Jenny Gallows of Flamborough

Ghosts are seen to haunt the place where something terrible happened to them when they were living, but the ghost of Jenny Gallows is a curious one because it is only seen when disturbed. Jenny was a Flamborough girl who committed suicide in a small pond not far from her home. The pond has since dried up but Jenny is said to be still there and she becomes very angry when disturbed. It is said that anybody who walks round the pond seven (or nine, depending on the source) times will see her. Several people have tried but always run off when they heard Jenny calling to them. A farmer once tried to find out the truth but had not enough courage to walk round the pond so he rode round it seven times on horseback. As he was finishing the seventh round he heard Jenny shouting: “Ah’ll tee on me bonnet An’ put on me shoe, An’ if thoo’s nut off, Ah’ll seean catch thoo!” There is nearby ‘Gallows Hole’ on the coast (see photograph). Uncannily, and from awe-inspiring things, born by the love in the heart of the Flamborough, many a fisherman recall the ‘Gallows Hole’ for his rock-bound home. There is a short poem about the strong fishing links and weather: “The live wave's love for the shore, the shore’s for the wave as it dies. The love of the thunder-fire, that sears the skies, all his." And native to the place, too, is an undefined fatalism which found probably its fullest expression in the terse phrase of fishermen: “If ye're born to be drooned, ye'll be drooned.” There are two Flamboroughs; one the lighthouse and the bays with their high-beached cobles (a traditional flat-bottomed fishing boat), their wonderful pools and weeds, boulders and caves sharing in “sea change into something rich and strange” with every tide; the other Flamborough, of the rambling street and curious angular ways disposed inconveniently as if for some big game of hide and seek. The houses of the fisherfolk are drab and hard-looking, sharing the austerity of their lives. The men wrest their livelihood from the pitiless sea; they wring life out, drop by drop, through the strain and stress and turmoil of the worst weathers. Red-tiled roofs in the village gallantly strive to interpose a joyous note, but the graveyard of brave ships and strong men is too near. In these times, when one sees the women helping the men with their gear, Swinburne's lines should be recollected: “Weaty fa’ the wind-ward rooks, They sunken seven-score ships." And let love’s gang go free, have an increased pathos, as though they were written particularly for this place. You may once have seen some of the fishermen at their talking-corner on Saturday evening, red, weather-beaten men, who know every inch of the coast, and who, from the two lifeboats at the North and South Landings, have saved many lives. The talk of the older men, steeped in the traditions of the place, calls up pictures of dead ages, of the Sagas of the Norsemen, of the Vikings, who, it is said, named this fearful point ‘Flameburgh’, after their own Flensborg, south of Jutland. One may stand on the edge of a cliff from which old Britons threw the ‘Danegeld’ into the sea in tribute to Denmark; another edge is a fit scene for the death-song of Gunner in William Morris’s poem “Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Neblungs” - “So perished the Gap of the Gaping, and the cold sea swayed and sang, And the wind came down on the waters, and the beaten rock walls rang." History and superstition go hand in hand in other remote seaboard villages, and this one has a long and eventful story. Robert Constable, of Flamborough, gained his knighthood at the battle of Blackheath (1497) for services against the Cornish rebels. Sir Robert, Lord Darcey, and a member of ancient family of Aske afterwards together opposed the rising of Bigod; their fortunes fell, and the knight was taken prisoner and sentenced. He was brought to Hull in 1537, and his body was hanged in chains over Beverley Gate. The adventurous Scottish-born Paul Jones – the “Father of the American Navy” for his daring leadership during the American War of Independence, engaged in battle off the headland H.M.S. Serapis (see photograph of info panel) and the Countess of Scarborough, returning from the Baltic with forty odd merchantmen. Jones won the fight, though his ship, the Bonhomme Richard was sunk, and he boarded H.M.S. Serapis, whose captain had initially sought to surrender; he famously replied, "I have not yet begun to fight!" and ultimately captured the Royal Navy ship. He took the prize ships across to the Lowlands, where the refusal of the Dutch to hand over the prizes and their holder was believed to be one of the provocations of the war which followed between England and the Dutch. The romance of the local caves and reefs, well-worn in Blackmore’s “Mary Anerley,” speaks more thrillingly towards the fall of the year when visitors are fewer, and the rapid approach of winter emphasises the grimness of the cliff faces. The writer of a guide to the village mentions one who wished to name the lofty cave in Great Thornwick the “Sea-King’s Hall,” and under pleasant summer conditions this would be a delightful fancy. But not far away is a rock of sinister aspect. With the wind screaming round it, while the high waves of the incoming tide dash madly upon a wreck, a battered sacrifice lying on its side on the flat rock, this might well be the place of a ‘Sea Devil’. It is as gaunt and cruel as the other is beautiful, a fit companion to that part of the valley below, Thornwick Hotel, where the ‘Headless Woman’ is said to walk in the dark, rousing night-flying birds to wild, uneasy cries. The White Lady of the story is a superstition responsible for a tragedy. It is said that a few years ago a poor Sewerby girl, engaged to a Flamborough youth, went with him to look for the ghost. She caught a chill and died of consumption within a month. At her funeral in Flamborough Churchyard her coffin was carried by women, and a pair of white paper gloves was borne, according to custom, at the head of the cortege, while a local woman sat beneath a twisted tree near the entrance to St Oswald’s Church