In January 1993, reports started to come in of a wholly different kind of character encountered on Blue Bell Hill. In the early hours of 5 and 6 January, two families travelling home encountered a frightening figure that crossed their path at the same spot on a dark, remnant stretch of the Old Chatham Road - the former main route between Maidstone and Chatham before the construction of the current A229 in the early 1970s, and which now, as a feeder road, runs parallel for a short distance before joining the faster route further uphill.
When Claire Ogley of the Kent Today first called me to ask if I had ever heard of a ghost of an old woman being seen on Blue Bell Hill, I answered 'no'. I then asked her what she knew. The menacing witch-like apparition she described sounded too bizarre, too fairytale-like to be true - except that, at that time, one family, very much frightened by the experience, had come forward to say that it had happened to them...
The Maiden family's
experience had taken place at around 12.45am on 6 January on their journey
home to Rochester following a night out. The account given here differs
in minor detail from the original Kent Today version.1
It was, for
instance, a clear, cold night - far from the foggy conditions described in the newspaper account.
The location also differed - not the Chatham-bound carriageway of
the A229 - but a section of the lonely backwater route just to the west
that, in the past, had featured in at least one account involving the
ghost-girl.
There were five people in the car: Angela Maiden, her husband Malcolm (who was driving), Mrs Maiden's mother, her young daughter and a family friend. The daughter was asleep, but everyone else witnessed the event.
The family had come up from Aylesford, turning northward onto the Old Chatham Road at the Lower Bell crossroads (a location, again, that features as a reputed 'picking up' point for the ghostly girl hitch-hiker in the early history of the case). Some 300 yards (275m) further up, at Kit's Coty Cottage, the road makes a sweeping bend to the right. As the car started to turn into the bend, the Maidens saw a figure start across the road from right to left in front of them. Mr Maiden immediately slowed down.
"At first I thought it was [somebody in] a fancy dress costume," said Mrs Maiden. "It was wearing a long dress, very old-fashioned, that stopped mid-calf. It had a tartan shawl round the top and a bonnet with a brim." She remembered remarking to her husband: "Somebody's playing a prank."
But then the car's
headlights fully illuminated the figure. "It was like when you trap
a rabbit in your headlights. It stayed dazed, hunched over without
looking at us. As we got alongside it we were almost at a standstill.
All of a sudden it was 4ft [1.2m] away from the car. It rounded on us
really quickly and I saw the face. It was totally horrific...very small,
black beady eyes. It was like a wizened face. The worst thing of all was
the mouth. It opened and [it] was like an empty black hole.
"My mother was sitting directly behind me. At the same time I remember we said, 'Oh, my God.'"
With the figure's mouth agape, a hissing sound filled the car, even through the closed windows. The figure was carrying a spray of twigs, which it raised and shook threateningly. Mrs Maiden quickly engaged the car's central locking, instinctively bringing her arm up to protect herself.
With all this going on, Mr Maiden, panicking, was trying to get the car in gear to get away. As he did so, and started to pull away, Mrs Maiden's mother turned to watch the figure, which started toward the nearside kerb, where it seemed to vanish.
"My daughter woke up feeling a terrible atmosphere in the car. I couldn't talk; all you could hear was everyone breathing.
"I've never felt evil before and I've never been so terrified. I felt as if I had looked into the eyes of the Devil."
From folklore to...folklore
Brief encounters with ghosts are one thing, but such a nightmarish apparition is bound to raise suspicions of hoaxing. If so, it was a remarkably effective one: Mrs Maiden was unable to sleep for days after the experience and remained traumatized for some time afterward. She told the Kent Today that at such close range the car's occupants would have been able to tell if it had been wearing a mask or make-up. Neither did a thorough police search of the area following the incident yield any evidence of foul play. A spokesman could only warn that if it had been a hoax, the person(s) concerned were putting themselves and others at risk.2
However, the response to Kent Today's appeal for further accounts and my own inquiries were to suggest a less reassuring conclusion. The Kent Today received two further accounts from persons claiming past encounters with the creature that would come to be variously called the 'hag', the 'crone' or the 'witch' - the most impressive of which concerned another family who met 'her' at the spot just the night before the Maidens, on 5 January. A third reached me privately.
