#gloucestershire — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #gloucestershire, aggregated by home.social.
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Travel Alerts: Gloucestershire cheese rolling, Italy tiny homes, Nikoi Island camps and Fiji sail and stay
Tr…
#Italy #Europe #Europa #EU #2026 #alerts #and #another #apparently #back #bringing #britains #camps #chaotic #chase #cheese #coopers #dangerously #down #England #fiji #gloucester #gloucestershire #hill #Homes #island #most #near #nikoi #People #returns #rolling #sail #stay #steep #strangest #thousands #tiny #traditions #travel #wheel #would #year
https://www.europesays.com/italy/16831/ -
#JOHN #SEYMOUR #GLOUCESTERSHIRE MP advanced-search.allgraph.ro/advanced-sea... SEO - Creates Semantic Nodes and Clusters. NOSTR.com - Jumble: jumble.social/users/npub1j...
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#JOHN #SEYMOUR #GLOUCESTERSHIRE MP advanced-search.allgraph.ro/advanced-sea... SEO - Creates Semantic Nodes and Clusters. NOSTR.com - Jumble: jumble.social/users/npub1j...
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View from a garden. Cold Ashton, Glos.
#photography #garden #ColdAshton #Gloucestershire -
View from a garden. Cold Ashton, Glos.
#photography #garden #ColdAshton #Gloucestershire -
View from a garden. Cold Ashton, Glos.
#photography #garden #ColdAshton #Gloucestershire -
View from a garden. Cold Ashton, Glos.
#photography #garden #ColdAshton #Gloucestershire -
View from a garden. Cold Ashton, Glos.
#photography #garden #ColdAshton #Gloucestershire -
https://www.europesays.com/britain/33947/ Owner of ‘Britain’s biggest man cave’ in new prank call row with neighbours #Britain #Cinderford #ForestOfDean #ForestOfDeanDistrictCouncil #Gloucestershire #InTheNews
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Grand Demolition Marks End of Decade-Long 'Man Cave' Saga
Graham Wildin's 10,000 sq ft 'man cave' in Cinderford, Gloucestershire is gone after a decade-long dispute. The council seeks costs.
#ManCaveDemolished, #Gloucestershire, #GrahamWildin, #PlanningDispute, #Cinderford
https://newsletter.tf/man-cave-demolished-after-10-year-fight-gloucestershire/
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The huge 10,000 sq ft 'man cave' is now gone. This ends a 10-year fight for the council and neighbours.
#ManCaveDemolished, #Gloucestershire, #GrahamWildin, #PlanningDispute, #Cinderford
https://newsletter.tf/man-cave-demolished-after-10-year-fight-gloucestershire/ -
https://www.europesays.com/britain/33662/ Millionaire behind UK;s biggest man cave in fresh ‘prank call’ row | News UK #Airbnb #Britain #Gloucestershire #Neighbours #News #UK
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My childhood brushes with ghost lore
Despite writing about supernatural folklore, I rarely think about my childhood brushes with ghostly stories. I thought I might rectify that here—by reflecting on two examples of ghost lore I was exposed to in my youth.
Before I begin, I should point out that children’s folklore is just as vital and dynamic a phenomenon as its adult equivalent. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book (1999) is one example of a text that documents the folkloric creativity of children (as opposed to their passive receptivity). The book shows that wherever children come together, they form what folklorists call “folk groups.” The only criteria for the existence of such a group is that “two or more people. . . share something in common—language, occupation, religion, residence”; that they “share ‘traditions'”; and that they have the opportunity to meet face to face.
The Grey Lady
I’ll start with my childhood experience of belonging to a large “folk group” at my prep school, Tockington Manor, in South Gloucestershire. Every child in the school belonged to this folk group, because everyone, at some point, learned about the Grey Lady who haunted the manor’s halls. The boarders at the school were terrified of this lady: they said she wandered the manor at night—the spirit of a nurse who’d fallen from a skylight when the building served as a hospital during the First World War. I don’t remember much about this nighttime revenant, but she’s clearly a variant of a folkloric figure found at boarding schools everywhere: the Grey, White, Black, or Brown Lady.
In my school, older students, already initiated into the ghostly mystery, passed on stories about the drab-colored lady to the younger children, who did the same for the incoming class. I can only assume that telling stories about the Grey Lady allowed us to share anxieties in a fixed, personified form, which helped us adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. It also mythologized the building’s space, especially for boarders—those who couldn’t leave. Separated from their family homes, they created bonds and associations through the emotions that ghost stories evoke.
The story of the Grey Lady may have been one of the most memorable aspects of our folk group. But one story doesn’t create a culture. We also played games like marbles and conkers and had a shared language (words like cave—Latin for “beware”—were used to signal that a teacher was coming). Sometimes we sneaked out of school to gather in an old stone quarry, a place now dense with ivy-covered trees. The aura of this place—which we called simply “Quarry”—will forever remind me of the childhood capacity to create mythological worlds in spaces dominated by adults.
The Yellow Lady
Another example of supernatural storytelling from my childhood occurred during a trip to a Catholic boys’ camp in the summer of 1991. There too the sharing of ghostly legends created belonging among the boys. Despite sharing a tent with my brother, a cousin, and members of my cousin’s family, I felt unsettled in my new surroundings, and I remember how powerfully the nighttime telling of ghost stories allowed us to bond through fear.
