Found Fridayish

I missed Found Friday (and Weird Wednesday, which is unheard of), so I've been rummaging among my pix again. Here I am in 1987 lurking around a bunch of small boys, hands in pockets, sporting a huge beard and a Fergal Sharkey-style 'snorkel' parka. How creepy do I look? (Answers on a post card). This was actually my first job after leaving uni - working as an historical/researcher and guide for school parties at Bersham Heritage Centre near Wrexham. The guy next to me is Tim Pearce, who did the cover artwork for both Supernatural and Haunted Clwyd. Nice chap, sorry we lost touch.

Spooky Sunday

This is the local haunted site to me, Deborah's Well, a mile or so from the centre of Gwernaffield in Flintshire towards Cadole. The site is a bit of a mystery: how long it's been named after the legendary Deborah and how genuine a historical character she was remains elusive to me. Although Deborah's Well is considered the local area's top spooky site, I have only ever been able to find one written record of a ghost allegedly being seen here and that took place in the 1970s.

This sighting was reported in The Chronicle newspaper and involved a couple stopping their car near Deborah's Well so that the man could answer a call of nature. While he was behind a tree hsi wife saw the apparition of a woman with her hair on fire. The witness ran to find her husband and dropped her handbag while doing so. The fact that the couple then drove away, leaving behind the bag , is the detail presented to give assurance to the truth of the encounter. The police retrieved the bag the morning after, we're told, to find the lady's £90 cash still inside it.

Deborah is supposed to have been a 6th century woman running some sort of hospice nearby. I'm rather dubious about this, simply because we know so little of Dark Age hospices or nunneries. Or indeed anything from the 6th century. The tale has it that the hospice was burnt to the ground and Deborah perished in the flames - hence the appearance of the ghost.

I discovered Deborah's Well almost immediately after Haunted Clwyd came out in 1992. I was embarrassed about its omission at the time because so many people seemed to consider it a well-known haunted spot, one I should have known about. So I was quite relieved when I looked into it and found there was just this one story attached to the place (although that one yarn has proved quite sufficient for the kids growing up here in the 80s/90s to view the site as desperately haunted). I would like to know more about the putative Dark Age hospice, though. If genuine, that would be interesting indeed.

Spooky Sunday

During the spooky converations at The Sportsman's Arms I also met a lady who used to run the Pwll Gwyn pub along the A541 Mold-Denbigh Road.

When I interviewed the then current landlady here for my 1992 book Haunted Clwyd, I was told the building stood on foundations of a medieval hostelry servicing pilgrims to St Winefride's Well at Holywell. This information was used as an explanation for the apparition of a monk allegedly seen sitting in the dining room, often in daylight.

The woman I spoke to in the Sportsman's Arms, who was landlady up until the late 1980s, denied any medieval hostory for the building, saying that as far as she was aware it had always been a coaching inn belonging to nearby Maesmynan Hall (I gathered the owner of the Hall kept his own horses stabled there, too). She also knew nothing about a ghostly monk but certainly experienced a spooky presence about the place, especially on the first floor. The publicans I spoke to prior to 1992 had also spoken about an eerie presence upstairs.

But what this lady added to the mix was a phenomenon that may be unique and greatly engaged my interest. Although they saw no appairition duign their time as licencees, she and her husband (and staff) did get used to ciming into the dining room on occasions and finding little piles of salt had been mysteriously appeared on various surfaces overnight. Very neat and tidy, pyramidal piles they were, and the source of the salt was also a mystery.

Salt, of course, is a substance seen as sacred in many cultures, representing purity in the Christian religion (and capable of banishing evil spirits). The dining room, of course, is the room where the monk was seen in later years - was 'he' responsible for placing the salt?