The sightings of the old woman inevitably gave rise to suggestions - and not for the first time - that Blue Bell Hill is haunted by more than one ghost. Researcher David Thomas, who has also looked at the case, heard that she might be 'Paraffin Lynn', an old woman apparently fitting the description who, it seemed, used to wander across the dual carriageway in the region of the modern (Shell) petrol station. Other versions hold her to be a gypsy woman who sold pegs, or a former Blue Bell Hill village resident of whom local children learned to be wary. Which is all very well. However, this particular figure - a frightening caricature - seems to resemble more the kind of non-human entity found in folklore.
And it is to folklore that we must turn to gain any kind of understanding of what is really happening at Blue Bell Hill. It has been demonstrated how 1992's 'Spectral Jaywalker' encounters obey the conventions set out in the Phantom Hitch-Hiker folk version that serves as the foundation of the case. It was also shown how the same PHH/Jaywalker 'script' is repeated around the country and indeed the world with an identical pattern of events being reported over and again by reliable witnesses: of figures rushing into the paths of vehicles, and/or of disappearing hitch-hikers - which suggest that it has less to do with any specific case and its accepted explanation - like Blue Bell Hill, for instance, and the 1965 tragedy - but, at the same time, more than purely 'human' factors such a imagination and hoaxing.
At Blue Bell Hill, we find the encounters with the old woman occurring at the same locations, within the same time frame (generally 11pm-1am, straddling the not infrequently reported time of midnight, the 'witching hour' - a time period in which many similar encounters occur), and in broad accordance with the behaviour of the ghost-girl. In the Hag encounters, the figure, like the ghost-girl, 'attracts the attention' of passing vehicles by standing in the middle of the road, but instead of hitching a lift and vanishing from the vehicle, or running into its path, it induces a deliberate and more profound horror through its onslaught of the vehicle's occupants.
It shouldn't be surprising, then, to find that the old woman, like the girl 'accident victim', should have its hitch-hiker counterpart. Indeed, the old woman and the girl could be regarded as the pedestrian counterparts of the PHH.
In 1942, American folklorists Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey formulated a four-part categorization of PHH types from a sample collected from across the United States. Briefly, they are: Versions A & C, which describe the 'home'-seeking habits of the young, fair-haired woman in white, which, as the most common descriptive form, we can readily equate with BBH's ghost-girl. Less well known are the other two versions. Version D (which will also be seen to some relevance), based on the basket-laden old woman in an Hawaiian account, is defined as a local deity, in this case the goddess Pelee. Version B, however, is said to take the form of a darkly prophetic old woman, frequently attired in dark clothing, who characteristically issues dire forecasts before vanishing. Interestingly, whereas the Version A PH is said to favour lone drivers in her appearances, the Version B prefers to appear to married couples or families. In the four accounts on record for the Hag at Blue Bell Hill, this convention is upheld: two families; and, in the remaining two episodes, the car had five occupants.
In his book, Michael Goss cites a German case as his primary example of the Version B Hitch-hiker: the experience of a 43-year-old businessman at Greifnau, near the border with Austria, in 1975. According to The News of the World (13 April 19753, the encounter caused a wave of hysteria in the local community, prompting the local police chief, Captain Siegfried Eismann, to threaten prosecutions and heavy fines for drivers who repeated the stories.
The witness, who is unnamed in the newspaper account, told a local newspaper that he was stopped at midnight by a person he took to be a hitch-hiker.
"She was a weird-looking old woman, dressed in black. She waved at me. So I stopped the car and she asked for a lift."
The woman took the seat next to him. Ignoring the witness's questions, she murmured that something evil would happen. When he looked next the woman had vanished. The shock was so great he almost crashed into an oncoming car.
Others claimed similar experiences. Some reported that the woman had vanished as they opened the car door; others that she had sat silently beside them before vanishing.
Itself strongly reminiscent of the German folktale of the little basket-carrying old woman who climbs uninvited on farmers' wagons as they drive home alone at night, the Greifnau encounter leads us to ponder what might have befallen the Maidens at Blue Bell Hill had they responded to the old woman's beckoning and stopped to offer her a lift instead of fleeing at the sound of her scalding hiss.
