, I turned and noticed this little old man, I was half expecting him to ask what I was doing, I grinned, but no sooner had I looked at him, he did an about turn and he walked into the church. He wasn't the ghost, just a curious church attendant wondering what I was up to.
Whilst I was there I didn't see anything unusual and on reviewing back my photos I didn't see anything unusual on them.
The old grammar school is only across the road from the church, this building has seen ghostly encounters, built in 1585, old borders to the school have seen the ghost of a very thin boy, the headmaster apparently starved his pupils and kept food for himself, people think that the thin boy was the victim of the headmaster.
We then walked up the hill to the very haunted Green Man Inn. It is a 17th century coaching inn, guests have reported hearing a coach and horses and a ghostly figure has been spotted looking out of one of the windows.
The bus station in the town has seen some strange encounters too, a whole regiment of ghostly soldiers has been seen marching through it!
There is another story of ghostly presence that roams the streets of Ashbourne, that of a young girl, apparently she was buried alive after doctors thought she had died during childbirth, a concerned doctor was not convinced of her death and her body was later exhumed and it was found that the girl actually had given birth to her baby in the coffin!! How horrible!!
There is also a great piece of paranormal history that is linked to Ashbourne, which was reminded to us on a plaque which is reference to Dr Johnson one of the worlds first paranormal investigators. In the 18th century Dr Samuel Johnson the author from Lichfield came to Ashbourne to conduct some of the first paranormal investigations after he was asked to look into incidents involving poltergeists, he stayed in the mansion on Church Street.
On the last part of our journey around haunted Ashbourne we walked along the tunnel that runs under Ashbourne’s streets, I've not heard of any ghostly encounters down there, but when we got halfway through the tunnel we both heard voices and strange sounds and there was only us in there, the tunnel is very long. But as we got to the end, we saw a sign about a sound project in the tunnel, small speakers were places at intervals along the tunnel ceiling, the sounds travelled the whole length within seconds. If you didn't know about this and you had been down there alone at night you may have had a fright thinking its the many shades of Ashbournes past that are following you down there!
Ashbourne is definitely worth a visit and is on my map of favourite haunted places to visit.
Richard Felix of Most Haunted fame is now running ghost tours around the town.
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