Ghost Stories for Christmas- The Bone Coach of Lady Mary Howard

Merry Christmas Everybody! This season is a time of tradition, and we here at Skullduggery in the Smoke uphold that most Victorian of holiday pageantry: Ghost Stories for Christmas. As in years past, we examine the fanciful and dolorous haunting of the British Isles for adventures ideas suitable for your holly-and-ivy-trimmed gaming table. All our haunting are selected from Peter Underwood’s “Gazetteer of British, Scottish, & Irish Ghosts”. So bring a torch Jeannette Isabella, we’re telling Ghost Stories for Christmas!

In the lovely Devon countryside, a grisly phantom coach travels by night on the sixteen miles of road connecting the mine and market town of Tavistock to the ravaged ruin of Okehampton Castle. The walls, wheels, the entire coach is made from the skeletons of four men; their skulls ornament the coachroof’s corners. A headless driver spurs his equally headless horses onward with a whip smelling of death. A horrible red-eyed black dog runs along the road. Inside the coach, a ghostly woman in white with the face of a skull patiently awaits her journey’s end. This specter is identified by the local superstition as the ghost Lady Mary Howard.

Mary was born in 1596 to the wealthy Fitze family. Her infamous father, John Fitze committed suicide, falsely believing conspirators were closing in on him for a murder he’d committed, when Mary was nine, leaving the girl an heiress. Eager to add her riches to his own, the Earl of Northumberland married the now twelve-year-old girl to his brother, Sir Alan Percy. Percy died from a fever a few months after. Mary found safety from fortune hunters in the arms of Thomas Darcy. Sadly, he too died only a few months after their elopement. Her next marriage to Sir Charles Howard (Earl of Suffolk) was substantially longer but more combative. They fought over her fortune until Howard’s death in 1622, ten years later. Sir Richard Grenville (the grandson of the Sir Richard Grenville discussed in this post) married the three-time widow in 1628. This bitter marriage ended three years later with a divorce. Mary then lived as a recluse in her father’s manor, Fitzeford House, just a mile west of Tavistock until her death in 1671.

Accounts during her lifetime depict Lady Mary as a smart, beautiful, and capable woman who couldn’t be bullied.  After her death, suspicion over the deaths of her spouses and rumors of unnatural cruelty to her children lead to stories of her soul suffering restless penance for eternity in a coach made of her husbands’ bones.

Upon the ghastly coach’s’ arrival at Okehampton, the horrible hound gently and meticulously plucks a single blade of grass out from the ground with his savage teeth. What the dog does next varies in the telling.
Some say it lays the grass on a stone slab after their return to Fitzeford house, or the dog returns to the coach and gives it to the ghost of Lady Mary who clutches the grass to her breast and closes it in a book. She’s doomed to repeat this ceremony every night until the dog has plucked all the grass of Okehampton.

Adventure Ideas

Certain legends about Lady Mary make her into a grim reaper figure. If her coach stops in front of a house one of the occupants is soon to die or if her coach stops near a pedestrian, the coach door opens and Lady Mary invites inside the soon to be departed. As a collector of souls doomed to eternal nightly penance, Lady Mary could make a great spectral assassin for hire. In exchange for 100 blades of grass from Okehampton Castle, she cuts a life short. The victim sees her coach in the street or hears her dog growling a few times before she stops at their house and beckons them for a ride in her coach. If they try to run, the headless horses follow them wherever they go.

The later stories and suspicions of murder probably formed from her father’s reputation and a mistaken identity with Lady Francis Howard, a notorious poisoner contemporaneous to Lady Mary’s life.  How was innocent Lady Mary doomed to the ghastly punishment earned by two wicked souls? Did her father really commit suicide or does he have a larger more immortal goal in mind?

As incredible and bizarre as the bone-coach is, Lady Mary’s ghost has also reportedly appeared as a calf, a greyhound, and a sack filled with eyeballs rolling along the road. Giving a ghost a strange alternate manifestation lends their hauntings more variety, a richer folklore, a new monstrous apparition from which to run.

