To clarify, I do have some interest in the paranormal, and I have experienced things that I would describe as such, but at the same time I approach it with a level head, ready to find a rational explanation. It's only unexplainable when every rational explanation has been ruled out. I don't point out dust in my pictures and call them orbs. I'm not one of these mediums who claim that the shadow over there is telling me that it's name is Mary and it's looking for its lost kids, in a voice that rather conveniently only I can hear. In fact I absolutely loathe it when people claim to be experts in the paranormal, because if it was a subject you could be an expert in, it wouldn't be paranormal, it would just be regular normal.
And also, while disembodied voices and apparition sightings happen to the best of us, I find that the sudden leap to the assumption that these are the souls of the dead to be a little bit of a premature conclusion. Hold on to it if you want, but where's the connection? If you see a shadowy figure move and suddenly vanish, it hasn't done anything to establish a backstory. It's just a shadowy figure.
See what I mean? My own experiences with the paranormal have given me only two pieces of information- something exists that I can't always see, and that they like to fuck with humans sometimes. Now I don't know what that is. Is it the spirit of a dead person? Am I perhaps just a little bit crazy? Did someone spike my drink? If you told me that it was sentient hive of micro-organisms that can group together in a figure resembling humans on occasion just to play with us, I'd find that equally as plausible as life after death because I have the same amount of supporting evidence. In fact I would argue that it's slightly more plausible because at least it's delving into the realms of pseudo-science, albeit ridiculously. Nobody actually knows for sure, and thats what makes it so intriguing.
But there's a lot to unpack here so lets start at the facts.
Originally a semaphore tower stood here. That is, a communications tower that could convey information over long distance via visual signals. But who needs a tower with an actual purpose when you can have a big decorative folly instead? In 1845, in the middle of an agricultural recession, a quarry owner decided to both advertise the stone from his quarry and provide employment by having the semaphore tower replaced with this thing, which was eventually nicknamed the Pepper Pot by locals.
It was later renovated in 1907 and turned into a hunting lodge, and it's just sort of dominated the scenery ever since, although there were talks about demolishing it in 1938. As you can see, that never happened. But for the locals this has often been a place for youngsters to come and fuck about in all their youngster glory. The folly and the caves in the woods surrounding it have hosted many a party, and at some point between the two world wars, some guys tried to launch their own home made plane from the hill. I'm not sure how well they did, but given that it's their descendants who passed the tale on, we can assume they survived.
As for the the towers accessibility, it was reported locked in 2008, but apparently it wasn't long after that the door was stolen by metal theives, and now we're left with this delightful health-and-safety nightmare.
The tower is actually covered in signatures dating back decades. This one is from 1938. At some point graffiti and vandalism does become history, and part of a buildings character.
The folly contains a single stairway leading upwards. I ran up the stairs with wild abandon, gleeful that I'd get a good view. However about half way up I suddenly realised that there was no handrail, and my survival instinct kicked in, urging me to take things a little slower. It's strange how much comfort a simple handrail can provide.
It was after we'd left that I looked up the history of the place, and found the legend attached to it scrawled on the wall of a toilet cubicle...
Actually I wish that was true, because toilet cubicle graffiti is definitely a better form of literature than the real place that I read about it, in the pages of The Sun. Of all the rags, The Sun has the most misleading title. It takes eight minutes for light to reach Earth from the sun, but you could read The Sun newspaper every day for your entire life and not come across anything bright.
Nevertheless, we have a ghost story and it goes like this-
Allegedly long ago a gypsy girl named Sally was locked in this tower, without food and water, and left to die. According to the legend, she now haunts the tower and the woods around it. Sometimes people see her, and sometimes people just hear her disembodied voice. Sometimes people hear her crying in the tower, and if people are really lucky they get to hear her scream like a banshee.
Supporting this legend is the fact that the road through the area is actually called "Sally in the woods," an alleged reminder that she's there, lurking around even today.
Sally allegedly likes to remind motorists of her presence. Sometimes she's seen at the side of the road, and sometimes she actually runs out into traffic with a look of terror on her face, like she's running from something. According to the stories, shes responsible for a total of eight fatal car accidents.
