This article first appeared in Fortean Times.
There are a remarkable numbers of traditions from around the British Isles featuring phantom coaches. These phantom coaches are often driven by headless coachmen, sometimes with even the horses pulling the coach being headless too.
The village of Olney, Buckinghamshire, is allegedly the home of a phantom coach pulled by headless horses and with a decapitated driver. Kingston Russell House in Long Bredy, Dorset, is said to be haunted by a coach with a headless coachman, a headless footman and four headless passengers, pulled by a team of four headless horses. Headless horses driven by a headless coachman were said to emerge at midnight from a hole at Rowlands Hill in Wimborne, Dorset. Another phantom coach, with a headless lady passenger as well as a headless coachman driving headless horses, was alleged to ride around the site of a former court building in Stackpole Elidor, Dyfed. To look upon the phantom coach said to appear on Christmas Eve with a headless horses and a headless coachman at the reins, at Penrhyn, Cornwall, causes death, and so on.
Toby's Walk in Blythburgh, Suffolk is haunted by "Black Toby", Toby Gill, a Jamaican drummer of the 4th Dragoons regiment lynched by locals around 1750. In most versions of the story he walks the heath on foot, in some he drives a hearse to Hell, pulled by headless horses. Research by Joan Forman, local author of Haunted East Anglia, concluded that the coach with the headless horses is a later – 19th century – story that became conflated with Toby Gill.
A British dragoon roughly contemporary with Toby Gill, athough as a drummer he would have had a more colourful uniform. Out of copyright.
Toby's Walks beauty spot and picnic area, near Blythburgh, near the scene of where Toby Gill was lynched. It was closed in recent years by Suffolk Coastal District, citing frequent incidents of "dogging". Locals told me that there were one or two dogging incidents, and that the cash-strapped Council had used these an excuse to close the site to save money. Photo: Matt Salusbury
In one version of the "Black Toby" legend, Toby in his dragoon drummer's uniform drives a hearse (or a mail coach) to Hell, via Beccles. In other versions he is walking the heath in the civilian clothes he was found in.
There's a veritable cluster of phantom coach traditions around Bungay, Beccles and Oulton on the Suffolk-Norfolk border, each with a version in which the horses and sometimes the coachmen are headless, associated with local aristocrats and their stately homes.
The phantom coach with a headless coachman (no details on the headlessness of its horses) at Bungay and Geldeston is associated with the Bigod family. The phantom coach at Nursery Corner on the Beccles to Bungay Road is linked to the Blennerhassetts of Barsham Hall (now a ruin) and bears that family’s crest. In some versions it headless horses pull it all the way to Hassett's Tower in Norwich. The coach emerging from Roos Hall near Beccles, Suffolk, on Christmas Eve also has headless horses and sometimes headless coachmen.
The drive of Roos Hall, in Barsham near Beccles, from where a phantom coach linked to the local Blennerhassett family is said to emerge on Christmas Eve. In some versions of the story, the coach horses as well as the coachman are headless. Photo: Matt Salusbury.
Boulge Hall, near Woodbridge, Suffolk (not far from Sutton Hoo, with its Saxon horse burial, see here) has a tradition of a coach pulled by headless horses, said to convey either the temperamental "Queen of Hell" Mrs Short or Mr Fitzgerald, both former owners of the Hall – now a farm.
While headless ghosts sort of make sense as the souls of those executed by beheading, comparatively few coachmen were actually beheaded. Beheadings were usually reserved for high-profile figures. These were anyway out of fashion in the golden age of coachmen in the 18th and 19th centuries, with England’s last beheading happening in 1747. Headless coach horses, though, don’t make sense at all – horses weren't beheaded.
Site of the excavated Mound among the Anglo-Saxon burial mounds at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk. This mound contained a horse burial with a young warrior and a horse buried in full harness.
The recent discovery of an Iron Age chariot burial in Pocklington, East Yorkshire, (FT 295;14-15), may help explain some headless coach traditions. Archaeology at the The Iron Age burial site at Pocklington has already uncovered over 200 burials. These included the first Iron Age chariot burial discovered in England – unearthed in 2017, this included a young man with grave goods buried in a two-wheeled chariot and the complete skeletons of two horses in full harness, found buried as if pulling a chariot.
The following year, an excavation at a different part of the Pocklington site uncovered a barrow containing another Iron Age chariot burial, from around 100 BCE. In this burial, a "high-status" man in his forties or older was found crouched inside the chariot. The chariot itself, with its team of two horses, was buried as if the horses were leaping up out of the ground. Paula Ware of MAP Archaeological Practice told the Yorkshire Post their heads may have even protruded from the earth and been above ground.
The heads of the horses were at the point in the burial that was nearest the ground. It's likely they had been destroyed through centuries of ploughing, leaving behind the skeletons of two headless horses. Ploughing, along with natural erosion, is known to have destroyed or damaged many ancient barrows and tombs over the years – the antiquarians of the 18th century were already recording traditions of local "giant’s graves" that had disappeared. Any chariot burials that farmers stumbled across while ploughing may well have remained unrecorded. The grave goods of "high status" Iron Age warriors buried with their chariots would have been made of precious metals, it would have been tempting to walk off with the loot and cover up evidence of the burial.
Could superstitious folk of the 18th century have uncovered one such unrecorded chariot burial, with horses in full harness buried upright but with no heads, and interpreted it as headless horses pulling a coach? The counties associated with headless coach horse traditions listed above are also rich in Iron Age archaeology.
Thanks to Paranormal Database (www.paranormaldatabase.com), @manukenken and @HilaryRSparkles for headless horse intelligence. There are many more East Anglian phantom coaches, phantom coachmen, phantom coach horses (headless or otherwise), phantom horsemen and the phantom sounds of horses and coaches in my book Mystery Animals of Suffolk, available from bigcatsofsuffolk.com or via its distributor Bittern Books.
Update: (19/07/22) I have since had accounts of a phantom coach journeying between Harrow Hill and Long Compton, Warwickshire, report that both driver and horses are headless. The coach is most active in winter or after heavy rain. From Brazil comes the bizarre Mula-Sem-Cabeca, the phantom Headless Mule. This is said to be the ghost of a women who killed herself after having an illicit relationship with a priest. For some reason, the stump of the head of this dark-coloured headless mule is on fire.
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