Ghost Stories for Christmas- William Wallace and the “Devils” of Ardrossan Castle

Merry Christmas Everybody! This season is a time of tradition, and we here at Skullduggery in the Smoke uphold that most Victorian of holiday pageantry: Ghost Stories for Christmas. As in years past, we examine the fanciful and dolorous haunting of the British Isles for adventures ideas suitable for your holly-and-ivy-trimmed gaming table. All our haunting are selected from Peter Underwood’s “Gazetteer of British, Scottish, & Irish Ghosts”. So bring a torch Jeannette Isabella, we’re telling Ghost Stories for Christmas!

In the southwest of Scotland, a tall craggy hill juts up 300 yards from the sandy beach of South Bay. The bleak medieval ruins of Ardrossan castle crown the hill. Only fragments of the keep, part of a tower, and the south range remain. Cellars, tunnels, and a well descend into the hillside throughout the decrepit masonry.

Simon de Morville built the castle in the mid-1100s, at which time it was known as Castle Crags for the rocky hill beneath it. In the 1200s, the castle passed to the Barclay de Ardrossan family and gained their name. Clan Montgomery rebuilt and enlarged the castle after they inherited the castle through marriage in the 1380s. Finally, Oliver Cromwell’s troops destroyed the castle in 1648. They used it’s rubble to build Ayr Citadel, leaving what little remains of Castle Ardrossan. The castle is a disused ruin to this day.

During the First War of Scottish Independence, a garrison of English soldiers guarded Ardrossan castle. The rebellious Scottish knight, William Wallace, lured the soldiers out of the castle by torching a nearby house. The soldiers left their keep and Wallace and his men slaughtered them all on their return. Wallace won the castle and piled the bodies of the dead soldiers in the dungeon to rot. For this reason, the castle’s dungeon is known as “Wallace’s Larder”. The giant figure of Wallace’s ghost stalks the ruins on stormy nights illuminated by flashes of lighting.

Strangely there are two infamous inhabitants of the castle each known as “the Devil of Ardrossan”, both with curious and sketchily recorded histories. One is Sir Fergus Barclay. Sir Barclay lived for horseracing, and no one matched his skill at riding. The secret to his accomplishments was a magical bridle given to Barclay by the devil in exchange for his soul. Barclay somehow tricked the Devil into giving his soul back. Furious he’d been fooled, the devil angrily struck at the castle, leaving a single hoof print in stone. Despite this happy turn, Barclay lost his magic bridle to a racing rival. Sir Fergus Barclay was buried in a churchyard near the castle. Legends state tossing a piece of his tombstone or a handful of his grave dirt into the sea causes devastating storms to beat the Scottish shores. 

The other “Devil of Ardrossan” is named Michael Scott and his story is even more bizarre than Barclay’s! Scott’s father was a fisherman and his mother a mermaid. She gave young Scott a book of dark magic from which he learned to summon and command the devil. Seeing the people of Scotland were forced to pay an unjust tax, Scott commanded the devil to become a horse and take him to confront the Pope in Rome. The devil horse made the journey with a single mighty leap which left hoof prints in the stones of Ardrossan Castle.  Scott gave the Pope an ultimatum, release the people of Scotland from the tax or his horse will nay three times. The horse nayed twice causing the entire city to shake, and the pope agreed before Scot’s horse could open its mouth again.

Adventure Ideas

Everybody loves a murderous ghost. William Wallace died a grisly death at the hand of English executioners.

If his tall wrathful specter returned to his site of victorious slaughter, he might search the castle for more English souls to add to his “larder”.

Having two “Devils of Ardrossan” with so much overlap in their stories is too much of a coincidence. Perhaps it’s a title endowed on a sorcerer in possession of a particular book of magic, and the hoof prints in the stone are a side effect of a final test to prove their worth. Maybe a particularly powerful conjured being leaves footprints in solid stone.

