The earliest account comes from a letter printed in the Hull Advertiser on 13 August 1818 and reprinted by John Nicholson in his Folk Lore of East Yorkshire (1890). The writer had heard it at a gathering in Holderness, told by a gentleman "of known veracity". About ten years earlier, on a March afternoon, he was riding from Hornsea towards Bridlington and was climbing the hill south of Skipsea when he saw a young woman in white walking ahead of him between the hedge and the road. He followed her down the hill, expecting to meet her at the little bridge over the brook at the bottom. Instead she vanished in front of him while he was watching her. He said he had not been thinking of ghosts and had never been a man for such talk.
The lady of the house then added a second story. About five years before, a young manservant who scoffed at apparitions had borrowed a horse and set off for Bridlington two hours before daybreak on a Martinmas morning. He came back that afternoon, badly shaken. On Skipsea Lane his horse had bolted sideways, and when he got it under control he saw a fine lady in white with something like a black veil over her face standing close by. He was too frightened to go on until he could find someone to accompany him in daylight.
Nicholson adds that the apparition was believed to be the ghost of the murdered wife of Drogo de Bevere, whose castle stood about half a mile away at Skipsea Brough, and that nobody had seen her for years by his time of writing. The identification is a later local tradition rather than something either witness said. The two original accounts are second-hand reports relayed through a newspaper letter, so this is best read as a traditional ghost story with a dated printed source, not a verified sighting. The exact spot on the old road is not given, so the pin is approximate.
Comments