The only story I remember clearly (because it terrified me) was inspired by a local landmark. Visible from the camp was a house that glowed an eerie yellow at night. The sight of this building alone would be enough to inspire a haunted house tale. But in our case, the color became detached from the building, and we gave it to a supernatural figure who roamed the grounds at night. Apparently, a mysterious revenant called the Yellow Lady haunted that house, and she visited the meadow where we slept. Pricking up her disturbingly large ears to listen for wakeful boys, the Yellow Lady prowled the rows of tents, determined to steal a child.
Although I remember thinking at the time that the Yellow Lady must have been a ghost, she differs in one important way from the Grey Lady mentioned earlier. While the latter was merely a scary presence that never interacted with students, the Yellow Lady was relational, embodying the discipline of the adult world (“no talking after lights out”). Her eerie color and super-sensory abilities—a result of her inhumanly large ears—suggest that she was a kind of supernatural bogeywoman, perhaps even close to a fairy.
The extreme effectiveness of this Yellow Lady legend meant that all of us had trouble sleeping that night. The next day we rushed to mass, hoping to find protection in proximity to a sacred ritual. The impulse was in keeping with much ghost lore, where holy symbols ward off supernatural threats.
Interestingly, while researching “Yellow Lady” stories (to see how commonplace they are), I came across a blog post in which the writer talks about a Yellow Lady story he learned at a camp run by monks. He then turns the tale into a literary short story—an embellishment, perhaps, of a fragmentary tale like mine. It seems to me that the writer’s camp may even have been the one I attended. Either that or the Yellow Lady haunts a number of such camps.
Haunted houses and witch houses
Besides my encounters with the Grey and Yellow Ladies, the only other ghost lore I can remember from my childhood are stories about haunted houses. These were always abandoned homes in the neighborhood, their shattered windows revealing darkness inside, the absence of family life. Repeating things we’d heard or inventing stories on the spot, we called these houses “haunted” or the former resort of “witches”—words that described the rupture in our sense of what a family home should look like. One of these houses sat at the corner of Charborough Road and Dunkeld Avenue in Filton, Bristol (I can still picture its dilapidated state). Another was on a road branching off from Charborough Road: they said that if you looked into its broken, upstairs window, you might see a witch looking back. (The latter is a vague memory that may even have been my own thought.)
Considering all this lore, it seems to me that ghosts fill the gaps where social meaning decays, whether through separation from home, abandonment of a home, or maladjustment in a place that’s not yet fully home. When I consider these crucial functions, I understand why empirical approaches to ghostly “phenomena” bore me: they arguably fail to understand ghosts at all.
Read about more ghost lore here.
#books #england #EnglishFolklore #fiction #Filton #folklore #ghost #ghostLore #ghostStories #ghostStory #Gloucestershire #GreyLady #hauntedHouse #history #horror #TockingtonManor #witches #writing #YellowLady -
My childhood brushes with ghost lore
Despite writing about supernatural folklore, I rarely think about my childhood brushes with ghostly stories. I thought I might rectify that here—by reflecting on two examples of ghost lore I was exposed to in my youth.
Before I begin, I should point out that children’s folklore is just as vital and dynamic a phenomenon as its adult equivalent. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book (1999) is one example of a text that documents the folkloric creativity of children (as opposed to their passive receptivity). The book shows that wherever children come together, they form what folklorists call “folk groups.” The only criteria for the existence of such a group is that “two or more people. . . share something in common—language, occupation, religion, residence”; that they “share ‘traditions'”; and that they have the opportunity to meet face to face.
The Grey Lady
I’ll start with my childhood experience of belonging to a large “folk group” at my prep school, Tockington Manor, in South Gloucestershire. Every child in the school belonged to this folk group, because everyone, at some point, learned about the Grey Lady who haunted the manor’s halls. The boarders at the school were terrified of this lady: they said she wandered the manor at night—the spirit of a nurse who’d fallen from a skylight when the building served as a hospital during the First World War. I don’t remember much about this nighttime revenant, but she’s clearly a variant of a folkloric figure found at boarding schools everywhere: the Grey, White, Black, or Brown Lady.
In my school, older students, already initiated into the ghostly mystery, passed on stories about the drab-colored lady to the younger children, who did the same for the incoming class. I can only assume that telling stories about the Grey Lady allowed us to share anxieties in a fixed, personified form, which helped us adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. It also mythologized the building’s space, especially for boarders—those who couldn’t leave. Separated from their family homes, they created bonds and associations through the emotions that ghost stories evoke.
The story of the Grey Lady may have been one of the most memorable aspects of our folk group. But one story doesn’t create a culture. We also played games like marbles and conkers and had a shared language (words like cave—Latin for “beware”—were used to signal that a teacher was coming). Sometimes we sneaked out of school to gather in an old stone quarry, a place now dense with ivy-covered trees. The aura of this place—which we called simply “Quarry”—will forever remind me of the childhood capacity to create mythological worlds in spaces dominated by adults.
