Background & Setting | Sightings | Hekate on the Hill | The Beast of Blue Bell Hill

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"GHOST GIRL SEEN AGAIN" 

So ran the front page headline of the Kent Today of Tuesday 10 November 1992.

The article, by Emma Cooper, described the 'chilling new turn' in the saga of Kent's most famous phantom. The incident, it was reported, had taken place 'around midnight' the previous Sunday night (8 November) near the Aylesford turn-off of the southbound carriageway of the A229 at Blue Bell Hill, some four miles to the north of Maidstone.

Ian Sharpe, a 54-year-old coach driver, was on the last leg of his journey home to Maidstone when a young woman had appeared in the path of his vehicle, ran towards him and, with her eyes locked on his, fallen beneath the bonnet. Horrified, Ian skidded the car to a halt, and shakily got out to take account of the accident.

"I honestly thought I had killed her," he said. "You can't imagine how it felt. I was so scared to look underneath, but I knelt down and looked straight through - there was nothing there."¹

Ian searched around about the car, and in the bushes of the wide verge, but found nothing. Attempts to flag down two cars for assistance failed, so he continued on into Maidstone, making straight for the police station to report the incident.

White-faced and 'shaking like a leaf', he told police that he had run over a woman but could not find the body. After listening to Ian's account, in course noting the particular spot on Blue Bell Hill where the incident had occurred, the police seemingly came to an immediate if presumptuous judgment by recounting to him the 'spooky legend' of the ghost said to haunt that stretch of road.

Nevertheless, officers accompanied him back to the scene, and a search of the area ensued, which proved fruitless. No sign of damage was found on his car, reinforcing opinion that he could not have encountered a real person. But Ian maintained, he had not been 'seeing things'. The girl had seemed perfectly real, not as he imagined a ghost would be.

The following day, Ian Sharpe was said to still be expecting the police to knock at his door to report the finding of the girl's body. It had been, he said, the 'most scary' experience of his life.

When I later had the opportunity of interviewing Ian, his own version - not surprisingly - proved to differ somewhat to the Emma Cooper's Kent Today version and its derivatives. Rather than appearing before him, as many newspapers were to suggest, Ian saw the woman some way ahead, standing in the mid

"This was at exactly ten-to-twelve at night. I know it was the time because I'd just looked at my watch. I'd lit a cigarette up and come out of the Blue Bell Hill slip-road, from the village, coming down the Hill. I'd just had a puff when I saw this woman, and I thought: 'Oh, she'll go back, she won't come across'. But then she just ran straight in front of the car [from the right], and I hit her on her left side...and her head was facing this way; she was looking at me all the time.

"At the time I went into the police station [Maidstone] I still thought I'd knocked a woman over. I don't believe in - I have never believed in ghosts. My impression of a ghost is something you can see through, all white or pale. She was a normal woman; roundish face; she had shoulder-length hair that rolled inwards at the [shoulder'],,,and she was fair haired. She was wearing a 'lightish' coat with a long V-neck, with a light blouse or roll-neck underneath. But her face...I can still see her face now. Her skin was normal; and her eyes...she had big eyes, really big eyes."

Not unexpectedly, in the days following his encounter, Ian Sharpe's story was picked up by the national tabloids (and regional television). Not since an uncannily similar experience by a Rochester man in 1974 had the haunting of Blue Bell Hill attracted such widespread media interest...

The Goodenough Incident

In the early hours of 13 July 1974, Maurice Goodenough, a 35-year-old bricklayer from Rochester rushed into Rochester Police Station claiming he had knocked down a young  girl on Blue Bell Hill. Police hastened with him back to the scene only to find the discarded car blanket (or tartan car rug) with which Mr Goodenough had covered (or wrapped³) the injured girl, whom he had carried to the roadside following the accident, which had occurred around midnight.⁴

Goodenough told police that the girl had appeared suddenly in his car's headlights, forcing him to brake hard. But it had been too late to avoid running into her.

"The girl just walked out in front of me from the edge of the road," he said. "My car hit her with a hell of a bang."⁵

Jumping out of his car, he found the girl lying in the road. She had a cut on her forehead and cut or 'skinned' knees. One source included a feature that appeared in no other version of the incident: the girl was moving her head and had muttered 'Mummy' two or three times.⁶

Goodenough estimated the girl to have been about ten years old. She had shoulder-length brown hair, and was dressed in a lacy white blouse, white ankle socks and a skirt.

