Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/336

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HE universal voice of mankind has ever pointed out certain places as the borderland between the material and the spiritual world—has, truly or falsely, indicated deserted houses, marshy wastes, lonely roads, spots where enormous crimes have been perpetrated, and so forth, as haunted. In general, places which once were closely connected with man, but are now deserted by him, are thus distinguished in the popular mind, rather than those which have always been barren and desolate. It is natural then that with a past rich in historic incidents of the wildest kind haunted spots should abound in the North. Time would fail me to count them, nor could I by isolated instances give my readers a notion of the extent to which my native county is crowded by these shadowy beings. Almost every ancient barn, every cross road, every county mansion, is or has been haunted. Not many years back our squirearchy would have evinced some sense of shame had not every old family its ancestral ghost, nay, many of our yeomen claimed the same distinction.

Thus we have one haunted house at Willington Dene, another at North Shields, and a third at Chester-le-Street; Crook Hall, near Durham, has its “White Ladie,” South Biddick Hall its shadowy tenant Madam Lambton, and Netherby Hall a rustling