The Yellow Lady
The second example of supernatural storytelling from my childhood occurred during a trip to a Catholic boys’ camp in the summer of 1991. There too the sharing of ghostly legends created belonging among the boys. Despite sharing a tent with my brother, a cousin, and members of my cousin’s family, I felt unsettled in my new surroundings, and I remember how powerfully the nighttime telling of ghost stories allowed us to bond through fear.
The only story I remember clearly (because it terrified me) was inspired by a local landmark. Visible from the camp was a house that glowed an eerie yellow at night. The sight of this building alone would be enough to inspire a haunted house tale. But in our case, the color became detached from the building, and we gave it to a supernatural figure who roamed the grounds at night. Apparently, a mysterious revenant called the Yellow Lady haunted that house, and she visited the meadow where we slept. Pricking up her disturbingly large ears to listen for wakeful boys, the Yellow Lady prowled the rows of tents, determined to steal a child.
Although I remember thinking at the time that the Yellow Lady must have been a ghost, she differs in one important way from the Grey Lady mentioned earlier. While the latter was merely a scary presence that never interacted with students, the Yellow Lady was relational, embodying the discipline of the adult world (“no talking after lights out”). Her eerie color and super-sensory abilities—a result of her inhumanly large ears—suggest that she was a kind of supernatural bogeywoman, perhaps even close to a fairy.
The extreme effectiveness of this Yellow Lady legend meant that all of us had trouble sleeping that night. The next day we rushed to mass, hoping to find protection in proximity to a sacred ritual. The impulse was in keeping with much ghost lore, where holy symbols ward off supernatural threats.
Interestingly, while researching “Yellow Lady” stories (to see how commonplace they are), I came across a blog post in which the writer talks about a Yellow Lady story he learned at a camp run by monks. He then turns the tale into a literary short story—an embellishment, perhaps, of a fragmentary tale like mine. It seems to me that the writer’s camp may even have been the one I attended. Either that or the Yellow Lady haunts a number of such camps.
Haunted houses and witch houses
Besides my encounters with the Grey and Yellow Ladies, the only other ghost lore I can remember from my childhood are stories about haunted houses. These were always abandoned homes in the neighborhood, their shattered windows revealing darkness inside, the absence of family life. Repeating things we’d heard or inventing stories on the spot, we called these houses “haunted” or the former resort of “witches”—words that described the rupture in our sense of what a home should look like. One of these houses sat at the corner of Charborough Road and Dunkeld Avenue in Filton, Bristol (I can still picture its dilapidated state). Another was on a road branching off from Charborough Road: they said that if you looked into its broken, upstairs window, you might see a witch looking back. (The latter is a vague memory that may even have been my own thought.)
Considering all this lore, it seems to me that ghosts fill the gaps where social meaning decays, whether through separation from home, abandonment of a home, or maladjustment in a place that’s not yet fully home. When I consider these crucial functions, I understand why empirical approaches to ghostly “phenomena” bore me: they arguably fail to understand ghosts at all.
Read about more ghost lore here.
#books #england #EnglishFolklore #fiction #Filton #folklore #ghost #ghostLore #ghostStories #ghostStory #Gloucestershire #GreyLady #hauntedHouse #history #horror #TockingtonManor #witches #writing #YellowLady -
My childhood brushes with ghost lore
Despite writing about supernatural folklore, I rarely think about my childhood brushes with ghostly stories. I thought I might rectify that here—by reflecting on two examples of ghost lore I was exposed to in my youth.
Before I begin, I should point out that children’s folklore is just as vital and dynamic a phenomenon as its adult equivalent. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book (1999) is one example of a text that documents the folkloric creativity of children (as opposed to their passive receptivity). The book shows that wherever children come together, they form what folklorists call “folk groups.” The only criteria for the existence of such a group is that “two or more people. . . share something in common—language, occupation, religion, residence”; that they “share ‘traditions'”; and that they have the opportunity to meet face to face.
The Grey Lady
I’ll start with my childhood experience of belonging to a large “folk group” at my prep school, Tockington Manor, in South Gloucestershire. Every child in the school belonged to this folk group, because everyone, at some point, learned about the Grey Lady who haunted the manor’s halls. The boarders at the school were terrified of this lady: they said she wandered the manor at night—the spirit of a nurse who’d fallen from a skylight when the building served as a hospital during the First World War. I don’t remember much about this nighttime revenant, but she’s clearly a variant of a folkloric figure found at boarding schools everywhere: the Grey, White, Black, or Brown Lady.
In my school, older students, already initiated into the ghostly mystery, passed on stories about the drab-colored lady to the younger children, who did the same for the incoming class. I can only assume that telling stories about the Grey Lady allowed us to share anxieties in a fixed, personified form, which helped us adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. It also mythologized the building’s space, especially for boarders—those who couldn’t leave. Separated from their family homes, they created bonds and associations through the emotions that ghost stories evoke.
The story of the Grey Lady may have been one of the most memorable aspects of our folk group. But one story doesn’t create a culture. We also played games like marbles and conkers and had a shared language (words like cave—Latin for “beware”—were used to signal that a teacher was coming). Sometimes we sneaked out of school to gather in an old stone quarry, a place now dense with ivy-covered trees. The aura of this place—which we called simply “Quarry”—will forever remind me of the childhood capacity to create mythological worlds in spaces dominated by adults.