He tried to wave down 'about four cars' but none stopped. So, unable to see a telephone box, and of the opinion that it would be unwise to try to put the girl in his car, he left her by the roadside while he sped off to Rochester Police Station.

Thirty minutes later (Chatham Standard; Chatham News)⁷, Goodenough returned to the spot with police officers, who immediately instigated a search for the girl on both sides of the steeply wooded Hill, but without success. The search resumed at dawn with the aid of a tracker dog⁸, but no scent trace, tracks or bloodstains were found, the effort by then hampered by heavy rain. Extensive enquiries, including a check on hospital admissions, failed to locate anyone answering the girl's description.

Aside from the obvious and natural concern for the girl's well-being, the Chatham Standard and the Chatham News aired police fears that she may have been abducted. "We would appeal for any parent whose child has some unexplained injuries like a bump on the head to contact us. We would also like to hear from anyone whose child is missing," said a spokesman.⁹

From his home in Rochester on the Saturday night, Mr Goodenough was evidently confounded. He told The News of the World that he had definitely hit a girl and carried her to the side of the road. "I'm not going mad," he said. "But where did she vanish? I'm still shaking from the experience."¹⁰

If Maurice Goodenough was unsure exactly what to make of his experience, the Press evidently were not. From the start, the location of the incident and consequent failure to find the girl meant only one thing: the girl had to be a ghost. Apparent support for this contention lay with the inability (as would be the case in the incidents of 1992) to find any sign of damage to Goodenough's car.

As it turned out, the gamble of the general Press paid off. No child was forthcoming to invalidate their favoured interpretation. In the subsequent weeks local newspapers firmly linked Maurice Goodenough's experience to Blue Bell Hill's existing legend of a hitch-hiking ghost, and to its supposed 'cause' - a tragic event that had previously been alluded to, but never openly identified. 

As remarkable as Ian Sharpe's story was, it was made all the more so through the timing of his encounter, occurring as it had little over a week before the anniversary of a tragic car crash on the Hill in 1965 - a fact which, to the media, could only serve to reinforce claims that this crash and, in particular, a member of that tragic party, lay at the heart of the case.

It is a matter of record that late in the evening of Friday 19 November 1965 two cars were in collision on Blue Bell Hill. Three of the four young women in one of the vehicles, a Mark 1 Ford Cortina, died as a result of their injuries, one instantly. The fourth was seriously injured. The driver of the other vehicle, a Jaguar, was uninjured, and his companion, though badly hurt, was discharged from hospital a few days later.

Tragedy: the crash of 19 November 1965

One of the fatally injured women was a bride-to-be. Her wedding, scheduled for the following day, was never to take place. It had been too late to inform a number of the wedding guests, who dutifully gathered at the church in Gillingham the next day, only to be turned away.

In the early part of that Saturday, surgeons were involved in a desperate struggle to save her life. But to no avail. Her injuries had been too severe, and she died five days later in the West Kent Hospital, Maidstone, without regaining consciousness. She was unaware of the vigil that her fiancé‚ had kept by her bedside throughout.

Undoubtedly, the 1965 crash has provided a fitting and tangible origin for the haunting of Blue Bell Hill. We are inclined to assume a connection between sudden or violent death and hauntings. The 1965 crash - an incident that was well documented by local and county newspapers of the time, chiefly (and significantly) by Kent Messenger group publications (one of which - the Evening Post - was responsible for first naming the 1965 crash and its victims) - satisfies our expectations perfectly in respect of location and manner of death, and it is therefore easy to appreciate how it might have become adopted as a focus for the ghost stories that appeared soon after.

But was the connection really valid? Blue Bell Hill has been the scene of numerous fatal accidents over the years. If we were to accept the popular notion that the trauma/shock/unpreparedness of sudden death can somehow bind the spirit of an individual to the scene of his/her demise, then a number of fitting candidates for the identity of the ghost could be reasonably proposed. So how was it decided, and on what evidence, that the crash of 19 November 1965 was the source of the haunting of Blue Bell Hill?