And 'she' crops up again and again elsewhere, in folklore and 'fact' - for instance, in a figure said to haunt the lanes around Longridge in Lancashire. In this case, the old woman seen hobbling along in her shawl and bonnet, and carrying a basket under her arm, is said to walk quietly alongside persons trying to pass her, before turning suddenly on her companions, revealing the absence of a head inside her bonnet. Her head then leaps from the basket, 'shrieking with demonic laughter' as it chases the appalled and terrified victim down the lane.4 In a less fanciful account from the West Country, the old gypsy woman staggers across the Bath to Bradford-on-Avon road at Sally-in-the-Wood, a spot renowned for vehicles plunging off the road.5
With their precise reflection in the PHH folk versions, and their noted similarities in behaviour, it should be apparent that Blue Bell Hill's girl-in-white and the old woman are not distinct entities that just happen to haunt the same spots, at similar times, and in broadly similar manner, but are facets of the same phenomenon. This duality (or polarity) in form - young girl and old hag, light and dark, benign and hostile - is plainly demonstrated elsewhere, in the misty realms of folklore and myth (where the two, while sometimes appearing singly, are frequently portrayed as expressions of the same character, frequently hostile toward or beguiling of lonely travellers), and in a case that hints at what the Blue Bell Hill encounters may really be about.
Following the eruption of Mount St Helens in May 1980, police in Washington State (USA) received reports concerning a 'ghastly old woman', who prophesied a further upheaval that was to occur a month afterward. In later encounters, in which the predicted disaster was postponed until the following October, the hitch-hiking phantom took the form of an attractive female in a white gown.6
Hekate on the Hill
Folklore (and world folklore, at that) - as I have suggested, is replete with such characters, many of which bear more than a passing similarity to the two aspects and habits of the Blue Bell Hill 'ghost'.7 However, their best recognition is found in Celtic and pre-Celtic mythology, in the Cailleach of the Scottish Highlands (or in Ireland and the Isle of Man, the Caillaigh or Cailleac), the tutelary earth or mother goddess, and most especially, in the form of Hekate, the Dark Goddess of early Greek tradition.
The Cailleach was an ancient figure of wisdom and supernatural power who was commonly depicted as a hooded crone or hag (caille meaning hood or veil, the title itself lending itself to interpretation as hooded hag or, interestingly in terms of the PHH comparisons, veiled nun (not just as a Version B feature, but now also Version D), representing the transition, through Christianisation, from pagan goddess or semideity into nun).8
Her common depiction as the personification of winter, and her triple form of Virgin9, Mother, Crone (or the Woman Who Devours Men), representing seasonality and the nurturing and hostile faces of nature, have clear relevance to the forms and timing of appearances at Blue Bell Hill (frequently given as 'winter'). In some traditions, she is depicted as transforming into a beautiful girl.
But it is the Cailleach's role as a spirit of place or genius loci that has particular relevance to our discussion regarding Blue Bell Hill. We can note, for instance, that many Scottish mountains, regarded as places of sanctity - where the veil between this world and the next grows thin - were said to have their own personal hag as guardian.
Other high places and sacred spots preserve the tradition. And so, in the Celtic world, in addition we find her connected with caves, and with springs and rivers, and dolmens and ‘fairy mounds’ (today's Neolithic sites) - traditionally sites supporting tales of ghosts, fairies, and other elemental entities, and again something in common with Blue Bell Hill and its prehistoric hilltop 'necropolis'.
Thus, in Ireland, amongst other names, she goes by the ancient name of Aine or Ana or Anu; in other parts, such as the High Peaks, Th'Owd Woman; in still others, as Gentle Annie, Black Annis25, or simply the Mother. Or, in other traditions, by other names, for instance, Hawaii's basket-laden mother goddess, Pelee.
And it isn't all legend and myth. Some even suggest that, like Blue Bell Hill, the crone has been seen in modern times, such as on the hilltop road at Loxley Ford, near Bicknoller in Somerset as recently as 1950.10
Turning to early Greek tradition, to the pre-Olympian earth goddess Hekate, we find further eerie echoes of Blue Bell Hill’s dark ghost. Like the Cailleach, Hekate (Hecate in Latin) has been featured as one aspect of the primordial triple-goddess: Maiden (Hekate), Bride (Persephone), and Mother (Demeter).11 In the most ancient depictions, she is portrayed as a ‘bright-coiffed’ girl or young woman, in keeping with her function as attendant12, guide and guardian - a role demonstrated most famously by her leading of Persephone back from Hades to her mother, Demeter, after hearing her cries from her cave dwelling.13 (As with the Cailleach, it is difficult to overlook here the apt comparison to Blue Bell Hill’s own triple set of Young Girl (Maiden), Young Woman (Bride (or Bride-to-be?)/Mother), and Hag (Crone/Mother)).
