The Battle of Otterburn was fought on 5 August 1388 between English forces and a Scottish army under Douglas, remembered ever since in border ballad tradition, including the celebrated Chevy Chase ballads, as the fight where a dead man won the field: Douglas himself was mortally wounded during the fighting but had his own officers hide his body in a bush so that news of his death would not break Scottish morale before the battle could actually be won. It stands today as one of the best-documented medieval battles fought anywhere in Northumberland, a genuine and thoroughly recorded piece of border military history.
Local folklore holds that the two armies still sometimes reassemble on the site in spectral form. The most detailed account comes from 1888, when two men named Percival Hall and John Ellesden, out driving sheep late at night, reported hearing trumpets and horses' hooves before Hall described watching a full battle raging directly below him, armoured figures clashing audibly together in the dark.
A second, quite different account is dated to November 1960, when a Mrs Dorothy Strong, travelling by taxi through the area, said the vehicle's engine died completely without warning and the car was surrounded by phantom soldiers who gradually faded away as they closed in around it. The two accounts, separated by more than seventy years and describing genuinely different circumstances entirely, are usually cited together as evidence of a persistent, if genuinely intermittent, battlefield tradition, rather than as a single repeated sighting occurring in exactly the same form each time.
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