The most prominent feature of the Hill today is the deep cutting and bench accommodating the A229 which grazes the face of the escarpment at the point it begins a mile-long deflection to the north. The exposed chalk cliff here, exploiting former quarry workings alongside the former Maidstone-Chatham road, combines with similarly exposed and abandoned workings just to the west to make Blue Bell Hill distinctive and easily recognizable.The attraction, however, is more than purely visual, for it is below the sheer white walls of the road-cutting here that the majority of the sightings of Blue Bell Hill's ghost or ghosts) have taken place.

A Special Place

Blue Bell Hill and its immediate environs have been a focus for human occupation and activity since before recorded history, long before the time of the Roman occupation when the first road was established here as a characteristically direct route to Rochester, where it joined the great Roman road of Watling Street.

It is therefore not surprising to discover that over the course of its long history, the Hill has attracted to it a number of tales, many of a supernatural flavour. As Michael Goss has pointed out, the stories regarding a road ghost are a quite recent addition to Blue Bell Hill's stock of legend and folklore, which are generally derived from or related to documented historic events or artefacts. 

A few of those tales relate to Kit’s Coty House (pictured right), Kent’s best known and best preserved Megalithic structure, and BBH’s claim to fame long before there were rumours of a ghost. Nestled on the shoulder of the Hill, the structure, a 2.4m-tall ‘portal tomb’, has been interpreted as the entrance or false entrance to a sepulchral chamber, once joined by a 60-m earth barrow, which today has all but vanished. It is joined a little to the south, off the Rochester Road, by a collapsed formation known as Little or Lower Kit’s Coty House (Countless Stones), these two in the past forming part of a complex of standing stones and circles across the hillside, today largely effaced. 

Like many similar sites of Neolithic age across Britain and Europe, the real purpose of these formations cannot be established with any certainty. Likely is that they had a number of functions: some for ceremonial purposes, others as trackway markers and sighting points, or astronomical markers. The dominant idea, though, is that they served as burial places, which would appear to be true in part for the site known as Coldrum, at Trosley, some 8 miles to the west of BBH. While no human remains have been found at BBH, this is undoubtedly the favoured interpretation for Kit’s Coty and many of the other structures there, prompting one commentator to refer to the complex as a prehistoric Necropolis.

Much of the air of mystery associated with BBH can undoubtedly be attributed to these legacies of our Neolithic ancestors. So little is known about them and their builders, they are a natural subject of myth and folklore. And, therefore, considering their proximity to the haunted stretch of road, it was inevitable, perhaps, that some connection would be made between them and the modern ghost story. As subjects of mystery attached to the same area, the two are naturally identified as expressions of the same mystical aura that marks BBH as a special place, instinctively identified as somewhere where strange experiences are apt to take place. 

An article for the Evening Post of 15 July 1974, for instance, noted that BBH - meaning the road (the A229) - runs across the sites of innumerable prehistoric graves, several of which, it noted, are ‘known to be connected with occult practices’. Individuals too, I would discover, felt the stones ‘had something to do with it (i.e. the ghost). As a taboo of many cultures, the desecration of the resting places of the dead is to virtually invite retribution; many prehistoric sites support such a tradition, with misfortune or death said to befall the guilty - which seems to be a kind of supernatural insurance policy against disturbance, reminiscent of the infamous Curse of the Pharaohs.

Some traditions state that the heavy stones were designed to imprison the spirits of the dead within their graves - an idea that dovetails to some degree with the commentary in the Evening Post, which implies that occult influences may have been unleashed by the destruction of the graves, or at least have tainted the atmosphere of the place so as to be conducive to hauntings - an idea which may not be as silly as it sounds. One outcome of my research into BBH, and noted just the same in other cases, is the correlation between outbreaks of ghostly activity and large-scale disturbance of the physical environment. Two major episodes figure in BBH’s recent history - the construction of the new A229 dual carriageway over the Hill in 1970-1972, and the major refurbishment of Junction 6 of the M20 with the A229 at the foot of the Hill in 1992, the latter of which correlated very well with the spate of renewed sightings of the ghost in November 1992 - which could lead to the consideration that some of these locations may possess special energetic properties, akin to Paul Devereux’s work and theories relating earthlights to megalithic sites and other peculiarities of the terrain. 

