Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/337

Rh lady who walks along a retired passage in that mansion, her dress rustling as she moves on. But the Willington ghost is perhaps the most remarkable among them, and I am disposed to give its history somewhat at length. It attracted much notice at the time, hundreds of people crowding day after day to visit the place of its appearance. And a good deal of information respecting it has been kindly supplied to me by a son of the owner of the property, who permits me to state that he corroborates the following facts, his family being at the time they lived in the haunted house too young to perceive the supernatural character of what they saw and heard.

The steam corn-mill at Willington with its adjacent dwelling-house were built A.D. 1800. In 1806 the premises were purchased by Messrs. Unthank and Procter, the latter gentleman being father to the present owner; and in 1831 Mr. Joseph Procter, the present owner, a member of the Society of Friends, went to reside in the house with his wife. It was not till three years after this that they began to be molested by what is popularly called the Willington Ghost. I may observe at the outset that the house and mill are detached and that there is no cellaring under the former. Both stand on a little promontory bordered on three sides by a watercourse in full view of the Willington viaduct on the Newcastle and Tynemouth Railway.

The first annoyance was from strange and unaccountable sounds. When the servants went in the evening to fasten the garden gate they heard footsteps behind them, but could see no one. Then the master used to hear a noise as of something heavy descending from the roof and falling through floor after floor, with a heavy thump upon each till it reached the bottom of the house. Again there would be a commotion in the kitchen, as if the things in it were moved and thrown about, but on going down stairs the master would be relieved on finding it was “only the ghost,” as the disturber of their peace began to be familiarly called.

One night the peculiar creak and squeaking of a certain water-cart was heard by Thomas Mann, the foreman at the mill, so that he felt sure it was being dragged out of the yard, but on