The Yellow Lady
The second example of supernatural storytelling from my childhood occurred during a trip to a Catholic boys’ camp in the summer of 1991. There too the sharing of ghostly legends created belonging among the boys. Despite sharing a tent with my brother, a cousin, and members of my cousin’s family, I felt unsettled in my new surroundings, and I remember how powerfully the nighttime telling of ghost stories allowed us to bond through fear.
The only story I remember clearly (because it terrified me) was inspired by a local landmark. Visible from the camp was a house that glowed an eerie yellow at night. The sight of this building alone would be enough to inspire a haunted house tale. But in our case, the color became detached from the building, and we gave it to a supernatural figure who roamed the grounds at night. Apparently, a mysterious revenant called the Yellow Lady haunted that house, and she visited the meadow where we slept. Pricking up her disturbingly large ears to listen for wakeful boys, the Yellow Lady prowled the rows of tents, determined to steal a child.
Although I remember thinking at the time that the Yellow Lady must have been a ghost, she differs in one important way from the Grey Lady mentioned earlier. While the latter was merely a scary presence that never interacted with students, the Yellow Lady was relational, embodying the discipline of the adult world (“no talking after lights out”). Her eerie color and super-sensory abilities—a result of her inhumanly large ears—suggest that she was a kind of supernatural bogeywoman, perhaps even close to a fairy.
The extreme effectiveness of this Yellow Lady legend meant that all of us had trouble sleeping that night. The next day we rushed to mass, hoping to find protection in proximity to a sacred ritual. The impulse was in keeping with much ghost lore, where holy symbols ward off supernatural threats.
Interestingly, while researching “Yellow Lady” stories (to see how commonplace they are), I came across a blog post in which the writer talks about a Yellow Lady story he learned at a camp run by monks. He then turns the tale into a literary short story—an embellishment, perhaps, of a fragmentary tale like mine. It seems to me that the writer’s camp may even have been the one I attended. Either that or the Yellow Lady haunts a number of such camps.
Haunted houses and witch houses
Besides my encounters with the Grey and Yellow Ladies, the only other ghost lore I can remember from my childhood are stories about haunted houses. These were always abandoned homes in the neighborhood, their shattered windows revealing darkness inside, the absence of family life. Repeating things we’d heard or inventing stories on the spot, we called these houses “haunted” or the former resort of “witches”—words that described the rupture in our sense of what a home should look like. One of these houses sat at the corner of Charborough Road and Dunkeld Avenue in Filton, Bristol (I can still picture its dilapidated state). Another was on a road branching off from Charborough Road: they said that if you looked into its broken, upstairs window, you might see a witch looking back. (The latter is a vague memory that may even have been my own thought.)
Considering all this lore, it seems to me that ghosts fill the gaps where social meaning decays, whether through separation from home, abandonment of a home, or maladjustment in a place that’s not yet fully home. When I consider these crucial functions, I understand why empirical approaches to ghostly “phenomena” bore me: they arguably fail to understand ghosts at all.
Read about more ghost lore here.
#books #england #EnglishFolklore #fiction #Filton #folklore #ghost #ghostLore #ghostStories #ghostStory #Gloucestershire #GreyLady #hauntedHouse #history #horror #TockingtonManor #witches #writing #YellowLady -
My childhood brushes with ghost lore
Despite writing about supernatural folklore, I rarely think about my childhood brushes with ghostly stories. I thought I might rectify that here—by reflecting on two examples of ghost lore I was exposed to in my youth.
Before I begin, I should point out that children’s folklore is just as vital and dynamic a phenomenon as its adult equivalent. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book (1999) is one example of a text that documents the folkloric creativity of children (as opposed to their passive receptivity). The book shows that wherever children come together, they form what folklorists call “folk groups.” The only criteria for the existence of such a group is that “two or more people. . . share something in common—language, occupation, religion, residence”; that they “share ‘traditions'”; and that they have the opportunity to meet face to face.
The Grey Lady
I’ll start with my childhood experience of belonging to a large “folk group” at my prep school, Tockington Manor, in South Gloucestershire. Every child in the school belonged to this folk group, because everyone, at some point, learned about the Grey Lady who haunted the manor’s halls. The boarders at the school were terrified of this lady: they said she wandered the manor at night—the spirit of a nurse who’d fallen from a skylight when the building served as a hospital during the First World War. I don’t remember much about this nighttime revenant, but she’s clearly a variant of a folkloric figure found at boarding schools everywhere: the Grey, White, Black, or Brown Lady.
In my school, older students, already initiated into the ghostly mystery, passed on stories about the drab-colored lady to the younger children, who did the same for the incoming class. I can only assume that telling stories about the Grey Lady allowed us to share anxieties in a fixed, personified form, which helped us adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. It also mythologized the building’s space, especially for boarders—those who couldn’t leave. Separated from their family homes, they created bonds and associations through the emotions that ghost stories evoke.
The story of the Grey Lady may have been one of the most memorable aspects of our folk group. But one story doesn’t create a culture. We also played games like marbles and conkers and had a shared language (words like cave—Latin for “beware”—were used to signal that a teacher was coming). Sometimes we sneaked out of school to gather in an old stone quarry, a place now dense with ivy-covered trees. The aura of this place—which we called simply “Quarry”—will forever remind me of the childhood capacity to create mythological worlds in spaces dominated by adults.
