A ghostly tale

This ghostly Tale is reproduced from Leicestershire Ghosts and Legends, by D Bell, published in 1992

Accident Victim Or Executed Felon?

IN February 1989, Mark and Michelle Christian were driving along the Melton to Waltham road at 10.30 pm. It was pitch black, and just after they had passed the Freeby turn, Mark was startled to see the figure of a man apparently about to step into the road.

The man was standing on the right-hand side of the road. Mark only saw him for the split second he was in his headlights, but noticed he was wearing ‘old-fashioned clothes’. He thinks he had on a woollen coat and brown trousers. He seemed to have stepped out from the dark trees at the side of the road, but as the car drew level, the man had disappeared.

The following year, Natalie Doubleday was in a car being driven by her husband, Keith, travelling along the same stretch of road, but in the opposite direction, when she too saw a ghostly traveller in the road. He was running along the road ahead of the car.

It was four o’clock on an October afternoon, so there was enough light to see him clearly. She describes him as having ‘thick brown collar length hair, a crumpled brown jacket that had never seen an iron, thick brown working trousers and working men’s clogs. He looked like a farm worker of the 1890s.’

When she first spotted him, she assumed it was a living person in front of the car, and feared that they were going to hit him. In a panic that left her unable to scream or to warn her husband, she closed her eyes and waited for the thud.

Nothing happened. She opened her eyes and turned to look through the rear window but there was no-one there. Keith saw nothing himself, but firmly believes that Natalie did. After appealing in the local press for any clues to the identity of the ghost, she received two suggestions.

One was that it could have been William Brown, known as Peppermint Billy, who was executed in 1856. Billy, born in nearby Scalford, murdered a toll keeper and his grandson at Thorpe Arnold which is about two and a half miles from where Natalie saw her ghost.

However, Natalie favours the alternative suggestion, that she saw the ghost of a farm labourer who was run down by the Grantham to Melton stage coach in 1886, at the very spot where she saw him
in 1990.