The Haunting of HMS Asp

1850. George Manley Alldridge took command of HMS Asp, a small paddle packet. The dockyard superintendent greeted him with a half joke. "Do you know, sir, your ship is said to be haunted?" Within a week the shipwrights asked to be taken off the job.

The ship lay at anchor more than a mile offshore. Every night the after cabin stirred. It sounded like a drunk man stumbling and falling. Lockers banged, drawers opened and decanters and tumblers clashed together. The only way in was the companion ladder, in sight of the mess, yet searches found no one.

Then came the touches. Alldridge felt "a hand, to all sensations, being placed on my leg outside the bedclothes." Another time, "a hand was placed on my forehead." He grabbed at it and rang for the quartermaster. Nobody was there.

At anchor in Martyn Roads, the look-out man rushed to the lower deck. A figure of a lady, he said, was standing on the paddle box, pointing with her finger to Heaven. Ordered back on deck, he went into convulsions. Several men deserted or asked to be discharged, and all described "the transparent figure of a lady pointing with her finger up to Heaven." Near Lawrenny one Sunday, the steward was alone aboard when an unseen voice spoke to him on the companion ladder, and he fell down in fright.

Mr Phillips, the clergyman of Lawrenny, questioned the crew. His story: the Asp had once been a mail packet between Portpatrick and Donaghadee. After one crossing, the stewardess found "a beautiful girl with her throat cut" in the ladies' cabin. Neither victim nor killer was ever identified.

In 1857 the vessel needed repairs and was ordered alongside the dockyard wall at Pembroke. On the first night a sentry saw a female figure mount the paddle-box, holding up her hands towards the heavens, and step on shore. She came along the path towards him, and he brought his musket to the charge. "Who goes there?" She walked through his musket, and he dropped it and ran to the guard house.

A second sentry saw her and fired to raise the alarm. A third stood near the ruins of Pater old Church. He watched the figure mount a grave in the old churchyard and stand pointing up to heaven, until she gradually vanished out of sight. Afterwards none would remain at their post unless they were doubled. She was never reported aboard again.

Alldridge wrote it all down years later. One printing dates his letter 15 March 1867. Rev. C. Douglas of Pembroke passed it to the Pembroke Dock and Tenby Gazette in 1868. "Here end my tale, which I have given in all truth," Alldridge wrote. He called himself a sceptic about ghost stories.

No guard book or Admiralty record of the alarm has surfaced. Nor has any record of the murder. Sceptics point to the years between event and telling, and to the ship's earlier reputation. The BBC series Uncanny asks whether isolation and cabin fever played a part. Historian Richard Sugg, writing in History Today in 2015, took the opposite view, counting it among the well-witnessed hauntings that moved him away from scepticism.

Jonathan Ceredig Davies placed the story in Folk-Lore of West and Mid-Wales in 1911. Rita Singer of Aberystwyth University retold it in 2023. Danny Robins took the case to BBC Radio 4. Some modern sites call it an official Royal Navy record. It is a private letter from a serving officer, offered in his words as a "true account."