Join our Facebook Ghosts Group Today!

Ghosts | Ghosts

Yorkshire

Ghosts Home >> Haunted >> Yorkshire >> The Phantom Driver

---

The Phantom Driver

Yorkshire has a fair share of ghosts to its credit. One of the most intersting was a “warning ghost”, originally a farmer’s daughter named Nance. She was betrothed to Tom, a neighbouring farm hand, but just before the wedding she lost her heart to a glib-tongued persuasive stranger from York, and to everybody’s surprise — and Tom’s dismay — she eloped and married the stranger instead. In order to assuage his grief, and to try to forget, Tom left the farm where he had been employed, and became a coachman on the route from York to Hull. About a year later, when he was returning to York, to his great surprise he saw Nance sitting in the grass on the roadside nursing a baby.

Recognition was mutual, and she called out to him to stop. When he did so, and had clambered down out of his driver’s seat, he found to his great dismay that Nance was dying. He lifted hoth her and the baby tenderly into the coach, and drove them to a friend’s house in York. Then he listened while Nance told her story. Her husband had turned out to be a highwayman. He already had a wife and family Nance, heartbroken over her own treatment and repentant over her shabby treatment of Tom, grasped his hand and whispered, “If my spirit is allowed to return, I will always warn you, your childer, and your childer’s childer of any coming danger.” Shortly after Nance was laid to rest Tom was sent to Durham to drive four important clients to York on urgent business for the King. They were late in starting off, and urged Tom to get there as quickly as possible, each promising him a guinea if he arrived in York “by eight chimes”.

Things ran smoothly and well until the coach was some ten miles out of York, when a thick fog rolled over the countryside, blotting out the road so completely that Tom was forced to draw his horses into a walk. But to his amazement at that very moment a ghostly form took her place by his side and laid her cold hands on the reins. Tom had no doubt that the ghost was Nance and he handed over the reins without the least hesitation. The ghost urged the horses into a gallop, the guard tootled his horn, and along the fog-shrouded road the sawying coach thundered through the dusk, scattering other travellers and leaving toll-gate keepers agape. Meanwhile the four startled travellers in the coach became terrified and shouted to Tom to rein in his horses and drive more carefully, “Have no fear, gentlemen!” Tom shouted back. “You are in safe hands, and you’ll be in York by eight chimes!”

He was quite right. The coach rattled over York’s cobblestones and into the yard of the Black Swan just as the clocks were striking eight, and as the four travellers thankfully handed over their guineas to Tom the ghostly form of Nance disappeared in to the fog.