I have always been captivated by ghost stories for a reason I can’t quite put my finger on. I don’t particularly enjoy being scared, although there is a nostalgic excitement that comes with it that’s very difficult to replicate. It’s the infatuation and sustained attention my mind meets ghostly tales with. It’s the liberating feeling of knowing there is no hard evidence or factual data to strike off your imagination. Stories that thrive off participation, that crave involvement and intimacy. There is something deeply human about a ghost story. Voices and stories enriching a place with a specific identity and tangibility. Voices and stories that exist freely, away from the binds of a textbook or academic curriculum.
Why, in our increasingly secular world do we still walk around with a tale or two ready and waiting at our lips. Still hesitant about walking upstairs after you’ve turned off the downstairs light on your way to bed. Weary of the buildings that seem to penetrate your gut, warning you to stay away if you knew what was best for you.
Why do we not seem to grow apart from ghost stories and folk tales like we do fairy tales as children? Rather, they seem to grow with us, ever expanding as the world around us expands too.
Despite the tight grip we have on the traditional ghost story, it seems their significance as collective histories has been lost. Our understanding of ghost stories and folklore has been eaten away by disenchanting neoliberalist cultures that commercialise ghostly tales and folklore, while the actual social histories of the communities producing these stories remain overlooked. The question, ‘do you believe’, sits at the forefront of any conversation about ghosts and folklore. Usually, with the aim of exposing a weirdo amongst the group to poke fun at for daring to look beyond the material conditions curated by a consumerist, capitalist society. In reality, it is a question that is so deeply personal and by extension, so deeply political. It is often said that true belief comes from experience, you have to see it to believe it. But what if you feel it? Deep in your core when you see a community crumbling around you. What if you hear it? Ricocheting across the mouths of local grafters and pub-goers. What if your understanding of ghosts and folklore has been distorted by images of Ouija boards, infrared cameras, groups of keenos meeting in a cellar at night to discuss the brevity of each-others cold shivers. What if this image makes you think the locals are a bit loopy, scuttling round telling you about old goblins down the mines or a spirit called Beryl who has a bit of fun turning the tap on occasionally down the local pub. What if these stories are deeply rooted in our culture as a means of survival. Of making sense of the dangers of labour. Of clinging onto our heritage before it is erased. Maybe you would think about what believing really means.
Jeannie Banks Thomas put this tension to rest in a beautiful manner. “Our DNA makes us ghosts of our ancestors.. we are the shadows of who they were.”
We live amongst ghosts whether we believe in them or not, whether we can see them or not. Their voices are part of our cultural make-up and their stories dictate how we navigate our corner of the world. They name our streets and give meaning to architectural structures. They help us make sense of the chaos around us by making our history tangible – a history we have seldom had the pleasure in telling ourselves. The whole of human history is essentially an intricate web of stories that interweave throughout oral and material connections. There are certain things in many stories that are simply unfathomable and do not make sense. We have a way of coming to terms with such things, of making sense of them. Of surviving.
Antonio Gramsci understood folklore as a serious conception of the world and of life held by oppressed or lower classes. An essential branch of oral history that assisted in navigating the past and the present, helping us understand why we are here, where we are and who is here with us. It is on the ground knowledge and interpretation, unfiltered and unabridged, passed down through generations. But what happens when we consider the ghosts and stories that inhabit our own corners of the world? The ones that have made homes in the disused collieries of Yorkshire, the abandoned docklands of Hull, the old Mills of Lancashire, and the pubs and clubs that are hanging on by a very dear thread. The folkloric traditions of our working-class communities were once the living tissue of industry, a vital tool of survival, designed to protect when industries wouldn’t. What is left now, the ghost story, is the scar tissue. It is what remains after the living tissue has been ripped away by deindustrialisation and gentrification. After we stop breathing life into our cultural histories and remembering them as human. All that is left are eerie physical vacuums of once pulsating spaces of life, and the ghost story – the final, stubborn residue of a culture fighting to be remembered.
As I’ve travelled through the shifting landscapes of the North, drifting between the raw brick of new and hollow shells of old, I found myself yearning for a ghost story. Not just because it is Halloween, but because I wanted to feel connected to the lives that once thrived in the rotting concrete and rusted iron buildings that hem our hometowns. I want to know what happens to local identity when the furnace goes cold. How does a community survive its own erasure, and how have the working-class shaped their identity in the quiet, haunted spaces left behind when the work itself has gone.
There have been many ghostly sightings across the pits and coilers of Yorkshire. Their hollowed out, rusting frames like headstones, monuments to the thousands of lives claimed by disaster, and the communities that built themselves up around them. Walton Pit, West Yorkshire, saw a huge explosion of methane gas kill a number of miners working in the late 1950s. A tragedy almost routine in the labour of the mining industry. Right up until the closure of the pit in 1979, workers claimed to have spotted figures standing over them whilst waking from a nap, before disappearing into the depths of the pit, glowing light in hand. Electricians reported phantasmic clangs and hurried footsteps belonging to the lone phantom worker. “Once you saw him, you never went down again.”
