I soon discovered that the village had a wealth of very dark legends and looking into these became a sort of hobby. In these pages, I shall set our just two of the stories which came my way.
So, was it a coincidence that I chose this village as my retirement home? Well, I really cannot say but, once here, I needed something to occupy my mind and years of enquiring into various mysteries had conditioned me to keep probing into that which is hidden. I soon discovered that the village had a wealth of very dark legends and looking into these became a sort of hobby. In these pages, I shall set our just two of the stories which came my way.
The first of these came about after I had been enjoying a quiet pint in The Last Tot, the older of the two village hostelries. An old codger at the bar was regaling me with village yarns and he mentioned that this establishment had formerly been called “The Witch’s Revenge” but the name had been changed after a series of accidents and misfortunes associated with the property. The gentleman gave me the basic details and, lest I should accuse him of romancing, he asked the landlord to give me the name and telephone number of a certain young lady whom he said would corroborate all he told me. Having nothing else to do I did contact the lady who shall remain nameless and I include below the story which she told me.
The Summer after I finished my A levels I was invited to spend a week with my aunt, uncle and cousin at their home in the Compton Valley as a way of putting all the exam stress behind me. On my first evening with them they took me for a meal in the old pub in the village. It was a real old English pub, thatched and half timbered with black oak beams, a low ceiling and that unique scent made up of old wood, smoke and age itself. I have always been sensitive to what I call “atmospheres” which I define as that process whereby events record themselves in the atoms of buildings just as sound can be imprinted on a tape. As I sat and looked at the old blackened oak bar, I reflected that men had leaned on that bar and debated the rights and wrongs of the beheading of Charles I. People had sat just where I was sitting and smoked clay pipes as they discussed the news from Waterloo and Trafalgar.
The place was called “The Witch’s Revenge” and I asked my uncle if he knew the story behind the name. Apparently, it was a well-known local legend and he told it to me with the more salacious bits interjected by my cousin who was just a year older than myself.
According to the tale, during the Civil War, the village had been Parliamentarian and one day a young woman had wandered into the village from no-one knew where. The story went that she wore “Strange and immodest garb” and also spoke strangely. On the basis of this scant data the villagers had decided that she was a witch and set out to punish her but her womanly charms had affected the men of the village and the punishment became a long drawn out violation spreading over many days and nights. Eventually they finished her off in the market square just outside this tavern with a single sword thrust to the centre of her body which was then bloody and bruised. No-one knows what they did with the corpse but that is not the end of the story.
The witch had cursed the village and shortly after these shameful events it was taken by Royalist forces under the command of an unusually vicious officer. In order to set an example to surrounding communities the officer had all the men in the village condemned as traitors to the King and they were all put to a horrible death in the market square where it was said the blood flowed an inch deep as the screams of the victims and the wails of the women echoed off the buildings. Apparently, some years ago a historian had stones taken up from various points around the square and microscopic traces of old blood were found during tests of several of the samples so it does seem that a lot of blood had once been spilt over quite a wide area in the square.
Well, it had been an intriguing story but the evening progressed and the legend was soon forgotten or at least relegated to some back attic of the mind. The following day we all went on an excursion along the Dorset coast enjoying the wide sea vistas, sands and the clear blue sky. Next day my aunt and myself hit the shops in Dorchester and the following day I had to myself. This was not at all a lonely experience as it is a facet of my personality that I need time alone to recharge. I hiked to the top of Hunter’s Hill and then made my way down to the village seeking a tea shop; it was another warm day and my brief denim shorts and thin sun top were quite sufficient in the way of clothing.
As I approached the village, I encountered a small girl in full period costume of long black dress and a white pinafore and mop cap. She had been sitting on the grass beside the road making a daisy chain but when she looked up and saw me her hand went to her mouth, she hitched up her dress and hurtled off towards the village at Olympic speed. I was just assimilating my encounter with the child when I beheld an old lady sweeping her front doorstep with an old fashioned broom. The woman made a sound which I would never be able to reproduce then she dashed inside her cottage slamming the door behind her.