Firstly, it should be appreciated that the identification of the crash and, in turn, a firm selection of a candidate from that tragic party for the ghost's identity was not made until the occasion of Maurice Goodenough's encounter on the Hill, in July 1974 - nine years after the accident. 

In the Kent Messenger versions the identification of the crash was attributed to a police spokesman (unidentified) who described Maurice Goodenough's experience as the latest in a series of strange encounters that had occurred on Blue Bell Hill since that tragedy. Kent Messenger reporter Nigel Nelson followed up this clue and 'following a week of intensive investigation' he published his findings in the Evening Post (19 July). This article ('Drivers beware of the phantom on the hill'), an almost identical version of which was repeated a week later in the Kent Messenger itself ('Spectre of Bluebell Hill', 26 July), was to firmly establish the 1965 tragedy in the minds of the public as the cause of the haunting.

Although rumours and reports describing a phantom female had been in circulation since the late 1960s, this was the first time a specific origin for the haunting had been identified in print. In only two published accounts¹¹ of the haunting in the intervening years had an actual cause been alluded to - and these simply state that the girl was said to have been killed in a road accident; the latter (1968) adding that this had occurred ‘some time ago’.

Exactly why almost a decade should have elapsed before the crash became openly linked to the ghost stories, and on precisely what evidence, is still unclear. More certain is that its debut was a timely one, providing a convenient and compelling focus for the stories at a time when the case found itself under the spotlight of heightened press interest, which included coverage by three of the Sunday tabloids.¹²

Was there, then, really any more to it than its apparent fulfilment of press needs to establish a logical and suitably tragic foundation to the stories? The police source suggested that perhaps there was. But whatever the legitimacy of the connection (which may have been fostered by police officials or private researcher(s)), once established, the crash thereafter became an integral, possibly inextricable ingredient of the Blue Bell Hill story. Indeed, it has become the story within the story - the tangible driving force behind it.

From a purely artistic viewpoint, it isn't difficult to appreciate how the 1965 crash has become such a powerful and enduring source of interest. The deepened sense of tragedy found in the death of a young bride-to-be just hours away from her wedding imbues the story with a special poignancy, fulfilling romantic notions of cruelly-terminated love, which has made the Blue Bell Hill story particularly memorable, even captivating.

The most puzzling feature of the 1974 articles, then, is why the bride-to-be - as the almost perfect subject (from a story point of view), and certainly the 'logical' candidate of the three victims of the 1965 crash (and primary subject of discussion on the oral grapevine in the late 1960s) - should have been overlooked in the identification of the ghost. Paradoxically, Nelson named one of the other victims of the crash, stating that the ghost was rumoured to be that of 22-year-old JL of Rochester.

It is still uncertain as to why this choice was made. The source of the rumour, as for the crash itself, was never clearly identified, but henceforth this young woman became the main subject of interest and speculation for later writers who from time to time touched on the case.

A clue as to how JL may have become identified with the ghost is to be found in Nigel Nelson's own articles. Credited in the Kent Messenger (26 July 1974, an expanded version of his Evening Post article) is the late Tom Harber [see Background]. In it, Mr Harber - the case's first researcher - described how, since the crash, motorists travelling between Maidstone and Chatham late at night (generally after 11 p.m.) had reported picking up a young girl who was thumbing a lift from the roadside at Blue Bell Hill - a girl who would subsequently vanish from the back seat of the car. On occasion, before vanishing, the girl would say she wanted to be taken to Rochester, stating that she had been involved in a car accident.

Could the mention of Rochester as the destination of the ghost in Tom Harber's anonymous account (or, as has been speculated, Maurice Goodenough's own destination on the night of his encounter - his home in Rochester) have prompted Nelson to form an unconscious association with JL, also from Rochester? Author Michael Goss has observed that of the three victims of the crash, J alone was pictured in one of the original crash articles available in the Kent Messenger's archives (Maidstone Gazette¹³) - something which may again have forged an association?

Whatever the case (personal correspondence with Mr Nelson in 1990 failed to resolve the question, his involvement understandably too long removed), it does not appear that the identification was founded on firm evidence. Needless to say, JL's father was astonished at the suggestion that his daughter was haunting Blue Bell Hill.

