The Real Lives of the Ghosts in my Stories - (1) Sir Walter Calverley

In my short story Confessions of a Teenage Ghost-Hunter, there’s a reference to the protagonist’s ghost-hunting exploits while he was a student at Leeds University. 

“We both nearly caught pneumonia sitting out in the grounds of Calverley Old Hall trying to catch a glimpse of Sir Walter’s ghost,” he says, adding, “That’s Sir Walter Calverley, he was crushed to death, on the orders of the Court of Star Chamber in 1604, because he refused to confess to a crime he was suspected of committing.”

The short story appeared in my collection This is the Quickest Way Down (Salt/Proxima Books 2011) and in the anthology A Dream of Stone and other ghost stories (Paraphilia 2011). But what’s the real story behind this story?

It is in fact a semi-autobiographical tale, in that I once did camp-out, with a fellow ghost-hunter, in the grounds of the Calverley churchyard in the early 1970s in the hope of seeing Sir Walter’s spirit. But what of Sir Walter?

Here’s the inside skinny... Calverley is a village a few miles to the west of Leeds in West Yorkshire (UK) that was the home of the Calverley family, the local lords of the manor, for several centuries. Walter Calverley – always called Sir Walter even though he was merely Squire Calverley, was born in 1579 and, following the early death of his father, became the ward of his guardian William Brooke, aka Baron Cobham.

When Walter left Cambridge University, apparently without earning a degree but with considerable debts (throughout this period the Calverley male line had a propensity for running up enormous debts) he became engaged to the daughter of a neighbouring landowner in Yorkshire. But then in 1599 William Brooke encouraged Walter to break off this engagement and marry Phillippa Brooke, one of Brooke’s own relatives. 

For Walter, this proposal had two distinct advantages. He was marrying someone a few rungs higher up the social ladder than himself, which in Elizabethan England was a useful career move. And, Phillippa came with a large dowry – always handy if you have debts.

According to once source, Walter didn’t think twice about dropping the farmer’s daughter in favour of a wealthy socialite. However according to another source, he disliked his new wife and soon fell into a wayward lifestyle of drinking heavily and gambling badly, firstly in London and later back in Yorkshire at the family home Calverley Old Hall. In fact by 1600, after less than 12 months of married life, Walter had got through his money so fast that he was in prison for debt and his mother-in-law was attempting to reclaim Phillippa’s dowry. 

This didn’t stop Walter and Phillippa from subsequently having three sons – William, Walter and Henry (sons in the Calverley family were always called William or Walter) but by 1605 Walter Calverley was in debt again. It cannot have helped that he was in the invidious position of having to sell off property to raise money to pay his debts while his mother, who had retained her side of the family fortune, was buying up land across the county!

Then tragedy struck, triggered it is said by Walter learning that one of his friends had been imprisoned for debts Walter himself incurred.

It may have been the drink that drove him into a murderous range. It may have been money worries that pushed him over the edge into a depressive life-is-not-worth-living-so-I-may-as-well-end-it-all-and-take-my-family-with-me mood. Or, it may even have been a mental breakdown – this also ran in the family with his own father once being described as having “weakness of witt and braine and bene of long tyme subject to lunacie.” 

Whatever the exact cause, on the 23rd April 1605, Walter Calverley lost his mind. 

He accused his wife of being unfaithful to him, claiming the children were fathered by a lover, and promptly stabbed to death the two oldest sons William and Walter. Then he threw Walter’s nurse down the stairs, killing her in the process, and tried to murder Phillippa. Luckily for Phillippa, she was wearing a corset reinforced with metal stays that deflected the dagger blow. Nevertheless she fainted and her husband, believing her dead, ran out of the Hall and rode off into the night, intending to kill his third son Henry, who was being wet-nursed in the nearby village.

Unfortunately for Walter (but fortunately for Henry) his horse stepped in a rabbit hole and fell on him, pinning him down until the authorities, alerted by the servants back at the Hall, could arrive to arrest him.

The capture and arrest seem to have jolted Walter back to his senses. He knew there could be no judicial forgiveness for his crime – it would be several hundred more years before any court would accept a plea of temporary insanity. More importantly, he also knew that regardless of whether he pleaded guilty or not-guity, when he was convicted (as he inevitably would be) the courts of the day would confiscate his property, with the result that Phillippa and his remaining son Henry would be penniless and the Hall lost to the family forever.

Walter Calverley therefore took the only remaining option open to him: he refused to enter any plea at all. But, by denying the court had a right to try him, he was guilty of contempt of court, which in those days was punishable by peine forte et dure, also known as pressing. This was a form of torture in which a stout door or planks of wood were laid across the victim, on top of which were piled more and more heavy stones, until eventually the hapless victim either entered a plea or was crushed to death.

Despite attempts by friends and even his long suffering wife Phillippa to have his sentence mitigated, Walter Calverley was pressed to death at York Castle on 5th August 1605. He never entered a plea and according to some reports his last words were “A pund o’ more weight! Lig on! Lig on!” – Yorkshire dialect for “A pound more weight! Lay on! Lay on!” 

He was initially buried in York but legend says his body was later exhumed and moved to the family plot, at St. Wilfrid’s Church in Calverley, to lay beside his murdered sons.

But what happened next?

Because he never entered a plea, Walter’s estates and property were not confiscated by the State. His wife Phillippa Brooke Calverley subsequently remarried and in due course his surviving son Henry inherited Calverley Old Hall. However, in keeping with family tradition, Henry was also plagued by bad debts although in his case it was caused by supporting the wrong side during the English Civil War.

Then came literary fame. Within two years of Walter Calverley’s crimes and execution, George Wilkins (probably best known to history as a London inn keeper and minor thug) published a play called The Miseries of Enforced Marriage. It was originally a tragedy but after the Cobham family complained, he rewrote the ending to make it a comedy. One year later, in 1608, saw the publication of another dramatisation A Yorkshire Tragedy- not so new as lamentable and true. For many years this was attributed to William Shakespeare however the playwright Thomas Middleton is now believed to be the true author.

Then there is the ghost.

According to witnesses, the ghost of Walter Calverley, brandishing a bloodstained dagger in one hand, has often been seen galloping on a large black horse, with glaring red eyes, through the lanes surrounding St. Wilfrid’s churchyard. Sometimes the ghost disappears at the point where the horse fell. At other times, with the ghost shouting “Lig on! Lig on!” it rushes at any witnesses and vanishes just as it reaches them.

And finally, there’s the story (first reported as long ago as the 1830s) of the schoolboys who regularly tried to raise Calverley’s ghost on evenings after class. Piling their hats and caps together in a pyramid, they would form a ‘magic’ circle and, hand in hand, would dance around the churchyard singing...

Old Calverley, Old Calverley, I have thee by the ears
I’ll cut thee into collops* unless thee appears 

The ritual required them to mix pins and breadcrumbs together and scatter them in front of the church, before one of them would walk up to the church door and whistle through the keyhole to summon Walter’s ghost. A newspaper report from 1874 says that on one occasion the ritual worked, causing the boys to run away in terror. When they returned the following morning, their hats and caps had vanished, presumably taken by the ghost of Walter Calverley. 

* In case you were wondering, collops are slices of meat or bacon. In Elizabethan times, Shrove Monday before Lent was also known as Collop Monday, when a meal of bacon topped with fried egg would be eaten for breakfast.