The Garstang Ghost

September 1881. The place was Garstang, in Lancashire. The press would call it simply the haunted lane. One secondary account says the postman was on his way to collect mail from the night train. No one ever recorded his name. No one recorded the exact night either. What survives is the newspaper story, and that story travelled fast.

He was walking a lonely road near the village, absorbed in his work. Then a ghost "stopped his way and warned him with many mysterious signs not to continue in his present courses." The postman did not argue. He "at once turned tail and fled."

He carried away a clear picture of what he had met. "Abnormal stature, a horrid pallor of hue, and a variety of terror striking gestures." Reports say he resigned his post rather than walk that route again.

The figure was not finished with the lane. A young woman of the district was out there at evening. Her "affrighted eyes beheld the ghost." It stood "of fearsome height, clothed in white," and she later declared it was "performing portentous movements with its arms."

She threw her apron over her head and ran home. Then she went straight to bed. The paper noted that she had stayed there since, "in proof of the truth of her story."

Garstang answered in the Victorian way. A large group of young men took to the streets, patrolling in an attempt to apprehend the ghost. No source records what they found. The press took up the story. The Staffordshire Sentinel carried it around 5 September. The Star printed "A Ghost Story" on 8 September. The Preston Chronicle ran "The Ghost at Garstang" on 10 September. The Illustrated Police News published an engraving, reported as "The Palpitating Postman", showing him dropping his letters as the giant spectre looms over him. On 21 September the Lancaster Gazette ran one last headline. "Disappearance of the Garstang Ghost."

The reporter called the facts "sufficiently authenticated," yet wrote with a smirk. He blamed spiritualism for the recent run of hauntings, picturing the modern spirit reduced to "beating tambourines or tweaking noses at a dark séance."

A tall white figure waving its arms in a dark lane. Local patrols. A sudden disappearance. The pattern fits the Victorian prankster ghosts, like the Hammersmith Ghost of 1803. But no source names a hoaxer, and no confession is recorded. What the Lancaster Gazette finally concluded remains unread.

The case survives today through the Findmypast blog, Strange History and the Paranormal Database. The last tells a darker tale. A hooded woman, said to have been murdered on the bridge, stands by the roadside and reveals the white skull that is now her face. She chased a postman, it says, until he ran past a churchyard and she disappeared within. That version carries no date, and none of its details appear in the 1881 reports. The postman who met a white giant in a Lancashire lane has passed into legend.