People in Onchan talked of a death coach on the main road through the village. The accounts never quite agreed. Sometimes it could be heard rumbling past but not seen. Sometimes it was seen, but made no sound. In some versions it was the familiar black coach of British folklore, drawn by headless horses.
One version gives the coach an owner. Spurrier, the story goes, was a man who lived in a house that became famous as haunted, long since pulled down to make way for the Co-op on the corner. He met the notorious Dr Palmer and drank with him at the Marine Hotel in Peel. Soon afterwards Spurrier fell ill and died, and the £1,000 he had been carrying in his pocket was never seen again. In Peel, Franklin writes, Spurrier's coach can also be heard arriving at the end of its journey.
It is a good story, but the connection to Palmer, the Staffordshire doctor hanged in 1856 for poisoning, is exactly the kind of detail that gets borrowed from a famous case, and no independent record of it has been found. Treat the death coach as traditional and the Palmer link as unconfirmed.
Comments