HAUNTED DORSET

From spectral Roman armies and duelling ghosts to a beneficent black dog, Jerry Bird explores some of the spookier goings on around the county

- Jerry Bird

The ancient county town of Dorchester has many ghosts. Unsurprisingly some of them result from the infamous ‘Bloody Assizes’ of 1685. Judge Jeffries’ lodging house, 6 High West Street, is said to be haunted by the restless souls of the executed victims of his rough justice, whose heads ended up on spikes on the church railings opposite. The judge is said to haunt Antelope Walk, appearing at night from the doorway at the rear of his lodgings, and walking a few yards downhill before disappearing at the entrance to the dining rooms of the Antelope Inn (now The Oak Room).

More ancient in origin are the ghostly Roman soldiers which have been seen at both Maumbury Rings, the henge monument which was converted into an amphitheatre by the Roman army, and Maiden Castle, the huge Iron Age hill fort just outside the town.

In 1969 in Thorncombe Wood, close to Thomas Hardy’s birthplace at Bockhampton, on the line of the old Roman road to Badbury Rings just outside Dorchester, a Roman soldier was seen by a group of borstal boys on a ‘working camp’ from Guys Marsh, at Shaftesbury. According to the officer in charge the soldier, complete with shield, sword, toga and helmet hovered ‘about two feet in the air’ – the estimated level of the original Roman road surface. In 1661, two holy men saw what were afterwards interpreted as a large cohort of Roman Cavalry on the old Roman Road from Eggardon to Dorchester.

The writer Thomas Hardy, said he saw a ghost in Stinsford Churchyard on Christmas Eve, after laying a sprig of holly on his grandfather’s grave. His sister, Kate, interpreted the spectre as their grandfather. The ghost uttered the words ‘A green Christmas’ to Hardy before disappearing into the church.