The Road

In terms of the modern haunting, the main feature of concern, is of course, the road setting - the A229 itself. Briefly mentioned earlier was the supposed cause of the BBH haunting, at least as hyped by the media - the car crash of 19 November 1965. The scene of this tragedy is preserved on a backwater section of the Old Chatham Road (pictured right), which now serves as a link-road/slip-road onto the dual carriageway which supersedes it. The construction of the new road - the modern dual carriageway, which now holds the title of ‘A229’, which was completed in 1972, was built to improve both traffic flow and safety.

Construction of the new road necessitated a massive rock/earth-moving programme, reducing the dangerous mile-long 1-in-11 gradient to 1-in-18, which has left little of the original road intact between Maidstone and Blue Bell Hill Village at the top of the Hill, altering the character and appearance of the entire location.

Consequently, the Blue Bell Hill of today is a very different place to what it was at the time of the 1965 tragedy. If we at this stage just suppose that this accident is responsible for the ghost, then the events of 1992 have demonstrated that the radical disruption of the environment a few years later has not discouraged it from manifesting, nor diminished the appeal the story holds for us. Indeed, the most convincing encounters have occurred some time after the new road became established. 

Whether it is significant or not, the only effect the new road has had on the stories, other than on the strength of evidence, is to mark a change in the ghost's behaviour, the late 1960s characterized by a hitch-hiking phantom, and the post-construction years by the by-now familiar 'suicide-intent' pedestrian. Otherwise, 'she' seems little-fussed as to where she appears, with sightings locations, as we shall see, dotted about the Hill, on the new and old road alike.

Early Days - The Haunted Hill

My own introduction to the Ghost of Blue Bell Hill came on 28 February 1981. I remember the date so well not because the story made any great impression - quite the reverse in fact. No, I recall the date because it was the same day I moved with my family from London to Kent. The story was related by an uncle later that night as he drove us back to our new home in Maidstone. The route would bring us down the A229 at Blue Bell Hill; and it was here that I first heard about the Hill's ghost.

The story as told was essentially the same as outlined above, with the exception that the ghostly protagonist was said to be a bride-to-be who died the night before her wedding; and who now, even after death, was forlornly trying to complete her last journey. However, as interesting as it was to discover that BBH had acquired its own PHH story, along the lines of Chicago’s ‘Resurrection Mary’, that’s as far as it went. Typically anecdotal in style, and offering the same highly questionable premise, the story was soon forgotten.

Until 1989 that is, and the discovery of  Michael Goss's The Evidence for Phantom Hitch-Hikers.¹ Chapter Six ('The Haunted Hill') was devoted to the haunting of Blue Bell Hill. Goss not only confirmed the content of the rumours in circulation on the oral grapevine, but provided a mass of detail and references that pinned down the story and its possible origins to a specific time frame. Regardless of the merits of the case as a possibly genuine haunting, at least I could now see that the BBH story was not entirely apocryphal. It had some basis in fact.

The book highlighted the efforts of the late Tom Harber, a blind switchboard operator at Oakwood Hospital, Barming (in Maidstone), and the pioneering researcher of the case. Tom’s interest appears to have been piqued by the 1966 experience of someone known 'extremely well' to him. The witness, whom Tom interviewed less than twenty-four hours after his encounter, described how, after picking the girl up near the Lower Bell public house (at the bottom of the Hill), she had talked of her wedding the next day as they drove towards Maidstone. Later (presumably after dropping her off uneventfully in the town) he went to the address the girl had given him to check on her safety, only to discover that she had died a year before on 'the very day' and at the same spot he had picked up the hitch-hiker. In this case, it seems, the witness refused to believe that the girl he gave a lift to could possibly have been a ghost.

In due course, Tom claimed to have traced and interviewed no less than eleven further witnesses to the 'Week Street' girl (Week Street was then a busy road at the heart of Maidstone where, in other instances, the girl allegedly vanished

On the face of it, there appeared to be an almost unprecedented case for the repeated appearance of a hitch-hiking ghost on Blue Bell Hill. But as Goss noted, the acceptance of such rested on Mr Harber's testimony alone, since his witnesses (in one case, at least, by request) remained anonymous, and their accounts were never committed to print.

