An Exmoor Ghost Story

Photographer Richard Austin joined me so that we could illustrate this ghost story for the newspapers

The other day an old friend phoned to ask me to remind him of the ghost story concerning Bampfylde Clump. I dug it out of my old files and repeat it here - but have another old pal, Tim Bannerman, to thank for this very spooky tale.

Question: take a romantic young poet, a lonely ring of trees and a haunted pub, and what do you get? The answer is – one of the most chilling ghost stories that you’ll ever hear. 

The young poet is now a middle aged man with a successful media business in London’s West End, but the other night he recounted the following West Country based yarn at a pre-Christmas dinner - and even the streetwise youngsters present were scared witless.

Before we begin, let’s first say that the central element in this story focuses on a ring of trees – you’ll find such places dotted all around the region and, for many, they do hold a special place in the imagination. 

I do not know the history of Bampfylde Clump, perched almost 1000 feet up on the southern ridge of Exmoor above North Molton – but I do know that such rings occur for various reasons. Many are situated around ancient cattle pounds – and the pounds themselves may have been located on even more ancient hill fortifications dating back to the Iron or even Bronze Age. 

But let us travel back a mere trice to the spring of 1976 when we find a young Cambridge graduate climbing ever higher from the great vale of mid-Devon to the southern moors. His name is Tim Bannerman and he has set out on a long walk from South Molton to Bristol in a bid to clear his mind and sort out his future. 

I jotted the following notes when Tim was telling this tale at supper.

“Towards the end of the day I noticed a big hill with a clump of trees on top, and I climbed towards it feeling marvellous and wonderful - as you do when you are free and walking for days. 

“As I got closer I realised what a wonderful vantage point the place had. The trees were planted in a perfect circle and I thought I’d go in and revel in the wonderful expanse of England on a spring evening. 

“There was a gate set into the outer ring of the wood and I went to hop over it but, as I put my hand on the wooden bar, it was like getting an electric shock. But a different sensation to that…

“It was this sense of difference that instantly struck. And there was more -all the noise stopped – the birds, the wind in the trees - everything became still. And the temperature suddenly dropped.

“I went on into the wood and headed straight to the centre – and as I did I realised it wasn’t so much me doing the walking, as me being walked. It was as if I was being drawn in. Like being pulled by a magnet.

“I found myself slowing down – I realised I was being literally rooted to the place. Whatever force had drawn me there was now holding me - sucking the sap, the juice, the lifeblood, from my body.

“I was no longer in control, but I knew if I didn’t move I’d be sucked dry. As I looked around I could see the strange shapes of the trees - and they started to take on eerie forms. 

“I had to apply a huge sense of will – like when you are in a dream and you know if you don’t, something terrible will happen. I literally pushed one limb in front of the other. And, one step at a time, I forced myself from the centre.

“As I tried to escape I went past a stack of tree roots - and I realised it was actually a stack of bodies. The skeletal forms of soldiers – one with remains of a uniform sash. There was woman – possibly with a child in her arms wrapped in muslin… All in a state of decay – it was all loss and death and despair.

“I thought: these people have been claimed by the wood - and I am not going to be. For some reason, this wood had chosen me - and I thought: what can I give this wood instead of me? All I had was an orange – so I solemnly peeled the skin, opened it in a perfect fan, and laid it on the ground to formally present it to the wood. 

“Then I headed toward the gate and, as I went, the sense of silence was so heightened every footfall I made was like an explosion. I realised the trees were closing around me - the wood was making one last effort not to let me go. But, after the moment with the orange, I was feeling quite strong - believing I could make it – and I leapt over the gate, then ran like the wind.  

“Back on the road I started heading towards Simonsbath – I will always remember a sign to a place called Bentwitchen – and after a mile or so I turned a corner and to my amazement saw a sign swinging in the breeze. “It was getting dusky and I realised a miracle had occurred - here was a pub, completely in the middle of nowhere. The Poltimore Arms was an answer to a prayer - I opened the door and, to my joy, it let me into a warm stone-flagged room.”

A much relieved Tim talked to a customer and to a friendly barmaid or landlady and told them of his terrifying adventure – and they, in return, replied with a story of their own about a ghost called Charlie who frequented the place.

Fast forward, just for a moment, a couple of years and we see Tim returning to the area. Time had soothed his fears and he wanted to revisit the wood (which on this occasion offered none of its erstwhile threat) and call at the lonely pub. 

He was told a disturbing tale. It seems that the barmaid who’d made him feel so at home had since been murdered by a jealous lover. Tim was also told that the resident ghost had disappeared one day with a customer who’d come to live in the parish, and had taken up a haunting residence in his home.  

So much for the poet’s tale. Tim is one of my best friends and I know that the sepulchral afternoon was a major turning point in his life. He stayed at Simonsbath that night and the next morning hitched a lift with a man who happened to be the chief reporter of a local newspaper.

That man convinced Tim to take a vacant reporter’s job (recently vacated by one Martin Hesp who was going travelling), and the poet turned his pen to journalism, came to live in West Somerset, met his lovely future wife – and the couple now have four children and five grandchildren. 

But here is a weird an unsettling rider to this tale. I cannot give any reason or meaning to the strange apparitions which overtook my friend 33 years ago in Bampfylde Clump – save to say that WMN photographer Richard Austin and I went there recently and we two old cynics were scared half to death. 

While in the middle of the trees, we heard the most blood curdling, unearthly, scream either of us has ever encountered. Two friends, who were walking around the edge of the wood, heard not a single thing.

However, what I did discover in some old records is the possible – nay probable – identity of the mysterious ghost Charlie, who used to haunt the pub.

This is taken from an old newspaper called Trewman's Exeter Flying Post – dated Thursday, December 30, 1852.

“An inquest was held on the body of Mr John Avery, late of the Poltimore Arms. It appeared that on Saturday the 18th, he purchased at Mr Attwater's (druggist), three ounces of oil of vitriol, which he took home with him, and about six o'clock the same evening he swallowed the whole of it. 

“He lingered on in the most awful agonies until about the same hour on Sunday, when he expired. A post-mortem examination was made, the result of which plainly showed that the deceased had died from the effects of the poison.”

I ask this question: what had caused John Avery to become so horribly “despondent” that he’d swallowed vitriol knowing it would give him the most painful death? 

Had he been claimed, I wonder, by the awful phantoms of that nearby ring of trees?