I've obviously not been content to let The Sun be my only source, so I've looked up the legend in multiple places and come across a few variations of the story. One version was that she was locked here by military folks. Another version is that it was her fiance who went missing around here, and she's spending eternity looking for him.
Some say that only motorists in the front seat will see her, so backseat passengers have nothing to worry about. Some say she only appears to male motorists.
That's a bit sexist, Sally. I get that you're centuries old but try to keep with the times at least. Women are allowed to see ghosts too.
But whether it's male, female, front seat or back seat, the articles claim that the locals will often refuse to drive up here at night.
As for the woods themselves, it's said that people report shadowy figures darting between trees, or standing and watching. Sometimes beastly noises are heard, such as howls or ferocious growls. Some say that an apparition of an old woman can be seen coming out of one of the caves before vanishing.
But I am aware that the media will take a story of a man stepping on lego and report that he's getting his entire leg amputated. That's just what the media does- it takes the mundane and finds a way to make it sell papers. So I'm going to find actual testimonies, dig a little deeper, regurgitate the facts as unbiased as possible, give my opinions, and let you draw your own conclusions.
There's a metal pole on the stairs. This is the remains of the handrail. It's likely that was also stolen by metal thieves.
So in regards to whether Sally haunts the road, I'm going to point out that we did see deer on our drive up here. It was dark and they just emerged from nowhere, ran across the road and vanished into the bushes. I'm fairly certain that they might be responsible for a few road accidents, and maybe even a few Sally sightings.
In regards to the roads name, there is an actual explanation for the road being called "Sally in the Woods," but it's quite a boring ordinary one. It turns out that Sally is archaic slang for a fight, and it refers to a historic battle that took place in the woods in 1643 during the civil war. It predates the tower that Sally was supposedly locked in by two hundred years, and seemingly removes a huge chunk of the myths supporting evidence.
Some graffiti says "Don't die going up," but someone has defaced the word "Die."
I guess it's a bit of a sore subject in this neighbourhood.
The earliest published record I can find of the ghost girl Sally was in a folklore book from the 1970s that tells of Sally haunting the woods after being struck down by an automobile. A later book published in 1998 claims that Sally was locked in the tower where she starved, although often the legends are combined, with some saying that she was held captive in the tower but somehow escaped and fled for help, before getting struck by a car. This certainly adds up with the stories that she has a look of terror when she runs into the road.
However the woods themselves were the stuff of legend even before the tower was built, and this is because of a local witch that many say is the woman people now known as Sally.
Her real name was Sarah Gibson, and she was born in 1724. Her family was huge. Her father came from a brood of eleven and her mother was from a brood of six. Sarah was the fourth daughter of the family, and quite nearly the last when her mother died during her infancy. But not to be put off spawning more humans her father remarried and managed to successfully shoot his DNA into his new wife a few more times, producing another four children.
Sarah married a gamekeeper called John in 1748. She moved in to his family home, which was owned by the estate that John worked for. He died in 1783 at the age of 58, and some of the sources that try to play up the witchcraft angle say that he died "suspiciously," and that it baffled medical science at the time. In all honesty it was probably pretty easy to baffle medical science in 1783, but nevertheless, it's well documented that he died of pneumonia. And in all honestly, believing that Sarah did use witchcraft to kill someone that she'd been married to for 35 years is a little silly, because she hasn't got a motive- Johns employers evicted her after he died. She was suddenly homeless, all because they wanted to free the house up for the new game keeper.
But the game keepers had numerous huts throughout the woods, and she was quite familiar with them, having often brought her husband food while he worked. So she gathered what few things she had and began squatting in one of these huts. Her husbands former work colleagues, feeling sorry for her, not only allowed her to stay there but actively worked to cover up her presence, and it seems that it was these attempts to hide her that started the rumours that there was something sinister lurking in the woods. People reported strange noises, dancing shadows, and over the next 41 years Sarah herself gained a reputation for being a witch and a celebrated "wise woman."