The Yellow Lady
Another example of supernatural storytelling from my childhood occurred during a trip to a Catholic boys’ camp in the summer of 1991. There too the sharing of ghostly legends created belonging among the boys. Despite sharing a tent with my brother, a cousin, and members of my cousin’s family, I felt unsettled in my new surroundings, and I remember how powerfully the nighttime telling of ghost stories allowed us to bond through fear.
The only story I remember clearly (because it terrified me) was inspired by a local landmark. Visible from the camp was a house that glowed an eerie yellow at night. The sight of this building alone would be enough to inspire a haunted house tale. But in our case, the color became detached from the building, and we gave it to a supernatural figure who roamed the grounds at night. Apparently, a mysterious revenant called the Yellow Lady haunted that house, and she visited the meadow where we slept. Pricking up her disturbingly large ears to listen for wakeful boys, the Yellow Lady prowled the rows of tents, determined to steal a child.
Although I remember thinking at the time that the Yellow Lady must have been a ghost, she differs in one important way from the Grey Lady mentioned earlier. While the latter was merely a scary presence that never interacted with students, the Yellow Lady was relational, embodying the discipline of the adult world (“no talking after lights out”). Her eerie color and super-sensory abilities—a result of her inhumanly large ears—suggest that she was a kind of supernatural bogeywoman, perhaps even close to a fairy.
The extreme effectiveness of this Yellow Lady legend meant that all of us had trouble sleeping that night. The next day we rushed to mass, hoping to find protection in proximity to a sacred ritual. The impulse was in keeping with much ghost lore, where holy symbols ward off supernatural threats.
Interestingly, while researching “Yellow Lady” stories (to see how commonplace they are), I came across a blog post in which the writer talks about a Yellow Lady story he learned at a camp run by monks. He then turns the tale into a literary short story—an embellishment, perhaps, of a fragmentary tale like mine. It seems to me that the writer’s camp may even have been the one I attended. Either that or the Yellow Lady haunts a number of such camps.
Haunted houses and witch houses
Besides my encounters with the Grey and Yellow Ladies, the only other ghost lore I can remember from my childhood are stories about haunted houses. These were always abandoned homes in the neighborhood, their shattered windows revealing darkness inside, the absence of family life. Repeating things we’d heard or inventing stories on the spot, we called these houses “haunted” or the former resort of “witches”—words that described the rupture in our sense of what a family home should look like. One of these houses sat at the corner of Charborough Road and Dunkeld Avenue in Filton, Bristol (I can still picture its dilapidated state). Another was on a road branching off from Charborough Road: they said that if you looked into its broken, upstairs window, you might see a witch looking back. (The latter is a vague memory that may even have been my own thought.)
Considering all this lore, it seems to me that ghosts fill the gaps where social meaning decays, whether through separation from home, abandonment of a home, or maladjustment in a place that’s not yet fully home. When I consider these crucial functions, I understand why empirical approaches to ghostly “phenomena” bore me: they arguably fail to understand ghosts at all.
Read about more ghost lore here.
#books #england #EnglishFolklore #fiction #Filton #folklore #ghost #ghostLore #ghostStories #ghostStory #Gloucestershire #GreyLady #hauntedHouse #history #horror #TockingtonManor #witches #writing #YellowLady -
My childhood brushes with ghost lore
Despite writing about supernatural folklore, I rarely think about my childhood brushes with ghostly stories. I thought I might rectify that here—by reflecting on two examples of ghost lore I was exposed to in my youth.
Before I begin, I should point out that children’s folklore is just as vital and dynamic a phenomenon as its adult equivalent. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book (1999) is one example of a text that documents the folkloric creativity of children (as opposed to their passive receptivity). The book shows that wherever children come together, they form what folklorists call “folk groups.” The only criteria for the existence of such a group is that “two or more people. . . share something in common—language, occupation, religion, residence”; that they “share ‘traditions'”; and that they have the opportunity to meet face to face.
The Grey Lady
I’ll start with my childhood experience of belonging to a large “folk group” at my prep school, Tockington Manor, in South Gloucestershire. Every child in the school belonged to this folk group, because everyone, at some point, learned about the Grey Lady who haunted the manor’s halls. The boarders at the school were terrified of this lady: they said she wandered the manor at night—the spirit of a nurse who’d fallen from a skylight when the building served as a hospital during the First World War. I don’t remember much about this nighttime revenant, but she’s clearly a variant of a folkloric figure found at boarding schools everywhere: the Grey, White, Black, or Brown Lady.
In my school, older students, already initiated into the ghostly mystery, passed on stories about the drab-colored lady to the younger children, who did the same for the incoming class. I can only assume that telling stories about the Grey Lady allowed us to share anxieties in a fixed, personified form, which helped us adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. It also mythologized the building’s space, especially for boarders—those who couldn’t leave. Separated from their family homes, they created bonds and associations through the emotions that ghost stories evoke.
