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.