This was the point where I registered the fact that I was walking on dust rather than tarmac and I wondered if I had stumbled into some local festival or even if a film company were using the village but it seemed strange that my uncle and aunt had mentioned nothing about such an event.
I had just decided to ask the next person I saw what was going on when three young men came into view advancing down the street. Two of them carried pitchforks and the third carried a full sized pike complete with a very meaningful spike on one end. The men all wore what I would call “Farm labourer’s costume” and they shouted at me something which was loud, unintelligible and definitely threatening. In moments they were upon me and strong arms grabbed my forearms. I struggled and protested loudly but I was dragged helplessly through the village where some folk peeped out of doorways and men attached themselves to the crowd surrounding me.
My state of mind had now moved from puzzlement through confusion to full blown terror. I had not the remotest idea what was going on and events were moving far too fast for me. Everyone was speaking in a loud, guttural dialect in which I picked out just enough words to identify it as a sort of rural English but I could not make out any sentences which I could actually comprehend. If only someone would listen to what I was trying to tell them but I am afraid that as I became more and more frightened my screams became less intelligible.
The men handled me very roughly and I knew that I must be covered in bruises as I was dragged into the old church and rope appeared among the men to bind my arms behind me. I was pushed down onto the cold tiled floor and my ankles were secured and a scarf of some sort was forced into my mouth and very firmly tied to gag me.
A clergyman came through the crowd and the other men backed away so that the cleric and myself were in the centre of a rough circle. The clergyman held aloft a wooden cross and incanted some words which may have been Latin then there was sort of a conference. Everyone was very animated and waving their arms as they shouted and the cleric was trying to impose some sort of order. As I lay on the floor I was shouting uselessly into my gag and I became aware that the cleric was losing the debate. The mob was shouting even louder now and pushing towards me. I came to see the cleric as my only hope of release but my terror deepened as the emotional temperature of the argument rose alarmingly. The cleric was now being pushed and jostled and the men at the back of the mob were shouting support for their leaders who were haranguing their Reverend.
In the end the tide of men just surged forward pushing the cleric out of the way and rough hands grabbed my bound legs and my body bearing me up and dragging me out of the church and into the town square which lacked the painted signs over the shops to be seen in the modern town. This was just a cluster of thatched buildings around an area of stone cobbles and I was dumped on my back in the centre of the square as the shouting continued. I realized that the situation was now totally out of control and being spurred on by some dark primeval force.
I was almost hysterical as the mob, like one single beast, lifted me up and bore me to a barn behind the town street where I was taken in and chain was used to fasten me very securely to a great vertical beam which supported the roof.
This being done the mob withdrew to stare at their weeping, captive as I stood there against the beam. I think they wanted to post a guard on me but none of them would stay in the barn without the rest of the mob and they withdrew slamming the door behind them and making a lot of noise outside as I imagine they secured the door.
Left alone I began to quieten down but I was still in the grip of terror as I half expected them to set fire to the barn with myself inside. I think it was only the risk to surrounding wooden buildings which prevented them from doing this.
The human mind is preprogrammed to try to make sense of whatever input it receives, that is why we have superstitions. Primitive people saw the sun move across the sky and came up with the story of a sun god riding a fiery chariot. We cannot just leave things alone; we are bound to put them into some sort of story which attempts to explain what we see. And so my mind called forward stories which I had read of so called “time slips”. For no particular reason both stories were said to have occurred in France; in the early twentieth century two ladies believed that they had accidentally wandered into the gardens of the Palais de Versailles during the reign of one of their many kings called Louis and they described in great detail the costumes of the people they saw there.
Then there was the curious story of two English couples holidaying in rural France who spent a night in a very reasonably priced pension next door to a police station. It was much later that they discovered that the uniforms of the gendarmes they saw belonged to a previous era and that the police station on that site had closed many years before their visit.