The story of the Grey Lady may have been one of the most memorable aspects of our folk group. But one story doesn’t create a culture. We also played games like marbles and conkers and had a shared language (words like cave—Latin for “beware”—were used to signal that a teacher was coming). Sometimes we sneaked out of school to gather in an old stone quarry, a place now dense with ivy-covered trees. The aura of this place—which we called simply “Quarry”—will forever remind me of the childhood capacity to create mythological worlds in spaces dominated by adults.
The Yellow Lady
The second example of supernatural storytelling from my childhood occurred during a trip to a Catholic boys’ camp in the summer of 1991. There too the sharing of ghostly legends created belonging among the boys. Despite sharing a tent with my brother, a cousin, and members of my cousin’s family, I felt unsettled in my new surroundings, and I remember how powerfully the nighttime telling of ghost stories allowed us to bond through fear.
The only story I remember clearly (because it terrified me) was inspired by a local landmark. Visible from the camp was a house that glowed an eerie yellow at night. The sight of this building alone would be enough to inspire a haunted house tale. But in our case, the color became detached from the building, and we gave it to a supernatural figure who roamed the grounds at night. Apparently, a mysterious revenant called the Yellow Lady haunted that house, and she visited the meadow where we slept. Pricking up her disturbingly large ears to listen for wakeful boys, the Yellow Lady prowled the rows of tents, determined to steal a child.
Although I remember thinking at the time that the Yellow Lady must have been a ghost, she differs in one important way from the Grey Lady mentioned earlier. While the latter was merely a scary presence that never interacted with students, the Yellow Lady was relational, embodying the discipline of the adult world (“no talking after lights out”). Her eerie color and super-sensory abilities—a result of her inhumanly large ears—suggest that she was a kind of supernatural bogeywoman, perhaps even close to a fairy.
The extreme effectiveness of this Yellow Lady legend meant that all of us had trouble sleeping that night. The next day we rushed to mass, hoping to find protection in proximity to a sacred ritual. The impulse was in keeping with much ghost lore, where holy symbols ward off supernatural threats.
Interestingly, while researching “Yellow Lady” stories (to see how commonplace they are), I came across a blog post in which the writer talks about a Yellow Lady story he learned at a camp run by monks. He then turns the tale into a literary short story—an embellishment, perhaps, of a fragmentary tale like mine. It seems to me that the writer’s camp may even have been the one I attended. Either that or the Yellow Lady haunts a number of such camps.
Haunted houses and witch houses
Besides my encounters with the Grey and Yellow Ladies, the only other ghost lore I can remember from my childhood are stories about haunted houses. These were always abandoned homes in the neighborhood, their shattered windows revealing darkness inside, the absence of family life. Repeating things we’d heard or inventing stories on the spot, we called these houses “haunted” or the former resort of “witches”—words that described the rupture in our sense of what a home should look like. One of these houses sat at the corner of Charborough Road and Dunkeld Avenue in Filton, Bristol (I can still picture its dilapidated state). Another was on a road branching off from Charborough Road: they said that if you looked into its broken, upstairs window, you might see a witch looking back. (The latter is a vague memory that may even have been my own thought.)
Considering all this lore, it seems to me that ghosts fill the gaps where social meaning decays, whether through separation from home, abandonment of a home, or maladjustment in a place that’s not yet fully home. When I consider these crucial functions, I understand why empirical approaches to ghostly “phenomena” bore me: they arguably fail to understand ghosts at all.
Read about more ghost lore here.
#books #england #EnglishFolklore #fiction #Filton #folklore #ghost #ghostLore #ghostStories #ghostStory #Gloucestershire #GreyLady #hauntedHouse #history #horror #TockingtonManor #witches #writing #YellowLady -
https://www.europesays.com/videos/22707/ Drug gang jailed for 36 years after filming themselves mixing cocaine | ITV News West Country (West) #bowls #cocaine #explosion #Frenchay #Gloucestershire #itv #ItvNews #ITVNewsInFull #JoanneShaw #VisuallyImpaired #WestonSuperMare
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Superdry co-founder James Holder jailed for eight years for raping woman https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/may/07/superdry-co-founder-james-holder-jailed-rape #Crime #RapeAndSexualAssault #UkNews #Gloucestershire #England #Law #Society
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Superdry co-founder James Holder jailed for eight years for raping woman https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/may/07/superdry-co-founder-james-holder-jailed-rape #Crime #RapeAndSexualAssault #UkNews #Gloucestershire #England #Law #Society
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Superdry co-founder James Holder jailed for eight years for raping woman https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/may/07/superdry-co-founder-james-holder-jailed-rape #Crime #RapeAndSexualAssault #UkNews #Gloucestershire #England #Law #Society
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Superdry co-founder James Holder jailed for eight years for raping woman https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/may/07/superdry-co-founder-james-holder-jailed-rape #Crime #RapeAndSexualAssault #UkNews #Gloucestershire #England #Law #Society
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🆕🚉 Work is progressing on #Charfield Station in South #Gloucestershire, due to open in spring 2027. The £41.7m scheme, funded by the West of #England Mayoral Combined Authority using Government transport settlement funding, has installed platforms and a footbridge.
It will restore rail services to the village for the first time since 1965, with GWR operating hourly trains. Journey times are expected to be around 32 minutes to #Bristol Temple Meads and 22 minutes to Gloucester.