'Though I stand to be corrected,' stated Goss, 'the first printed reference to the Blue Bell Hill haunt may have appeared in The Gazette (Mid-Kent's picture paper, a member of the Kent Messenger group) of 10 September 1968.'² And although indeed I would later be able to correct this statement by locating earlier references³, these in no way conflicted with Goss's supposition that the fixing of the rumours in print may have helped define the tale as it was later told.

The version presented in this article described a very similar pattern of events to those described by Tom Harber's first witness: the girl is reported to wait by the Lower Bell, and thumbs a lift from a passing Maidstone-bound motorist. She chats busily throughout the journey until, 'somewhere in the vicinity of Week Street', the driver turns around to discover that she has vanished. 'The story is always the same,'⁴ remarked the author, implying that the story was unvarying, while at the same time carefully evading judgement as to whether this feature supported or refuted the reports as genuine paranormal events.

What I found puzzling about the article was its reporting of Mr Harber's failure to locate a single witness to the ghost-girl after a search of several months: "I've made enquiries, but there's nothing you can pin down. I've kept asking for a description of the girl - and never got one."⁵ Implied was that Tom's search (and possibly the rumours of a ghost) had begun in 1968, and by September of that year, he had failed to locate even a single first-hand witness to the ghost, let alone the round dozen⁶ he would later claim to have traced (possibly resulting from this publicity). More importantly, this declaration stood in plain contradiction to the stated date of his first interview and, according to Goss, the reason for his involvement - the 1966 account outlined above. Unless he was misunderstood or misquoted, it is difficult to imagine how or why Tom Harber would be announcing a negative outcome to his inquiries in 1968 when he supposedly had detailed knowledge of an incident two years before.

Furthermore, the 1966 witness had claimed his passenger had spoken excitedly of her wedding throughout the journey and, although the article painted a similar picture of a chatty young woman, there was no description of the content of her speech, and no reference to a wedding in the article. Why is this significant? Well, since the details of the versions heard by Tom Harber never made it into print - ever - it followed that much later oral versions which did include reference to an impending wedding could not have been derived from newspaper sources. Although printed reference would eventually be made (in 1974) to a car crash on Blue Bell Hill that involved the death of a bride-to-be whose wedding was scheduled for the following day, these articles identified one of the other victims of that tragedy as the prospective ghost. And yet the bride-to-be continued to be favoured in many of the oral versions thereafter, possibly as she had before 1968.

I became intrigued with the story initially out of curiosity regarding the mysterious bride-to-be. Why did she feature strongly in some of the oral accounts (after all, this particular version had survived intact for a good number of years, until I first heard it in 1981) but not prominently in written accounts, and not at all in the early versions?

If the early written accounts were based on the rumours circulating in the late 1960s, then we have to assume that the bride-to-be did not feature in the early oral accounts, or that this very attractive elaboration on the essential story was overlooked or ignored in their preparation.

It is not difficult to appreciate the added value the death of a bride-to-be might have in terms of story point. It brings with it a poignancy, a sense of heightened loss - the same sense of fate and tragic waste - of robbed potential - we have seen in modern true-life legends: the story of the Titanic, the assassination of JFK, and, most recently and comparably, in the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The sense of deep sympathy which is evoked in many of us would not only make the story memorable (thus ensuring its longevity), but her untimely and fateful death provided the perfect explanation for her return to the world of the living. “She desperately did not want to die," commented Tom Harber.⁷ And Goss himself stressed the 'emotional or artistic rightness' of the idea of a tragically slain young woman futilely attempting to complete her last journey (a Love-transcends-Death theme that runs through other PHH and other supernatural tales).⁸

The fact that the bride-to-be (or any association that was later made with the 1965 car crash) was not a feature of the early written accounts led to all sorts of questions and possibilities regarding the origins of the story. Why, for instance, this discrepancy between Tom Harber's knowledge of the bride-to-be version in 1966 and his public admission of finding no witnesses in 1968? Was the failure of the newspapers to report this aspect a function of its non-existence early in the history of the story, or because of an unwillingness by Tom Harber at the time to impart a possibly useful 'diagnostic' feature to the press in spite of the interest it would generate?

The list could go on on. The answers to some of these nagging questions would lead me into my own investigation. That, and the simple desire to find out more about the participants of this saga. 

