The Wolstanton "Hoositon" Knocking Ghost

Wolstanton sits beside Newcastle-under-Lyme, in the Potteries of Staffordshire. In 1831 Samuel Lewis called it "a large and well-built village", with a cotton mill and a parish that "abounds in coal, clay, and ironstone". The Grand Trunk Canal ran through it. Some 958 people lived in the township itself. Locals had their own name for the place. The Staffordshire Advertiser said it was "vulgarly called 'Hoositon'".

For the last four or five weeks before Christmas 1830, the village had a ghost. It was heard before it was seen. Knocking. Scratching. All of it "at a most tremendous rate". And it would not keep to one address. It was "playing his pranks at two habitations."

Word spread. Multitudes came out at the witching time of night, "anxious to gratify their curiosity". Some went home with more than a story.

A woman named in the report as "Lady Maria Henrietta" "affirmed that she had both seen the ghost and felt it." It "first appeared like a man's arm, afterwards it changed to a horse's head". One man admitted he had "never seen the ghost". He had, he said, "witnessed its foot marks!" Another had heard it "scratching for some time before it made its horrid appearance."

The head of the constabulary force set out to lay the ghost. With him went "a trusty brother of the trade". In the dark they found their quarry. "The little man was seized 'sans ceremonie,' manacled," and a good number of sound blows were dealt on what they took to be the ghost's head.

It was not the ghost. It was a little potter, out that night for the same reason as everyone else. He had come to see the ghost.

The potter wanted redress, and he took the matter to the magistrates. Several villagers came forward to describe what they had experienced. One acted out the scratching, "knocking at the same time on the magistrates' table with his elbows, and hands like pair of drum-sticks." The newspaper reports that the magistrates were amused. The assault was judged an honest mistake rather than malice, and "the matter was made up to the mutual satisfaction of the parties."

No one recorded a cause. The Staffordshire Advertiser, which reported the case on 25 December 1830, wrote it up as comedy. No prankster was ever named or exposed. Sceptics might point to rats, settling timbers or a neighbour playing the ghost, a common prank of the century. An arm and a horse's head might be shapes in poor light, seen by an excited crowd. But nobody at the time went looking, and the witnesses stood by what they had heard, seen and felt.

The case survives in a single modern retelling. In 2015 Beachcombing, writing at Strange History, filed it among the "ghost riots", 19th century crowds that gathered for ghosts and sometimes clashed with police. Its closest cousin is the Hammersmith Ghost of 1803 and 1804, where ghost hunters also attacked an innocent person. That time the victim died. Staffordshire had another scare at Lower Gornal in 1881. At Wolstanton, the only casualty on record was a bruised potter. Whatever knocked at those two houses was never caught.