Now, being a witch likely just meant that she knew how to treat a few illnesses with various herbs, all of which baffled medical science at the time, because as we've established, this was easy to do in the 1700s. Nobody really has anything bad to say about Sarahs witchcraft, and many described her as a practitioner of white magic, although some sensationalist media retellings of her story do try to go for a more sinister angle, claiming that local children often went missing. But generally the worst she's ever been reported doing is asking people traveling through the woods to help her with her shopping, and then giving them bad luck if they said that they would but then didn't. Good for her.
Most astonishly, Sarahs date of death is recorded as August 12th 1824. She was only a few months off from a hundred years old. No wonder she became a legend. She outlived everyone who originally knew her.
Sarah was mentioned in writings long after her death. According to some written documents in 1882, following her death the local carpenter and acting bailiff burned down her house, having been inside and seen a few witchcrafty things. He claimed that when the house went up in flames, her broomstick flew out through her chimney.
A later publication in 1899 tells of the ruins of "Old Sallys Cottage" and how she was a good witch but that she could fly using her broom and kept black cats. A later publication from 1929 tells of how Sarahs house was incredibly smoky and that she would hang her mugs on the ivy that encased her home, presumably so that they would fill with rain water and rinse out. Visitors and passers by would often leave coins in these mugs, and other tokens of gratitude for her so-called witchcraft.
Another publication, also from 1929, tells of how she earned a living offering refreshments to people who traveled through the area.
But you see, the legend of Sarah and all of the publications that mentioned her seem to predate the publications of Sally the girl who was locked in the tower. I guess it's pretty plausible that the story of a witch in the woods has been muddied over time, changed with each re-telling, given additional detail because of a big ominous tower, and undergoing a name change because of an oddly named road utilising archaic slang that just happens to be a womans name.
But again, so far this is just legend and myth. The best way to draw a line between media sensationalism and actual occurances is to ask the locals.
Here is the top floor of the tower, although there isn't much of it left. It sure has an ominous looking drop! Someone has drawn a clock here for some reason.
The upper windows are all smashed, but I did wonder what the locals thought of our lights up there. Perhaps we've unknowingly contributed to the local legends.
But on the subject of the locals, most opinions are pretty divided. It's not quite as bad as the media makes out, claiming that people are too afraid to come up here. On the contrary people come up here all the time. They either believe that the woods are haunted, or they think it's a load of shit. But it's rare that someone actually refuses to come here.
In regards to the tower, one man claimed that as a youngster in the 1950s he would often see lights on up in this tower, and that his father told him that there was some kind of bogey man up here that would come and get him if he didn't go to sleep. That's not really supernatural but certainly indicative of other retellings of the towers history.
In regards to the road, the car accidents are real, but what causes them remains up for debate. Some people do claim to have seen an old lady at the side of the road. One man swears that he thought he hit someone in his van, but when he got out to check, nobody was there. One man claims that an old woman appeared in the back of his car before vanishing. One woman says that while traveling through the area, she suddenly felt cold, and burst into tears for absolutely no reason, and then saw the old lady at the side of the road. Her husband didn't see anything and thought that she had lost her marbles.
Some other stories are a bit more personal and creepy. In 2007 a family were driving along the road when their four year old daughter kept repeating "I died over there," although in spite of being creeped out a little, they still drive up there and nothing has happened to them since.
Another woman says that while she has no memory of it, her father recalls that when she was four they drove down the road and she cried the entire time, claiming that she could hear people screaming.
So this seems to disprove the myth that the ghost only appears to men and front seat motorists. But you know what else it disproves? Sally the gypsy girl.
People aren't seeing a gypsy girl running into road in terror! People are seeing Sarah, the elderly woman who made a living offering refreshments to people traveling through the area! Sally who was locked in the tower, at this point, sounds like media hype. No actual testimonies claim to see a young gypsy girl, but plenty of people claim to see an elderly lady.
But while the gypsy girl may well be a media fabrication, there are apparently other ghosts. A paranormal group who investigated the area in 2008 reported picking up the presence of a man who had been struck down by a blow to the side of the head during the earlier skirmish in the 1600s, as well as the presence of a woman around this tower, but that she communicated to them that she didn't die here. Apparently one of the mediums picked up the presence of a 45-year-old woman who had an incredibly distorted face, asking if she could join their group. While they say she wasn't evil as such, her energy was unpleasant.