The identification of JL would not be the only source of confusion introduced in the work of Nigel Nelson. In addition to erroneously placing the date of the crash on a Thursday, he painted a somewhat different picture of the crash, furnishing his version with a hitherto unreported account of the fateful events leading up to the crash. In what Michael Goss would later refer to as 'these deviant facts', it was related how JL was to have been a bridesmaid at the wedding of one of the girls, which was scheduled for the following day. They had been trying on dresses when they had decided to meet the bride-to-be's fiancé‚ at a pub later that evening - an appointment they were never to keep, as their car spun off a treacherous bend on Blue Bell Hill.

In providing such an attractive and ready-packaged 'solution' to the haunting of Blue Bell Hill, Nigel Nelson's articles would inevitably find favour in later years, in spite of their unsatisfactory features. 

Perhaps the most obvious of these lay with the discrepancy between the estimated age of Goodenough's child 'ghost' and the three victims of the 1965 crash, all of whom were in their early twenties. In confronting this problem, Tom Harber simply felt there was no discrepancy. He pointed out to Michael Goss that Maurice Goodenough's estimate of the girl's age was made under fraught circumstances on an unlit stretch of road (but presumably partially illuminated by his car's headlights?). Tom believed that Goodenough's estimate of the girl's age may have been based on two factors: her diminutive stature, and her attire. Her white ankle socks in particular, he observed, may have given Goodenough the impression that she was a schoolgirl. Tom, as previously stated, undoubtedly favoured the bride-to-be as the ghost. Her identification, said Goss, rested on descriptions he had gleaned of the girl Hitch-Hiker. The bride-to-be was, Tom said, a small person, apparently youthful in appearance - something upon which a number of his witnesses had remarked. On the night she died, she had been dressed 'youngish' and had been wearing white ankle socks.

Quite how Tom Harber might have come by this information, however, eludes me. A little more research would have revealed that the bride-to-be was not from Maidstone as Tom appears to have believed (at least initially), but from Australia. I later established that she was on only her third trip to England (and staying in Gillingham, for the occasion of her marriage) when she died. She had no relatives in Britain.

To my knowledge, no record accessible to the public existed in the UK that could have provided such information. The newspapers reporting on the 1965 crash provide no descriptions or other pertinent specifics relating to the victims - such would hold no relevance in the reporting of the crash itself, although two of the party - but not the bride-to-be - were pictured in Kent newspapers.¹⁴

The only possible source of this information (aside from friends/relatives of the other deceased, or the surviving member of the party - and there is no evidence to indicate that Tom attempted to contact them) would have been the public inquest of the 1965 tragedy, held in March 1966. In this case, even if Tom first heard the story very early in 1966, it is inconceivable that he could have gathered sufficient data to identify the crash and its bride-to-be in time to attend the inquest of the accident. Indeed, an examination of Tom Harber's early involvement in the case almost certainly rules this out. Other than through a romantically inspired identification with the ill-starred bride-to-be, it is difficult to see how Tom Harber came to so definite a conclusion.

As it is, as a registered blind person, Tom Harber can be more than forgiven for these factual discrepancies, and we can extend nothing but our thanks for his efforts, without which the Blue Bell Hill story would arguably have fallen into anonymity almost as soon as it began. 

However, Tom Harber's comments regarding the apparent youthfulness of the ghost-girl has found some support - in a convincing double-witness encounter (c.1985) - I would later hear. In this case, a couple who were confronted with the sight of a girl dressed in a light top and white ankle socks one night on the Rochester Road (at the foot of Blue Bell Hill) estimated her to be in her early teens. (It is worth noting in this case that none of the 1965 crash victims were identified from photographs. Nor had the couple heard of the Goodenough incident, or had any real knowledge of the case at the time beyond Blue Bell Hill's repute).

In the absence of the witness himself (Goss states that the negative aspects of the publicity surrounding his encounter eventually forced Maurice Goodenough to refuse to talk about his experience¹⁵) it is impossible to confirm the reported age estimate of the girl, although I have no reason to suspect that it was not accurately reported. 