Of course, as I stood there chained, cold and alone in that barn my mind turned to the tale of the witch’s revenge. I was a strangely dressed young woman who had strayed into this village and been taken for a witch. Had I somehow slipped through a crack in time? Was I in fact the origin of the story which I had been told four hundred years after it happened? Or had I somehow intertwined my life with that of a genuine victim of those dark years of Civil War?
The terror was returning now as my mind began to dwell on what, if the tale were true, was the ordeal into which I was about to be plunged. My body began of its own accord to pull against the iron which held me in a desperate bid for freedom but there was no inch of give in my bindings. I used every last ounce of strength to try to wriggle free, sweat began to run down my skin and I was panting fit to burst my lungs.
I have no idea of how long I fought those cruel chains but I froze when I heard sounds at the barn door and a group of young men came in fastening the door behind them, I smelt the strong odour of hops on their breath and the reek of their seldom washed bodies stung the back of my throat….
It is a known fact that the human brain is able to protect itself by obliterating, or at least suppressing, any memory with which it cannot deal. I believe that I have cause to be grateful for this provision. Sufficient to say that my next memory is of finding myself rising to consciousness as if from a long sleep and finding that I was fully clothed and lying on my back in a field. When I attempted to move, I found that every part of my body hurt so I lay still for a while before again trying to move but this time very carefully.
Doing this caused me to fall sideways with my back against the very slight mound on which I had been lying. Very gradually I found that I was in a position where I felt able to attempt sitting up although doing so hurt my head. I was sitting on the ground with my knees bent and I found that the low mound from which I had rolled was long and narrow and its size and shape suggested nothing other than a grave. At the time I did not pay very much attention to this fact as I was more concerned to clear my head and get myself firstly into a kneeling position and then to my feet.
Eventually, and with several stops to rest, I made my way back to my aunt’s although I said nothing of my macabre experiences of the day. I had paid so little attention to the exact location of that field that I have never been able to find it since so I have not been able to revisit my “grave”. On one level I have no wish to ever return to that place but, on the other hand, if I ever could find it again, I may be able to dig down to discover if the bones of the Compton Witch lie buried beneath. If there are no bones there then perhaps, I would have to accept that the Compton Witch is still walking around and it is I.
I did make one more discovery which relates to this disturbing affair. When I showered upon returning from my day, I found that my body was bruised in a great many places and right in the centre of my abdomen was a vertical mark about three inches long. When I ran my fingers over the mark, I found that it was perfectly smooth. It was a dull red like the mark of a very old wound which had healed but it had not been there before although it is still there to this day.
For my second enquiry I was invited to a very nice house on the outskirts of the village where I met a lady aged 29 and her husband. My informant had been aged twenty six when she and her husband had moved to a new house on the Lorne Park Development which had grown up on the site of an old mansion just outside the village. The properties here are set at an angle to each other and screened by hedges and trees. A development is like an estate but it has an extra nought on the end of the price.
Understandably the young woman would only speak to me if I promised anonymity so I must call her Susan. Almost as soon as the couple moved into their new home the dreams began; they were dreams which she said were unlike anything she had known before and were extremely disturbing. One of the most coherent concerned Susan leaving a Halloween ball very late at night. Immediately outside the venue stood a shiny, black motor car with the back door open and a man waving her into the car. This dream repeated for many nights and on every occasion Susan recalls standing on the kerb and feeling as if she were two people. Her sensible side told her that it would be madness to go into the car but somehow, she always felt compelled to slide onto the soft leather seats whereupon the car purred away.
Susan never saw the face of the man who sat beside her in the car but she had an impression of cultured elegance and total control. The driver’s seat in the front of the limousine was unoccupied. Then she would be climbing steps into a palatial hall lit by a huge chandelier and suddenly the scene would change to a basement of cold stone and flaming torches. Incongruously the basement would contain a vast polished mahogany dining table covered with identical newspapers all announcing Susan being found dead at midnight to which she always gave the same reply.
