(October 31st) All Hallows Eve, and all is not quiet. As our ghost tour guide dons his best macabre persona, none of us are convinced. The school girls are giggling, the adults are discussing what might be more frightening: the tour guide's acting, or that we're all playing along, and my housemate Alex and I are rolling our eyes at yet another unbelievable tale. But, somewhere in the midst of the yarns pulled forth comes a thread or two of reality.
Queen's Lane, once site of a boarding house that was payed by the crown for each child they tended. This boarding house, it seems, had a nasty habit of letting the children die, then disposing of the evidence by burying the bodies in the walls. Years later, when this old church building was renovated, the skeletons, dozens of them, were discovered. Our tour guide tried to convince us that the alley we were walking down was now haunted by the spirits of those children, but we didn't buy it, until we took a picture of a strange, flickering light...
In a series of photographs, that blue light moved from one end of the alley to the other. I'm not sure what to make of it, but at the time I just thought of it as strange. Several weeks later, when I was seeing Fred off in the wee hours of the morning, I decided to start my daily run by heading up Queen's Lane. Immediately after turning down the alley, the air grew cold and still, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and sounds of children (at six in the morning, well before sun rise), echoed off the high walls. My mind quickly flashed back to this tale from Halloween, and I've yet to revisit that alley while alone in the dark.
But, that's not the only haunting that I shall endeavor to not explain. Oxford has a rich history dating back over a thousand years. The celebration of Halloween and All Souls Day, whether from the Christian or Druid perspective, is pervasive in the life of the city.
And just as the celebration of these days is integral to the city, so to are the stories of ghosts permeating these walls. On my first visit to Christ Church, in particular to the hall where the Harry Potter dining scenes were filmed, I snapped this photograph:
Here, students are enjoying dinner on the left, but what I'd like to bring your attention to is the man walking in the aisle on the right. Look at the second and third lamps on that table, and you might see him. When I took this photo, I was in the process of taking several shots in a row as I found the right light levels for my camera. In each of the photos, the man is visible as you see him above, that is hardly visible at all. I'm confident that what you see isn't an artifact of someone quickly walking through my photo and just barely showing up as no one else has this quality to them, but make of it what you will. I've not sought out any information about hauntings of this hall.
My last encounter with ghosts is much closer to home. Fred, Alex, and Mannu, if you're reading this you should stop now. Seriously.
Unbeknownst to my housemates, there is a haunting in Bear Lane. As I'm frequently known to be in the kitchen cooking every night, I've come to notice something odd during my time here. At first I dismissed it as some strange sound that I wasn't paying attention to while cooking, but after a few weeks I realized that the sound I kept hearing was of a horse walking through the streets. Clip-clop clip-clop. Only that our kitchen opens onto a courtyard, on the other side of which is a street too narrow for a horse-drawn carriage to go along. After a few more weeks of being cognizant of this sound, I began to notice another trend: it came at the same time every night. Repeatably, while cleaning up from cooking around 10:30, the sound of this horse walking by outside would be heard. As I know that there were no horses in the courtyard, nor on the street on the far side of the buildings behind us, I'll leave it to you to draw what conclusions you might.
What we can all agree upon, though, is that Oxford is full of a rich, and at times bloody, history. And while some things may have perfectly reasonable explanations by skeptical science, there are those things that still challenge my own skeptical view of such matters.
Queen's Lane, once site of a boarding house that was payed by the crown for each child they tended. This boarding house, it seems, had a nasty habit of letting the children die, then disposing of the evidence by burying the bodies in the walls. Years later, when this old church building was renovated, the skeletons, dozens of them, were discovered. Our tour guide tried to convince us that the alley we were walking down was now haunted by the spirits of those children, but we didn't buy it, until we took a picture of a strange, flickering light...
In a series of photographs, that blue light moved from one end of the alley to the other. I'm not sure what to make of it, but at the time I just thought of it as strange. Several weeks later, when I was seeing Fred off in the wee hours of the morning, I decided to start my daily run by heading up Queen's Lane. Immediately after turning down the alley, the air grew cold and still, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and sounds of children (at six in the morning, well before sun rise), echoed off the high walls. My mind quickly flashed back to this tale from Halloween, and I've yet to revisit that alley while alone in the dark.
But, that's not the only haunting that I shall endeavor to not explain. Oxford has a rich history dating back over a thousand years. The celebration of Halloween and All Souls Day, whether from the Christian or Druid perspective, is pervasive in the life of the city.
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| Halloween at St. Edmund's Hall. |
Here, students are enjoying dinner on the left, but what I'd like to bring your attention to is the man walking in the aisle on the right. Look at the second and third lamps on that table, and you might see him. When I took this photo, I was in the process of taking several shots in a row as I found the right light levels for my camera. In each of the photos, the man is visible as you see him above, that is hardly visible at all. I'm confident that what you see isn't an artifact of someone quickly walking through my photo and just barely showing up as no one else has this quality to them, but make of it what you will. I've not sought out any information about hauntings of this hall.
My last encounter with ghosts is much closer to home. Fred, Alex, and Mannu, if you're reading this you should stop now. Seriously.
Unbeknownst to my housemates, there is a haunting in Bear Lane. As I'm frequently known to be in the kitchen cooking every night, I've come to notice something odd during my time here. At first I dismissed it as some strange sound that I wasn't paying attention to while cooking, but after a few weeks I realized that the sound I kept hearing was of a horse walking through the streets. Clip-clop clip-clop. Only that our kitchen opens onto a courtyard, on the other side of which is a street too narrow for a horse-drawn carriage to go along. After a few more weeks of being cognizant of this sound, I began to notice another trend: it came at the same time every night. Repeatably, while cleaning up from cooking around 10:30, the sound of this horse walking by outside would be heard. As I know that there were no horses in the courtyard, nor on the street on the far side of the buildings behind us, I'll leave it to you to draw what conclusions you might.
What we can all agree upon, though, is that Oxford is full of a rich, and at times bloody, history. And while some things may have perfectly reasonable explanations by skeptical science, there are those things that still challenge my own skeptical view of such matters.
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