Ghosts

Strange tales!

Our best known ghost is Dorothy Forster, sister of Tom Forster military commander of the first Jacobite uprising. After surrendering his army to government forces at Preston, Tom was imprisoned in Newgate goal where his escape was organised by Dorothy. She brought him to Blanchland, hid him in the ‘priest’s hole’ in the chimney of the Hilyard room of the Lord Crewe Arms hotel and arranged for his escape to Europe. Dorothy haunts our Bambourgh room asking anyone who will listen to take a message to her brother, still in France, that all is now well and he can safely return to England.

Two years ago a couple were sleeping in the Radcliffe bedroom. They did not know that the room that they were in was part of the Abbot’s lodging of a Promenstratension monastery and they knew nothing of the White Cannons. The wife woke during the night to see a monk in a white habit kneeling at the bottom of her four poster bed, she put her hand out and he was quite solid and then, she reported, he slowly dematerialised. Her husband was asleep beside her and we know that they had drunk very little at dinner the previous evening.

Some years ago a woman, who knew the hotel well, was the only person sleeping in the ancient part of the building. Early in the morning she heard an outside door open and close, then she heard footsteps, then she saw a light under her door. The footsteps receded into the hotel and the light was extinguished. Next morning she mentioned to the manager that she had heard old Tom coming into the hotel to light the fires. Tom had died some months earlier. The outside door was bolted and it was quite certain that no one beside herself had been put in that part of the building all night.