Intriguingly though, an account given by one of the police officers involved in the investigation gives a different age-estimate - one that compares more favourably with the age-band of the 1965 crash victims, as well as presenting a picture of the incident that is somewhat at variance with the published versions.

In his book One Dog and her Man¹⁶ - his memoirs of his work with police dog Bess (a black Labrador) - Ted Wright, a retired dog handler for the Kent County Constabulary recounts how in the early hours during one particularly busy night shift, he and ‘Bess’ were called out to Blue Bell Hill to search for a missing accident victim.

Although neither the year nor the name of the motorist are given, there is little doubt from his description that Ted is referring to the Goodenough incident of July 1974:

On arrival at the scene, he took minimal details from the Inspector before directing Bess to a car rug that lay spread out on the grass verge. Scent detected at the rug led back only to the assembled gathering of police officers and ambulancemen. Checks round about the rug revealed nothing; Bess failed to pick up the human scent they were looking for, although she had no problem finding Ted's van keys that he subsequently dropped into the grass to act as a control.

Ted relates how 'they' listened to a very strange story from a motorist: he had been driving up the Hill when a lady had stepped out in front of him. Having no time to take evasive action, he struck the woman with such force that she was thrown clear over the car and landed in the road behind.¹⁷ When he went to her, the motorist found her to be bleeding badly.

Fetching a car rug from the boot of his car, he gently placed the lady on it and carefully moved her to the safety of the grass verge. With the road deserted at that hour, he drove straight to Rochester police station to report the accident and to obtain help.

When the emergency services arrived at the scene, there was no sign of the lady, and no trace of blood. The damage on the man's car had also apparently disappeared.

In the words of Bess - from whose perspective the book is written - the piece concludes with: "Had I been trying to track the infamous Ghost Lady of Bluebell Hill?"

Seeking confirmation of the details of his account (particularly the estimated age of the woman), I managed to get in touch with Ted Wright late in September 1994. First of all, he confirmed that the incident he had attended had indeed taken place in 1974. Although quite naturally he could not remember the name of the driver, the incident itself was clear enough. He had been called out to the scene between 2.30 a.m. and 3 a.m. It was still dark. It was not raining, at least not at the time he conducted his search, which refutes the idea that scent from the victim or her tracks could have been obliterated before the police arrived.¹⁸

As Ted indicated in his book, Bess (described as an outstanding dog) did detect scent on Maurice Goodenough's car rug, but it only led back towards the road (no trace at all was found in any other direction away from the spot), from where, of course, Goodenough had moved the girl in the first place. A possible scent trace given off by the woman would therefore have been confused or masked by that of Goodenough himself and, subsequently, the police investigators, who would have inevitably approached the article from the same direction).

Something that did strike Ted as odd was the arrangement of the car rug. It lay quite literally on top of the grass. There was, he said, no indentation, no impression in the grass beneath to suggest it had borne the weight of a body - something that is plainly inconsistent with his version as to how Goodenough moved his victim to the roadside. Conflicting with newspaper versions which suggest Goodenough carried his victim to the grass verge and then covered her with his car rug (in which case, the discarded rug might well be found lying 'on top' of the grass), Ted said that he had in fact laid the rug on the road next to the woman (who was quite definitely described by the motorist as a young woman) and then carefully rolled her onto it before proceeding to kind of drag her carefully to the safety of the verge.¹⁹ Inevitably, some sign of disturbance or crushing of the grass beneath the rug and on the perimeter of the grass strip nearest the road should have been evident.

Goodenough's initial reaction was described as distraught. However, when the police search reveal absolutely no sign of an accident, let alone the fatality they expected to find, Goodenough's state of panic turned to confused embarrassment. With no lead to go on, the investigation was wound down fairly quickly.

The most valuable aspect of Ted Wright's information is possibly the revised age estimate of Maurice Goodenough's victim - not the child as reported by the newspapers, but a young woman. If we accept this as the true estimate given by Goodenough, Ted Wright’s version eliminates a major discrepancy between the Goodenough incident and the 1965 crash victims. It would also tally, as we shall see next (along with the uncannily similar pattern of behaviour of the 'ghost')  with the age estimate given by Ian Sharpe in 1992, and another witness who was to shortly take to the Blue Bell Hill stage...

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