What I discovered early on was that the inference that the rumours about a ghost may have been originated in 1968 was unfounded. The earliest published reference I have found places the rumours of a hitch-hiking ghost at least as far back as December 1967.⁹ There is no reason to suppose, therefore, that Tom Harber did not hear about and begin his investigation in just the way he related it to Goss - in 1966. This determined, the whole thing became even more interesting since it suggested that the earliest versions of the story, rather than acquiring fitting aspects of the 1965 crash a little later in its history (i.e. post-1974), may have had this association built-in from the very beginning.

On this assumption, there may just possibly have been some justification for the later identification of the 1965 car crash as the inspiration for the haunting, regardless whether the reported encounters with a ghost thereafter were real or imagined. It explained to an extent how this popular version of the story had survived independently in the oral tradition to a slightly different and relatively less appealing 'official' account that was spread abroad by the local press.

Tom Harber's coverage in The Gazette of 10 September 1968 can therefore be viewed as marking not the starting point for his research and the onset of public awareness, but the beginning of his search for additional witnesses.

Whatever the absolute truth of the matter, sadly we will never know for sure. Tom Harber passed away a few years after Goss spoke to him in connection with his research, and long before I began my own. What is certain is that Tom favoured the bride-to-be for the ghost's identity. We can be almost as certain that he kept his thoughts and opinions on this matter to himself, never declaring them publicly. This is a point worth remembering when we come to look at the reasons for the eventual identification of the 1965 crash as the cause of it all.

Michael Goss, aside from introducing and discussing the published history of the Blue Bell Hill case and an outline of the 1965 crash, pulled together some of the anecdotal support for the haunting. It seemed the ghost could be encountered at various points on the Hill. One resident (a young lady) told Goss that the Hitch-Hiker had been picked up at the bus-stop at the top of the Hill (which I infer to mean the stop on the Old Chatham Road (northbound, as pictured above) located just before the Kingswood Road junction, rather than the stop outside the Upper Bell pub, in Blue Bell Hill village) and by Medway-bound motorists on the dual carriageway.¹⁰

Evidently, the ghost was not restricted to haunt the precise scene of her demise, which was believed at that time to be the crossroads at the Lower Bell. Indeed, 'she' would have received far less attention following the construction of the dual carriageway if that had been the case.

This disparity in destination - north towards Chatham¹¹, or south towards Maidstone has been variously interpreted as evidence of the freedom of movement and will granted on the Other Side¹², or as indicating the presence of two hitch-hiking ghosts, identifiable by character and habit. In these accounts collected by Maidstone researcher¹³, Dennis Chambers, the talkative young lady who chats about an impending wedding is identified not as the bride-to-be, but one of her companions. The bride-to-be herself is said to be silent (defying how her identification was made, and in contradiction to Tom Harber's picture of a talkative young woman).

Tom Harber preferred to believe that all accounts reflected the variable habits of one ghost - the bride-to-be. In the instances where she wished to travel north, this was because this was the direction she was travelling on the night of her death¹⁴; the journey south, he supposed, expressed her intention to be taken home (to Maidstone).¹⁵

However, in spite of Tom's views, the double-ghost hypothesis appeared to be lent some support by the reported sightings of Rochester man David Smith.¹⁶ According to the Evening Post (27 February 1969)¹⁷, Mr Smith apparently saw, on a few occasions, two pedestrians walking along the roadside at Blue Bell Hill, usually heading up the Hill on the pavement on the left. On two occasions they vanished in full view, once when he was within a few yards of them as he drove up the Hill, and on the other when they walked into the path of an oncoming vehicle, which drove straight through them, leaving no trace.

But the question of whether there might be more than one ghost, or a single, very mobile one ignored the fact that there was no hard evidence for a ghost of any kind, David Smith's vague account and Tom Harber's claim to a number of witnesses notwithstanding.

Only Maurice Goodenough's vivid encounter in July 1974 would begin to approach the degree of circumstantial evidence we might be looking for. But even if we were to blindly follow press assertions that this incident represented a genuine encounter with the Blue Bell Hill ghost (which certainly seemed unlikely at the time), the ghost's behaviour (allowing herself to be struck by the witness's vehicle) differed markedly to the 'reports' which depicted a hitch-hiking apparition...

Notes & References

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