Similar sightings have been recorded in Barnsley where in the 1850s, multiple workers lost their lives. Their clothing and equipment giving away their historical identity. And South Yorkshire, where disembodied boots walk the lengths of the pit towards the deep underground.
Armley Mills, Leeds, is supposedly home to the ghost of a child. His scurrying footsteps weaving through the residual, unnerving clatters of ethereal machinery that permanently stain the brickwork, reclaiming the reality of human identity in a vast industrial space.
Whether you believe in these sightings or not, the stories behind them ring deafeningly true. We do not keep ghost stories alive because we are afraid of the dead. We keep them alive because we refuse to let the living pretend our history never happened. Ghosts are our inheritance, our memory, our past and our present.
Ghost stories do not have to be isolated tales from abandoned places. There are many pubs across the North that still make room at the bar for a forgotten voice to be heard. The Manchester Arms, Hull, is frequented by a friendly spirit by the name of Beryl. She made the pub in the backstreets of Hull’s Old Town her stomping ground over 100 years ago. She likes to flicker the lights, faff around with machines, and even play with people’s hair. Despite reports that she has on the odd occasion been the perpetrator behind minor floods, her presence is reassuring, one that reminds the locals that there can be comfort in death, that you can enjoy the simple pleasures in life and not be forgotten, and that there will be a tab open for you at the bar for the rest of eternity.
But perhaps we are too quick to describe these places as lost and forgotten. The history of the North is rather persistent. Stories of the macabre radiate from our landscape, inspiring artists, writers, and musicians from across the globe, all trying to make sense of our fragmented land and its ghostly qualities. They are told over kitchen tables in the recollections of a Grandad who spent forty years underground, guided by the ever-glowing light of Bluecap the goblin; in the songs sung in pubs, and in the peculiar local legends that have survived long after the buildings in which they were born have disappeared. Our industrial landscapes are haunted, certainly, but not necessarily by the women in black and contortionist demons. They are haunted by people, by lives, by our history. Their stories are not always found in archives, nor are they always recorded in the histories we are taught to recognise as culturally significant. Sometimes they survive only as fragments, embellished recollections, folklore, whispers passed between generations.
So, what do we do with it? How do we keep these stories alive for longer than one evening in October?
There has been a lot of attention directed at the concept of ghost stories and folklore as we have begun searching deeper for local identities in the wake of mass digitalisation and the rise of social media. Of how much can be uncovered and reclaimed about our local identities by looking in the places that have been boarded up and left to decay. Creative practices like photography and experimental sound have been reimagining the lives once lived in these spaces by engaging with them, creating a timeless vacuum of collective experiences. Old factories are becoming home to studio spaces and creative hubs, where artists are rebuilding and reclaiming community. Ghosts and their stories play an overlooked but central role in this action as raw and real material; real voices, real experiences, and real, tangible histories that are invaluable to creative practices.
25 Francis Street in Hull, home to Hinterland Creative and Atelier 8, an old factory in the centre of Hull, has been transformed with the support of HARI into an ecosystem of creativity, where the building itself is a part of artistic production. Maister House, once an 18th century merchant’s house in Hull’s Old Town, now operates as a music school where you can often find artists like Stewart Baxter engaging with its histories through experimental sound, bringing its historical structures to life and the voices that were left stagnant in its walls for generations.
Folklore has found new life in publications including Bog People: A Working-Class Anthology of Folk Horror, edited by Hollie Starling, which exposes just how often seemingly forgotten tales and rituals feed into our current ways of living and making sense of our world.
Saltburn and North Yorkshire based artist collective H.A.G.S use ceramics, weaving, illustration, and painting to give life to North Yorkshire folklore, including witches, coastal myths, and working-class legends through a contemporary feminist lens. These stories are more than just old wives’ tales, they are the building blocks of our communities, encapsulating vital tools for reconstructing and reconnecting with our landscape and the rules we navigate it by.
The only way to cling on to these vital, unwritten histories, is to live with them. Fill your lungs with them, feel them around you, let them direct your imagination, allow them to connect you to the people around you, whether they are living or not. Death is a fascinating thing that has a peculiar way of breathing life into stories. How communities have made sense of such an unfathomable reality forms the basis of not only how they once lived, but how they continue to navigate the world around them. Perhaps our ghosts are not simply remnants of lives that have passed, but companions in the lives we are still making.
Maybe it is time to put down your phone and venture through the landscape hidden behind it. Listen to the stories of strangers, feel the energy in run-down parts of town, and most importantly, look out for that unsuspecting flicker of a shadow in the corner of your eye. But don’t be scared. There is a story waiting there, and it demands your curiosity.