Here's a view looking directly down the tower from the top. It's pretty cool.
I'm a little curious about how the story of an elderly witch morphed in the space of a few decades into the tale of a gypsy girl, but perhaps this can be explained by looking at a few murders in the area that have actually been recorded. I got this idea when people I asked about Sally also started mentioning the murder of a girl called Tessa, which happened in 1978. It's a pretty brutal murder. She was nine. The killer was nineteen. He stripped her naked and cut her throat, and he eventually told the police that it was because she called him names. He sounds like a cunt.
The thing is, the murder of Tessa happened relatively near here, in the sense that an American might think Boris Johnson lives relatively close to Croydon. That is, geographically they're close, but to locals on a small scale, the tower and the location of Tessa's unfortunate murder are miles apart, so it seemed a little odd that people were getting the story of Tessa and the story of Sally confused. So I wondered if something similar had happened decades earlier that had maybe similarly led, through muddied re-telling after re-telling, to the Sally myth.
And this led me to the story of Elsie, a young woman who was murdered a few miles away, but in an area that has various caves and mines, just like the area around this folly tower. The similarity lends itself to the legend. A local girl is killed and found in one of the caves. There's a road going past a wooded area with caves with an odd name. Chinese whispers does the rest. It's probably not okay to call it Chinese Whispers anymore, but who cares?
Here's a view from the tower overlooking the woods. I guess it is pretty eerie.
So, Elsie's story is intriguing. She was a known liar and a bit of a scoundrel. While the media at the time said she was of German descent, because the murder of a foreign mystery woman sold more papers, she had in fact come from London. Her real name was Wilkie and her parents kept a coffee shop at Tidal Basin railway station. She was always a bit of a rebel, and was arrested for theft in 1880 when she was just fourteen. She ended up being carted off to a reformatory where she spent the next five years, with the sentence dragged out because she repeatedly clashed with the matron. Probably not helping the youngsters reformation, her family were quite relieved to see her go. She wrote to them in 1889 asking for forgiveness but they didn't want her, so she decided to change her name and reinvent herself.
Elsie got employment as a servant, in spite of her employers knowing about her past. According to them and to her peers, Elsie was surprisingly more educated and intellectual than her fellow domestics, which led to numerous rumours about where she had come from. However she was totally stealing from her employer and she was sneaking boys into her quarters, so she got a bit of a reputation as a scoundrel and a slut. In 1891 she was apparently on notice to terminate her employment, which had lasted only a few months, but then she went missing. Most people assumed she had run off with some guy and her parents were really not that bothered about finding her. It wasnt until 1893 that two schoolboys found a skeleton in a cave that was later identified as hers purely because it was wrapped in linen that she'd stolen from her employer. Above her eye was a penny-sized fracture indicative that she'd died from being whacked on the head.
The immediate suspect was a boy she was seeing, a coach building apprentice called Arthur who was actually eight years younger than her. Some of his friends claimed that he'd once bragged about murdering someone and getting away with it, but they assumed he was joking. He'd been seeing other girls on the side, including someone called Pollie. Witnesses in the past had heard both Arthur and Pollie make vague comments like "she ought to be dead," which exacerbated their suspect status, in addition to the fact that Elsie had caused quite a drama outside his house, claiming to be pregnant and making sure the entire neighbourhood knew that Arthur was responsible. Pollie had also had many a shout-off with Elsie and at least one physical fight but the most telling piece of evidence was that Arthur was treated for a wound on his hand, which doctors confirmed was a bite from a human being. He claimed he got it from some roudy liberals at a liberal fete but the police witnesses said that they'd all been on their best behaviour, and not at all bitey. To many this sounds like a self defence wound, inflicted by Elsie in her final moments.
But even so, there wasn't enough evidence that Arthur had murdered anyone, although he was certainly a man-whore. But the hiding place of the body shows some knowledge of the area and the fact that she was wrapped in linen from her stash of stolen things would imply that she was murdered in her lodging, and then removed. But he was known to be scrawny and few think he'd have the strength to do such a thing.