Facilities will include step-free access via lifts, a bus stop, cycle parking and car parking. Around 14,500 people live within three miles of the station. It is expected to improve access to jobs, education and leisure while supporting more sustainable travel and easing congestion.
The project forms part of a wider £400m West of England rail programme including Henbury, Bristol Brabazon, Pill, Portishead, Portway Park & Ride and Ashley Down.
https://www.westofengland-ca.gov.uk/news/new-charfield-station-on-track-to-open-in-spring-2027/ -
🆕🚉 Work is progressing on #Charfield Station in South #Gloucestershire, due to open in spring 2027. The £41.7m scheme, funded by the West of #England Mayoral Combined Authority using Government transport settlement funding, has installed platforms and a footbridge.
It will restore rail services to the village for the first time since 1965, with GWR operating hourly trains. Journey times are expected to be around 32 minutes to #Bristol Temple Meads and 22 minutes to Gloucester.
Facilities will include step-free access via lifts, a bus stop, cycle parking and car parking. Around 14,500 people live within three miles of the station. It is expected to improve access to jobs, education and leisure while supporting more sustainable travel and easing congestion.
The project forms part of a wider £400m West of England rail programme including Henbury, Bristol Brabazon, Pill, Portishead, Portway Park & Ride and Ashley Down.
https://www.westofengland-ca.gov.uk/news/new-charfield-station-on-track-to-open-in-spring-2027/ -
🆕🚉 Work is progressing on #Charfield Station in South #Gloucestershire, due to open in spring 2027. The £41.7m scheme, funded by the West of #England Mayoral Combined Authority using Government transport settlement funding, has installed platforms and a footbridge.
It will restore rail services to the village for the first time since 1965, with GWR operating hourly trains. Journey times are expected to be around 32 minutes to #Bristol Temple Meads and 22 minutes to Gloucester.
Facilities will include step-free access via lifts, a bus stop, cycle parking and car parking. Around 14,500 people live within three miles of the station. It is expected to improve access to jobs, education and leisure while supporting more sustainable travel and easing congestion.
The project forms part of a wider £400m West of England rail programme including Henbury, Bristol Brabazon, Pill, Portishead, Portway Park & Ride and Ashley Down.
https://www.westofengland-ca.gov.uk/news/new-charfield-station-on-track-to-open-in-spring-2027/ -
🆕🚉 Work is progressing on #Charfield Station in South #Gloucestershire, due to open in spring 2027. The £41.7m scheme, funded by the West of #England Mayoral Combined Authority using Government transport settlement funding, has installed platforms and a footbridge.
It will restore rail services to the village for the first time since 1965, with GWR operating hourly trains. Journey times are expected to be around 32 minutes to #Bristol Temple Meads and 22 minutes to Gloucester.
Facilities will include step-free access via lifts, a bus stop, cycle parking and car parking. Around 14,500 people live within three miles of the station. It is expected to improve access to jobs, education and leisure while supporting more sustainable travel and easing congestion.
The project forms part of a wider £400m West of England rail programme including Henbury, Bristol Brabazon, Pill, Portishead, Portway Park & Ride and Ashley Down.
https://www.westofengland-ca.gov.uk/news/new-charfield-station-on-track-to-open-in-spring-2027/ -
🆕🚉 Work is progressing on #Charfield Station in South #Gloucestershire, due to open in spring 2027. The £41.7m scheme, funded by the West of #England Mayoral Combined Authority using Government transport settlement funding, has installed platforms and a footbridge.
It will restore rail services to the village for the first time since 1965, with GWR operating hourly trains. Journey times are expected to be around 32 minutes to #Bristol Temple Meads and 22 minutes to Gloucester.
Facilities will include step-free access via lifts, a bus stop, cycle parking and car parking. Around 14,500 people live within three miles of the station. It is expected to improve access to jobs, education and leisure while supporting more sustainable travel and easing congestion.
The project forms part of a wider £400m West of England rail programme including Henbury, Bristol Brabazon, Pill, Portishead, Portway Park & Ride and Ashley Down.