Thus, her image and sanctuaries were erected at doorways and gateways, to ward off outside evils.14 Similarly - and significantly in terms of our interest - as ‘goddess of the crossway’ (crossroads)15, and protectress of roads, her three-headed or three-faced likeness was set up to watch over and act as a guide to travellers.
But it is Hekate’s transformed later guise that finds greatest recognition here. For from c.400 BC (and particularly since Roman Times), the darker aspects of Hekate’s character became dominant. And along with her changed character and function, came a wholly different and frightening image. Instead of the youthful, benevolent goddess - we find instead perhaps the quintessential expression of the evil supernatural hag - a terrifying chthonic goddess of magic, of the waning (dark) moon, the night, and death.
Known variously as the Crone Goddess, Goddess of witches, the Veiled One16, Goddess of Midnight, Queen of the Night, and Queen of Restless Ghosts, this Hekate was said to walk the highways of night (particularly at the dark of the moon), crowned wih coils of wild snakes (connecting her to divination or prophecy - a Version B characteristic) and wielding ‘terrible black torches’.17 With her wandered a train of fearful ghosts: deceased humans18, apparitions and dogs. Since crossroads were associated with her, these especially became the realm of these ‘outcast and accursed spirits’19, which, in many cultures were said to include the restless spirits of suicides, those who had suffered a sudden or violent death, or those who had died childless.20 Some of these spirits merely frightened men; others were said to bring bad dreams, illness or madness.21
Significantly, perhaps, Hekate’s chief feast day is 16 November (the Night of Hekate) - a date, as much as the anniversary of the 1965 tragedy, neatly straddled by the two main ghostly encounters on Blue Bell Hill in 1992.22
As the notes to this chapter attest, the folklore and mythology relating to these Mother Goddess figures have hidden depths and meaning for the real-life encounters at Blue Bell Hill and elsewhere. But while we shouldn't be too specific and overlook the wider body of folklore that shares relevant features with our Phantom Hitch-hiker or Jaywalker accounts - and here I am thinking broadly of Professor Kirk's mischievous, sometimes malicious elementals [see Introduction] (whose form and behaviour in today's fashion we might interpret as ghostly23) - it is the Cailleach/Hekate - the Hag, call her what you will - and her role as an arch-spirit of nature, a personification of the Earth itself - which, at Blue Bell Hill at least, provides a key to possibly understanding, if not the mechanism of what people see there - why they see the precise form and behaviour the phenomenon exhibits - then perhaps, something of the 'why here/why now?' aspect of the appearances. For emerging from my own research, and hard to overlook in other examples, is the correlation between 'road-ghost' outbreaks and environmental disturbance. The answer, if answer it is, is more complex than can be presented here, but it would seem to be related to the major construction works at the foot of Blue Bell Hill (at junction 6 of the M20/A229), which commenced in the spring of 1992 and carried on through the sightings period. Published rumours (and sightings?) similarly surrounded the construction of the current A229 over Blue Bell Hill in the early 1970s. And we can look to other road-building schemes haunted by similar events (Stocksbridge, 1987; Newbury, 1996), and, of course, back to the Mt St Helens case above.
What has gone unanswered is why we should see apparently objective manifestations and what it is that dictates that they obey such consistent form and behaviour. This aspect of the sightings, as related to Jung's concept of the personified unconscious was examined briefly in this website's Introduction. Further detail can be found under Road Ghosts - Mechanism.
Since
1993 - things
have been blissfully uneventful at Blue Bell Hill (at least so far as
publicized accounts are concerned). At time of writing (April 2001) -
amidst the construction of the overland Channel Tunnel Rail-Link (which
will complete the first fast service route between Paris and London) and
its tunnel beneath Blue Bell Hill; and the active phase of the M2
motorway-widening scheme - might we anticipate a new phase of indignant protest by the Hill's 'ghost(s)'?
Or might we expect in later years to
hear reports concerning a ghostly young woman, or a malevolent old crone
- the goddess herself - seen trying to flag down or even throwing
herself under the locomotive of one of the Eurostar trains as it enters
or emerges from the tunnel under Blue Bell Hill?
