The Lower Gornal Churchyard Ghost Scare, 1881

Lower Gornal sits near Dudley and Sedgley, in what was then Staffordshire. Its vicar was the Rev. James Yates Rooker, who had served the parish of St James's since 1848.

Friday 8 August 1879. Shortly before 10 a.m. Rooker stopped for a friendly chat with Charles Hartland, a chorister and former choir leader. Then he stepped into Jabez Addenbrooke's grocery shop on The Green. Hartland was the only other person inside. Shots were fired from the shop doorway.

"Blood gushed from my mouth and nose," Rooker later testified. PC Wright caught Hartland heading home to Ruiton. In 1877 Rooker had sat on the bench that jailed him, and now Hartland was in debt and blamed the vicar. At the Stafford Winter Assizes, Rooker asked for leniency. Hartland received twelve years' penal servitude.

Late 1881. For some weeks, rumours swept the village that ghosts were "walking about St. James's churchyard." Scores of people said they were seen there every night. The press named the ghost as "the convict Martland", the man who had tried to murder the Rev. J. Rooker. "The young women of the village choir refuse to go to practice in church without a strong escort," one report said on 10 December 1881.

Some said they had seen Hartland himself lurking in the churchyard. Others saw figures in the field between the vicarage and the churchyard, one performing strange antics. Ghostly voices were heard at night among the graves and in the vicarage yard. A local "wise woman" said the restless spirit was "moaning his woes in a ghastly voice."

The police were called in and watched the churchyard for several nights, but could not solve the mystery. Villagers feared the vicar would be murdered. "A band of young men pledged themselves to watch and inflict summary punishment on any person attempting to attack him or his family." In the dark they could not recognise one another. They fought among themselves and nearly attacked a fellow villager.

Then, late one Saturday evening, Rooker heard voices in his back yard. He opened the door and a man seized him. The vigilance party and police rushed in. The attacker was a neighbour who had been drinking, had heard the voices, and had come to help. He took the vicar for an intruder.

One woman had a cure. She asked the vicar to cut a turf four inches square from a grave, to be laid by the communion table so that the ghosts would disappear. The Black Country Bugle later wrote that it lay under the communion table for four days, and that the activity eased afterwards. Westwood and Simpson note that "there is no record as to whether they tried this." The Paranormal Database claims an exorcism, though no detailed account mentions one.

There was one problem with the ghost: Charles Hartland was alive. The 1881 census lists him, aged 42, as a convict at HM Convict Prison Chatham. Beachcombing, writing at strangehistory.net, suggested it must have been a doppelganger. Westwood and Simpson wondered whether it was a hoax gone wrong or a deliberate campaign against the vicar. The Bugle compared the turf cure to an 11th century Anglo-Saxon charm.

Beachcombing counts Lower Gornal among about a dozen Victorian "ghost riots", where a rumoured ghost gathered crowds and vigilantes. One coincidence lingers. In December 1881, the same month as the scare, another attempt was recorded to cut Hartland's sentence. No source connects the two. Rooker died on 15 March 1887 and lies in the family vault at St James's.