https://www.westofengland-ca.gov.uk/news/new-charfield-station-on-track-to-open-in-spring-2027/ -
Superdry co-founder James Holder found guilty of raping woman after night out https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/may/01/superdry-co-founder-james-holder-found-guilty-of-raping-woman-after-night-out #RapeAndSexualAssault #Crime #ViolenceAgainstWomenAndGirls #Superdry #Gloucestershire #UkNews #Business
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Superdry co-founder James Holder found guilty of raping woman after night out https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/may/01/superdry-co-founder-james-holder-found-guilty-of-raping-woman-after-night-out #RapeAndSexualAssault #Crime #ViolenceAgainstWomenAndGirls #Superdry #Gloucestershire #UkNews #Business
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Superdry co-founder James Holder found guilty of raping woman after night out https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/may/01/superdry-co-founder-james-holder-found-guilty-of-raping-woman-after-night-out #RapeAndSexualAssault #Crime #ViolenceAgainstWomenAndGirls #Superdry #Gloucestershire #UkNews #Business
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Superdry co-founder James Holder found guilty of raping woman after night out https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/may/01/superdry-co-founder-james-holder-found-guilty-of-raping-woman-after-night-out #RapeAndSexualAssault #Crime #ViolenceAgainstWomenAndGirls #Superdry #Gloucestershire #UkNews #Business
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https://www.europesays.com/videos/18784/ Iconic Bristol business to close with loss of skills| ITV News West Country (West) #BlueGlass #Bristol #Cheltenham #Gloucestershire #itv #ItvNews #ITVNewsInFull
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https://www.europesays.com/videos/17467/ New youth centre set to open this summer in South Bristol | ITV News West Country (West) #Bath #Bristol #Burnett #Cheltenham #Chippenham #ForestOfDean #Gloucester #Gloucestershire #itv #ItvNews #ITVNewsInFull #Keynsham #Swindon #Wiltshire
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https://www.europesays.com/videos/16786/ How fuel costs are affecting South West businesses | ITV News West Country (West) #Bath #Bristol #Burnett #Cheltenham #Chippenham #ForestOfDean #Gloucester #Gloucestershire #itv #ItvNews #ITVNewsInFull #Keynsham #Swindon #Wiltshire
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Took Ted and Ralph out for their fifth birthday today - Prinknash was a no-brainer having seen @lionelb's gorgeous photo this week (https://expressional.social/@lionelb/116455785188647361).
🐾 They LOVED it! 🐾
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Took Ted and Ralph out for their fifth birthday today - Prinknash was a no-brainer having seen @lionelb's gorgeous photo this week (https://expressional.social/@lionelb/116455785188647361).
🐾 They LOVED it! 🐾
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Took Ted and Ralph out for their fifth birthday today - Prinknash was a no-brainer having seen @lionelb's gorgeous photo this week (https://expressional.social/@lionelb/116455785188647361).
🐾 They LOVED it! 🐾
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Took Ted and Ralph out for their fifth birthday today - Prinknash was a no-brainer having seen @lionelb's gorgeous photo this week (https://expressional.social/@lionelb/116455785188647361).
🐾 They LOVED it! 🐾
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Fire breaks out at RAF base used by US Air Force for operations against Iran
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https://www.europesays.com/britain/22116/ Fears cats could kill and wipe out nightingales in ancient woodland if 2000-home A40 town is built #Environment #ForestOfDean #ForestOfDeanDistrictCouncil #Gloucester #Gloucestershire #UK #UnitedKingdom
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https://www.europesays.com/videos/15402/ Kemi Badenoch says Tories can win back Swindon | ITV News West Country (West) #Bath #Bristol #Chippenham #ForestOfDean #Gloucestershire #itv #ItvNews #ITVNewsInFull #Swindon #Wiltshire
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Europe's largest #historical reenactment takes over #Gloucestershire every summer. Thousands of volunteers recreate the 1471 Battle of #Tewkesbury with terrifying accuracy, bringing the Wars of the Roses to life. The surrounding camps feature a massive market selling period crafts and mead. A brilliant way to see 15th-century life up close.
#history #medieval #uktravel #reenactment
https://europa.tips/en/tewkesbury-medieval-festival-battle-history
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Europe's largest #historical reenactment takes over #Gloucestershire every summer. Thousands of volunteers recreate the 1471 Battle of #Tewkesbury with terrifying accuracy, bringing the Wars of the Roses to life. The surrounding camps feature a massive market selling period crafts and mead. A brilliant way to see 15th-century life up close.
#history #medieval #uktravel #reenactment
https://europa.tips/en/tewkesbury-medieval-festival-battle-history
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Europe's largest #historical reenactment takes over #Gloucestershire every summer. Thousands of volunteers recreate the 1471 Battle of #Tewkesbury with terrifying accuracy, bringing the Wars of the Roses to life. The surrounding camps feature a massive market selling period crafts and mead. A brilliant way to see 15th-century life up close.
#history #medieval #uktravel #reenactment
https://europa.tips/en/tewkesbury-medieval-festival-battle-history
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Europe's largest #historical reenactment takes over #Gloucestershire every summer. Thousands of volunteers recreate the 1471 Battle of #Tewkesbury with terrifying accuracy, bringing the Wars of the Roses to life. The surrounding camps feature a massive market selling period crafts and mead. A brilliant way to see 15th-century life up close.
#history #medieval #uktravel #reenactment
https://europa.tips/en/tewkesbury-medieval-festival-battle-history
-
Europe's largest #historical reenactment takes over #Gloucestershire every summer. Thousands of volunteers recreate the 1471 Battle of #Tewkesbury with terrifying accuracy, bringing the Wars of the Roses to life. The surrounding camps feature a massive market selling period crafts and mead. A brilliant way to see 15th-century life up close.
#history #medieval #uktravel #reenactment
https://europa.tips/en/tewkesbury-medieval-festival-battle-history
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It really doesn't get better than this. A fruit tree arbour in a walled garden on a warm, sunny afternoon.
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It really doesn't get better than this. A fruit tree arbour in a walled garden on a warm, sunny afternoon.
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It really doesn't get better than this. A fruit tree arbour in a walled garden on a warm, sunny afternoon.
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It really doesn't get better than this. A fruit tree arbour in a walled garden on a warm, sunny afternoon.