A Petrosomatoglyph is the supposed imprint of human or animal anatomy in rock. Much like the diabolic hoof prints, a ghostly physical feature in stone could be a very creepy focal point for a haunting. Everyone knows the story about how it got there and it’s a constant reminder of a supernatural happening. A Petrosomatoglyph could show up in other surfaces, following a victim where ever they go and eventually show up in their skin.

Ghost Stories for Christmas- The Secret Room of Chambercombe Manor

Merry Christmas Everybody! This season is a time of tradition, and we here at Skullduggery in the Smoke uphold that most Victorian of holiday pageantry: Ghost Stories for Christmas. As in years past, we examine the fanciful and dolorous haunting of the British Isles for adventures ideas suitable for your holly-and-ivy-trimmed gaming table. All our haunting are selected from Peter Underwood’s “Gazetteer of British, Scottish, & Irish Ghosts”. So bring a torch Jeannette Isabella, we’re telling Ghost Stories for Christmas!

Just east of the seaside holiday town of Ilfracombe on Devon’s coast, a cozy country manor hides a grisly secret. Chambercombe (shortened from the house’s true name, Champernowne Combe) is a large white-washed gabled farmhouse surrounded by pleasant elm trees and thick walls. Its current inhabitants are farmers providing nearby villages’ with fresh vegetables and milk, but Chambercombe was the manor house of the Champernowne family since before the 1160s. When that family line ended, Chambercombe passed through several owners until it landed in the hands of Duke Henry of Suffolk. After he and his daughter, the famous Lady Jane Grey who was the queen of England for nine days, were executed for treason, the house became the property of the crown.

With the stain from being the home of infamous traitors, the fortunes of Chambercombe quietly fell through the years to the farmhouse it is today. Little of interest occurred in the house until either 1738 or 1865 when its owner repaired the roof. While deciding which window gave the most advantageous access to his roof, he discovered a window corresponding to none of the known rooms of his home. The owner calculated the interior walls outlining the mysterious gap and knocked a hole through one.

Inside he found black Elizabethan furniture, moldy tapestries, voluminous cobwebs, and laying on a curtained four-poster bed the skeleton of a young lady. Since that day strange sounds and moans emanating from the discovered chamber, and the shadowy figure of a young woman in a white dress standing near the pond startles many visitors. 

Nobody knows the skeleton’s identity with absolute certainty, but the most commonly muttered story is that a young woman named Kate left Chambercombe to marry her lover without her family’s blessing. Their parting was bitter, but she promised to visit. After many years, a ship wrecked on the Devon shore and the woman’s father helped search the coast for survivors. He found a lady lying unconscious and badly maimed on the beach. He took her home and treated her wounds in the comfort of the chamber, but she died. The man discovered gold and jewels on the deceased’s body, sealed her body in the chamber to cover their theft, and used the wealth to purchase his home from his landlord. Next morning, he discovered the only unaccounted passenger of the wrecked ship was his lost daughter Kate.

Adventure ideas

The discovery and exploration of this secret room is something player characters should get to do. If they discover an unknown window or a crack in a wall, a skeleton is the best thing they can find.

Nobody knows exactly who the skeleton was, but court intrigue and royal murder are a part of this house’s past. Could the room hold a centuries’ old secret vital to the empire’s governance? Does the skeleton lead to a secret about the Royal succession from the reign of Bloody Mary?

Another rumor says forbidden spirits of a different sort haunt Chambercombe. Smugglers used a tunnel running under the house to Hele beach a mile away. The secret chamber was simply a secret compartment for illicit scotch and brandy built from an old priest’s hole used to hide from religious persecution. It might also have been used for storage by “wreckers”, criminals who shine bright lights on the coast to lure ships passing through dangerous waters into crashing into rocks so they can murder the crew and rob their cargo.

