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.
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.
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