Stray Notes on Oxfordshire Folklore.
(Continued from Vol. XIII., p. 295.)
III. Ghosts.
Mrs. Hannah Wells of Bampton, now eighty-one years of age, tells the following tales: When she was a girl of fourteen a farmer, called George Andrews, was riding along the Clanfield Road past Cowleys Corner when he passed a sow with a litter of pigs. These made such a noise it frightened the horse, and in trying to stop him the farmer saw what appeared to him to be a wool-pack, which went rolling over and over along the fields from the Corner, till it at last vanished into the fish-pond near the Lady Well at Ham Court. About the same time a shepherd, called Charles Taylor, had been setting his fold. When coming along this road he turned to look for his dog and saw that he was in company of a man, quite naked. He was much frightened, but the naked man vanished. Many different "things" had been seen at Cowleys Corner, and the old folks, as Hannah Wells remembers, used to go and dig in the bank by the roadside, thinking there were money and things hidden there, but nothing was ever found within her memory.—(May, 1894.)
[Dr. J. A. Giles, writing in 1848,[1] says that Cowleas Corner was formerly the place where, "at dead of night and by torchlight," suicides used to be buried. "Apparitions" were seen there, which sometimes "vanished in the shape of a calf, sheep, or other rustic animal;" another time "an old man" appeared to a belated traveller, "dressed in a low-crowned hat and a light-coloured foul-weather great-coat, such as the shepherds of this neighbourhood are known to wear." This apparition, like the last, kept always the same distance from the observer, and at length turned into a field near the Manor House (otherwise known as Ham Court) and took the shape of a calf. Another traveller saw "something like a flash of lightning" pass "rapidly before his eyes. He had no time to observe its form, in consequence of the swiftness of its motion. A loud noise followed, and the ghost . . . . glided backwards and forwards with the
- ↑ History of Bampton, 2nd ed., pp. 69-72.