There are a few leads that the police probably could have chased a bit better but the police had spent more than they were willing to on an investigation on a mere servant girl, and so the matter was dropped. Pollie and Arthur got married and then in 1914 they fled to Canada, a move that many say was suspicious. Pollie died in 1946 and Arthur died six years later, so if they did have secrets then they've taken them to the grave.
So what's this got to do with Sally? Like Tessa, the murder of Elsie happened relatively close but not that close. However I totally think that the story of Sally in a woodland covered in caves is a chinese-whispered-to-death version of the story of Elsie, who was murdered and found in an area covererd in caves. At least thats my theory. How did the myth change locations from one cavey area to another? Because there's a fucking road called Sally in the Woods, and the cavey area where they found Elsie is now a golf course.
A conversation might go like this-
"I heard someone was found dead in one of the caves years ago."
"Ah, I only know one area where there are caves and its up by the tower. Is that why the road is called Sally in the Woods? Isn't that where people see that ghost?"
There you go. The story of Sally was born. But it's important to emphasis that this is just a theory of mine.
Paranormal investigators also seem to agree that Sarah and Sally are two separate entities, but also that there's a third demonic entity in these woods around a tower. And indeed, witness testimonies do go beyond seeing an old woman. Campers claim to have heard children laughing and crying, and also more eerily, seen hands pressing against their tent from the outside. One camper has told of how he went to get wood and came back to see two shadowy figures stood behind his friend. Another claims to have once seen a single file row of five children walking through the woods, all wearing tatty Victorian attire while chanting strange things before disappearing into the woods.
And even more bizarrely people claim to have seen large black cats, and also UFOs. The UFOs tend to be bright lights in the sky, often white or orange and sometimes red, zipping around soundlessly before vanishing, although one story does tell of a couple of campers noticing a giant black triangle hovering over them, which they barely noticed against the night sky because it was so black.
But by far the most common claim is that people have stumbled across the remnants of people practicing black magic, with circles laid out, pentagrams, animals skulls, old worn down candles, and whatnot. And if you believe in that sort of thing, such as summoning various things via ouija boards and whatnot, then you're probably coming to the conclusion that maybe some edgy kids or occult folks have let in some unknown entity, and now it haunts the woods and the folly tower.
The tower sure has a nice view though!
To conclude, if you believe in this sort of thing, then it's either an amazing place that you can't wait to check out, or you'll avoid it like the plague. I think the tower itself is nice enough to visit even without the ghost stories.
I have no doubt whatsoever that folks interested in magic and the occult do their dabbling up here due to its reputation. Kids fuck about. Some do satanic graffiti (the best examples are when they accidentally do the Jew star instead of the pentagram) The ramifications of that vary depending on what you believe. I've taken part in ouija boards before, and I'll almost definitely do them again just to see what happens, although I know for a fact that I have friends who think I'm poking a big spectral hornets nest and should stay the fuck away from that sort of thing.
I personally didn't experience anything at this tower, but it makes for a fun story either way. Personally I do think the story of Sally has got mixed in with some of the murders that have happened here, and the story has altered with every re-telling. And there certainly are enough murders to do that with. Just south of here there's another wood that's named "Dead Man Woods" on old Victorian maps, a name completely lacking in subtlety. They might as well name this area Murdersville.
But regardless, you have to admit that if all this is myth created because of a simple battle in 1643 then thats a hell of a domino affect. Imagine a simple skirmish causing a centuries-long ghost story.
Fascinating really. The man who built the tower just wanted to provide work during a recession. The civil war soldiers just wanted to win, and Sarah just wanted to get on with life in solitude. They had no idea they were contributing to legend.
Thats all I've got. Next I'm looking at an abandoned pub, and then an abandoned garden centre! I've never done one of those before! Anyway, in the meantime, follow my Instagram, Like my Facebook and follow my Twitter! Thanks for reading!
I don't think I could climb those stairs. I don't know anything about making things out of stones, but those stairs look like the could just fall. Great post!!!
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