“But that’s impossible; I didn’t meet you until 2am.” And then she knew.
Not all the dreams followed such a fixed pattern. Some were confusions of impressions which she could not put into sentences but they seemed to include fear and cold, horrible laughter and pain. Sometimes there would be a man with his face lost in a huge cowl like a monk’s habit and if she ever looked into the cowl, she would see the bleached white grin of a skull. As time went on Susan did not have to be asleep to see the hooded man. She could be walking down a street and he would be across the road leering at her (Susan knew that a skull cannot leer but what was happening now was not in any way limited to what is possible).
All this time Susan was tormented by her inability to account for these things and she sometimes feared that they sprang from some depravity in her own psyche. What was especially terrifying was that the situation was not static but worsening. She remembers clearly the first time that she encountered “The Man”.
He was leaning against a lamppost just across the street when she pulled her car into the drive one Saturday morning. His face was very red and the huge nose was lined with ugly blue veins. He was bald but had unkempt wisps of grey hair clinging to his temples. The very worst thing about him was his grin; the mouth was a leering slit framed by nicotine stained white whiskers and showing uneven yellow teeth. For what seemed an age their eyes locked; Susan was unable to break away and somehow just by his leer the man was able to convey whole volumes of the total degradation which he intended to bring upon her. Eventually she managed to get from the car to the front door and fumble her key in the lock. When she looked back over her shoulder the man was gone.
The following Sunday he was across the road from the church watching as Susan came out of morning service. He was standing clear as day beside the road smoking a cigarette. Susan blinked, looked again, and he was still there. She walked a little further, she looked back over her shoulder and he was gone.
The Man could appear anywhere at all and he somehow became more real. Every time that she saw him Susan was overcome by waves of revulsion and now she somehow knew that he reeked of nicotine and had a voice like gravel sliding down a chute. Her thoughts kept coming back to the irrationality of the hold which The Man seemed to have gained over her mind and she feared that she was genuinely losing her sanity. What was it about him? What power did he have and how had he been able on so many occasions to appear and disappear at will?
Things became clearer when the couple decided that they wanted a pond and some contractors came into the garden with one of those small excavating machines. Susan arrived home from work to find that the digging machine had tumbled into a pit and all work on the pond had been stopped. Looking into the pit she clearly saw the stone walls of a chamber and part of an archway which led into blackness.
The investigations took time allowing for all the shoring and propping so that men could safely enter the pit but eventually it was revealed that they had discovered an underground complex which was probably the cellarage of an old house. There were long narrow passages and small rooms which extended from their boundary under the neighbouring properties but the investigators did not only find stone.
When they found the first skeleton it was not long before they found the next and then the next. In all seventeen young women lay in those chambers some with the rusty chains still around their bones. In one of the passageways, they found a collection of bones which confused them at first. It turned out that they had two skeletons here and, because the muscles and sinews had decomposed, the loose bones had become intermingled. One skeleton was of a girl and the other was a large man who had an axe embedded in his chest cavity. The skeleton of the girl showed evidence of having been brutally hacked and forensic pathologists speculated that the man had been attacking her but she had somehow got free, grabbed the axe and then swung it at her attacker but she had been too weak to escape and had died beside the man possibly due to blood loss.
Local research showed that the estate was built within the grounds of Lorne Park, the mansion which stood here and whose cellars contained the charnel house. The last resident of Lorne Park was Thaddeus Malkor who had simply vanished without trace. The rates on his property had not been paid and the house fell into dangerous decay. Malkor had no known heirs and eventually his estate fell to the ownership of the council who sold it to the developer who built the houses. Presumably the entrance to his basement of horrors was concealed to prevent anyone from finding his grisly secret so when he went down to the cellar one night he secured the door behind him and then met his end with the axehead in his chest. When the demolition contractors moved onto the site, they had failed to find the cellar so it had lain there until work began on the pond and the old stone finally gave way tipping the digger into the pit.