Lydney Docks haunted? (General)

by peteressex , Sunday, October 24, 2010, 20:18 (5149 days ago) @ J Thorne

Thanks for that. I have been looking into it further today (not wanting to leave it till any closer to Hallowe'en!) and found two traces of the story.

1. On www.paranormaldatabase.com there are three entries about Lydney ghosts. One of them, far from reporting a headless spectre, includes "Man without legs - Lydney, Docks area - 1934: one of the witnesses to this ghost reported that the misty figure wore a long raincoat and hat, but his legs were not there. The phantom would dissolve away if anyone moved too close. Many believed the entity was a man hanged on the docks after being found guilty murdering a girl on nearby marshland." With reference to the Naas Lane aspect now recalled, I suppose the river end of Naas Lane comes reasonably within "docks area", and of course the land down gets marshy. The other two entries on that website refer to the appearance of a child's footprints overnight in some bonding resin on an industrial unit (Pine End, possibly?)from which kids were banned, and to muffled heartbeats at Paisley House.

2. BBC Gloucestershire has a midday series fronted by Pete Wilson who on 09/05/2010 apparently interviewed an old Lydney skipper, Mike Meredith-Edwards, and the contents included "the Lydney Ghost". Unfortunately the programme only remained available for listening on line for 7 days after the broadcast, but I suppose we might be able to get more detail from BBC archives.

It also occurs to me that there was a fatal crash between a train and a skip lorry at Naas Lane crossing (often then used as a short cut to the docks from the Tutnalls direction) on 01/03/1979 in which the lorry driver was decapitated and the locomotive driver and secondman also died. Bert Sterrey was born in 1908 and died in 1991. I speculate that any idea of a headless ghost in or near Naas Lane could, in Bert's latter years, have stemmed from that. However, now that I see a story of leglessness, I also think that if Bert had reported such a spook it would have given rise to enduring mirth and recital in the family, given his reputed fondness for the sauce.

Watch this space - something might fill it!