IF you are sitting comfortably, we’ll begin. A long, long time ago – well, 50 years ago – Peter Daniels was sitting in the drawing room of his in-laws, Frances and John Littlewood, in Ashcroft Gardens in Bishop Auckland, listening to Frances’s extraordinary story unfold. Dusk was falling and the room was darkening, and whenever Frances stopped to gather her thoughts, the silence was broken only by the ticking of the clock on the mantlepiece.
A woman of sober sense, she didn’t have any time for fancies. As she told of an unforgettable incident that she witnessed down the Batts area of Bishop, by the Wear, in the mid-1930s, John stood behind her, nodding in wordless agreement. He had been there with her. He had seen exactly what she had seen, and so he knew every chilling word was true…
Jock's Row at the bottom of Batts Bank, with Auckland Castle high in the distance
“We hadn’t been married long, and we’d been to the pictures, and stopped for a drink at the Tuns and we were walking home to Jock’s Row. In them days, the street lights down the Batts was all gas lamps, and the third gas lamp back from the bridge had a drain underneath it, and there was steam rising from it.
I said to John: “Someone must have had a bath and tipped it down the drain”, ’cos everyone had to use the tin baths, there was no bathrooms then, and people used to empty the bath down the street drain sometimes.
But the steam got thicker, ’stead of getting less, and it took on the shape of a man.
We stopped walking and just looked.
It formed up into a man, a proper toff as I’d call him, with a long black jacket and a top hat and a white scarf, as solid as you and me. He was smoking a cigar, you could see it glow brighter when he took a draw on it, and facing away from us, but oh, our Peter, when he turned around, he had no face! Nothing. Where his face should be, it was like looking out the window into the dark.
He stood for a bit, I don’t know how long, and then he grew fainter until he disappeared.
And we stood a bit after he’d gone, and then John said to me: “Did you see what I saw, that feller with the top hat?” and I said yes, and he said: “We shouldn’t tell anyone about this, they’ll think we’re not right in the head,” and I said okay.
But a week later, my uncle, who lived just past us on the bridge side, came bursting into our house – we never locked the door in them days; well, there was nowt to steal, was there?
And he said: “Our Frances, I’ll never touch a drink again, I just saw something impossible, and it must be the drink. I was walking back and I got out a tab but I couldn’t find my matches, must have left them in the pub, but I sees this bloke, proper posh, smoking a cigar, and I went up to him and asked him for a light, and he turned around, but he had no face, and then he started to disappear and I ran and yours was the first door I came to where a light was on.”
So we told him we’d seen the same man, and he calmed down a bit. I think he was glad it wasn’t the drink as caused it!
Any road, he didn’t keep quiet about it, and it turned out that a few people had seen this man but were like us and didn’t want folk to think they were going mad.
But after the gas lights was taken out, no one saw that man again.”
When she finished, silence fell. Then, through the gloom in the room, John broke it by saying: “Aye, that’s right, Pete, but we only saw him once. Never seen nowt like it, before or since.”
The story has stayed with Peter ever since – it’s haunted him, you might say. “It seemed unbelievable, but Frances was not the sort to make up stories,” he says.
Can you explain? Why would the ghost go to such lengths to conceal its identity? What murderous activity had happened down on the Batts?
THERE were two Three Tuns in Bishop: one in Bondgate and one in Newgate Street, which was demolished in the 1970s for the shop that Boots used to occupy to be built. The Bondgate Three Tuns was known as “the little tuns” to distinguish it from the Newgate Three Tuns.
The Newgate Street postcard enlarged to show the Three Tuns inn sign
The King's cinema in Newgate Street, Bishop Auckland, in 1963 before it was converted into a supermarket
The cinema they’d visited must have been the King’s Hall, which is now a shop in Newgate Street. The north end of town was also served by the Odeon cinema but that didn’t open in Tenters Street until 1938 by which time Frances and John had moved away from Jock’s Row.
READ MORE: THE STORY OF CLAIRMONT, A DERELICT BISHOP AUCKLAND MANSION
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