The Monthly Chronicle of North-Country Lore and Legend, a Victorian periodical devoted to collecting folklore from across Northumberland and Durham, carried an account in its April 1888 edition describing a supposed encounter with witches associated specifically with Wallsend. The piece sits within a much broader nineteenth-century tradition of witch belief found across the North East, recorded by antiquarians who were often as genuinely interested in preserving colourful stories for their own sake as in establishing whether the events they described had actually happened.
Little further detail about the Wallsend witches has survived into modern retellings of the story, and it is best understood today as a documented piece of Victorian folklore collecting rather than as an ongoing local tradition, since it does not appear to have generated later sightings or a continuous line of storytelling in the way some of the county's more enduring ghost legends have.
It is nonetheless a genuine historical curiosity, an actual printed nineteenth-century source naming Wallsend specifically in connection with witchcraft, at a time when most such tales in England were already being treated by educated readers as quaint countryside superstition rather than as any kind of live concern requiring serious attention.
Comments