Chambercombe’s fall from a manor for a noble family down to a farmhouse makes a great angle for a haunting. In many cases, a ghost story is about a secret from a location’s past disturbing the peace of the present. All houses have a history and the strange background of a house long separated from its current use could fill in the gaps of a haunting very easily. 

Ghost Stories for Christmas- Buckland Abbey and the Ghost of Sir Francis Drake

Merry Christmas Everybody! This season is a time of tradition, and we here at Skullduggery in the Smoke uphold that most Victorian of holiday pageantry: Ghost Stories for Christmas. As in years past, we examine the fanciful and dolorous haunting of the British Isles for adventures ideas suitable for your holly-and-ivy-trimmed gaming table. All our haunting are selected from Peter Underwood’s “Gazetteer of British, Scottish, & Irish Ghosts”. So bring a torch Jeannette Isabella, we’re telling Ghost Stories for Christmas!

The Countess of Devon built Buckland Abbey near Yelverton for the Cistercian order of monks in 1278. Monks of the order remained at Buckland until their expulsion by King Henry VIII in the 1540s. The king sold Buckland Abbey to Sir Richard Grenville in 1541. The estate passed to his grandson also named Richard Grenville, an explorer, and privateer. Grenville renovated the abbey’s church into a country home by dividing the large open interior into three floors of rooms. The church’s bell tower remains, though it has been made into a pigeon house. He demolished most of the abbey’s outlying buildings but kept the massive stonework barn intact. Around the grounds, carefully selected and grown plants fill beautiful gardens originally cultivated by the Cistercian monks.

Strangely, Grenville sold Buckland Abbey in 1581, only four years after completing his renovations. After the sale, he discovered the two men purchasing Buckland Abbey were agents of his rival Sir Francis Drake! Grenville had previously planned to undertake a circumnavigation of the world which was preempted by Drake’s historic journey. Despite owning many estates throughout Devon, Drake made Buckland Abby his primary residence between raids, excursions, and cruises. Drake’s stature as a national hero preserved the home from alterations through the years. The Drake family still owns Buckland Abbey.

Even after his death, legends of Drake linger over the house. His sword, Bible, and other possessions remain in the abbey, but the most famous relic of Buckland is Drake’s Drum. Drake carried a drum marked with his family’s crest during his famous circumnavigation of the world. As he lay dying of dysentery in 1596, Drake ordered the drum sent to Buckland Abbey instructing that if England ever needed him again, he would return to save it after hearing the beating of his drum.

Additionally, Drake’s specter supposedly rides across the countryside leading ghostly hounds whose howling is so terribly, the sound instantly kills any living dog hearing it. At night Drake’s ghost leaves Buckland driving a black coach for the port town of Plymouth. Four headless horses pull the coach and stranger still, twelve stunted goblin-like creatures with fiery eyes and smoking nostrils run before it!

Adventure Ideas

There are a few legends saying Sir Francis Drake, not Sir Richard Grenville, remodeled the abbey and it only took three nights of work with the help of the Devil in exchange for Drake’s soul. The legend further posits, Drake’s ghost flees the horrible hounds of hell searching for unbaptized souls. So in summary, Drake’s coach pulled by headless horses pursues strange goblin-things and is pursued by hellhounds trying to claim his soul.  What are the goblins? Do they have his soul or the key to getting his soul back?

Buckland Abbey must have a dark secret history to justify all the peculiar facts in its past. For example, the Church excommunicated the first Cistercian monks inhabiting the abbey shortly after they started their residence. After taking it from the church, the king sold the abbey to Sir Grenville who passed it down to a grandson sharing his name. This grandson sells the abbey to a hated rival coincidentally born only a few miles away. There is something about that house that invites conspiracy. Any house with that past has to be haunted.

Drake’s drum could be a very sinister necromantic object. He may have been tricked by a vengeful necromancer into tying his soul into his drum in an attempt to gain immortality. The drum traveled all the way around the world, Drake was buried at sea, and his body was never recovered so his undead revenant could pop up anywhere the drum is beat to serve his new master.