opposite the churchyard, muttering prayers for those she believed would die in the coming year. There is in the rock circular pit where a maiden, Jenny Gallows, is believed to have committed suicide. Tradition has it that anyone running nine times round the hole can hear the fairies who frequent the place, and that Jenny, dressed in white, rises when the eighth circuit is completed and warns off the curious with the ditty: “Ah’ll tee on me bonnet, An’ put on me shoe, An’ if thoo’s not off Ah’ll fuan catch thoo!” Mr A. H. Armytage quotes this in his Flamborough folk-lore, where also is mentioned the tale of Milchah Lawrence, an old woman who used to sit in the church on St. Mark’s Eve, and declared she saw all those of her neighbours who were to die during the year pass ghostly procession before the altar. Finer spectacles such as Selwick Bay and the Stacks are seen from the cliff tops with the morning sun on them, or Little Thorn Ghosts are seen to haunt the place where something terrible happened to them when they were living, but the ghost of Jenny Gallows is a curious one because it is only seen when disturbed. Jenny was a Flamborough girl who committed suicide in a small pond not far from her home. The "muck," the fishermen call it, comes blackening from northward, racing wildly on and on, spreading streamers of dirty cloud before the wind, until it literally splits on the rocky headland with blazing light and crashes of thunder, to which every cave below mutters a reply. The surface of the bay crinkled with a million rain-drops, rises to a tearing gale; the sea is lashed almost to vapor; long breakers smash savagely across the reeling “blind the grasp of the dark strong wind,” and a human voice, shouting its loudest, less than a score feet away could not be heard for the hoarse clamour of the elements. In John Nicholson’s ‘Folklore of East Yorkshire’ (1890) he noted … ”Near Flambrough is a circular hole, resembling a dry pond, in which a Flambro’ girl committed suicide. It is believed that any one bold enough to run nine times round this place will see Jenny’s spirit come out, dressed in white; but no one yet has been bold enough to venture more than eight times, for then Jenny’s spirit called out. A farmer, some years ago, galloped round it on horseback, and Jenny did come out, to the great terror of the farmer, who put spurs to his horse and galloped off as fast as he could, the spirit after him. Just on entering the village, the spirit, for some reason unknown, declined to proceed farther, but bit a piece clean out of the horse’s flank, and the old mare had a white patch there to her dying day.” Nicholson described the circular hollow as being “near” Flamborough rather than in Flamborough, and that the Jenny spirit chased the farmer to the edge of the village, but would not enter it. Also, he described the hollow as a ‘dry pond’ rather than a chalk pit, which he would have known the difference between. The old chalk pit in the village is actually a large and deep quarry, and could not be mistaken for a dry pond. The large size of the old chalk pit also means that to run around it nine time would require running well over a mile in distance. The Jenny Gallows story has changed over the years, as folklore often does. Jenny has been referred to as a ghost, a fairy, and even a witch. She lived in either a dry pond, a chalk pit, or a well – somewhere near Flamborough, or in other cases in the village itself. Flamborough did once have a castle, and as most castles had a well, this may be the centre of the focus of the story. The oldest version of the story is from Nicholson who referred to Jenny haunting a dry pond somewhere outside the village. The only reference that makes any mention of the location of the dry pond comes from the rector of Catwick, Reverend William Smith. When Smith visited Flamborough in the early 1900’s he was shown the remains of the Spa Well by an old man, near the old lighthouse, on the road to Selwick Bay, and the Reverend also noted the Jenny Gallows story with its fairy association, writing that: “Flamborough gives us our next Fairy well, now only a dry round hole near the North Landing.” The North Landing is a bay on the coast 1 mile to the north east of Flamborough village (and where a scene from the Dad’s Army film in 2015 was shot, of Catherine Zeta-Jones and some captured German soldiers, complete with an original coastal pillbox, the ‘lozenge’ shape unique to the British coast). It would qualify as being “near Flamborough”. The old road from the North Landing to Flamborough would also fit with the story of the farmer galloping back to the village on his horse. Why did Jenny stopped pursuing the farmer at the edge of the village? This question might also be explained by the fact that a stream crosses the road at that point, and it is a general folklore belief that spirits cannot cross running water. It is not clear if Reverend Smith visited the site at North Landing, but it does ‘fit’ with Nicholson’s older version of the folklore, and it is quite likely that Reverand Smith got his information from the old man who took him to the Spa Well. Or was the connection an old sea dog’s tale? Perhaps Jenny Gallows’ story has been handed down to us over the years, a mixture of several pieces of folklore from the Flamborough area. Originally, there may have been separate stories about a fairy haunted ‘hollow’, and the spirit of a girl who killed herself, along with a ‘white lady’ type ghost who haunted the old castle grounds – to which the well/ pond now dried up is very close. During the 1800’s, the belief in these sorts of stories and folklore was dying out as they came to be regarded as just foolish superstition. The older generation did not pass on the stories for fear of been ridiculed, and so the details became lost. This might explain why Nicholson, when he was gathering information for his book in the late 1800’s, could only say that the dry pond was near Flamborough. The publication of his book may have partly revived the folklore, and in later years the story became attached to the quarry pit near the old castle, rather than the now dried up well.