The Murder of the Scottish Pedlar

We haven’t had a ghost story for a while, so here’s one that is a bit grim and grisly to satisfy your morbid cravings. It’s based just up the road from me in Stoney Middleton and there just might be a little bit of truth in it.

Pull up a knapsack…

There are some stories that refuse to die.They linger in old villages, whispered across generations, attached to particular buildings and particular stretches of road. Long after the witnesses are gone and the facts have blurred into folklore, the tale remains. Such is the case with the murder of the Scottish pedlar of Stoney Middleton, a story that has haunted the Peak District for more than two centuries.

The story begins long before Tiktok started spilling the long protected secret of our fish and chips shops and quarry pools. In fact it starts way back in the eighteenth century, during the annual Wakes celebrations in the neighbouring plague village of Eyam.

Now, these fairs and feast days drew traders, entertainers and travelling merchants from all across the country, and among them was a Scottish pedlar who had made the journey south to sell his wares. His name has been lost to history, though in local tradition he is often referred to simply as “the Scotch Pedlar”, but I’m going to call him Robbie.

Pedlars occupied a curious place in society. They were essential carriers of goods, news and gossip, travelling between isolated communities long before railways or modern shops existed. Yet they were also outsiders, viewed with suspicion and frequently finding themselves in conflict with local traders.

According to local tradition, the Scottish pedlar discovered that a group of rival traders were operating without the necessary licences. He reported them to the authorities and the offenders were forced to stop trading. Unsurprisingly, this did little to endear him to those whose livelihoods he had interrupted. The result, if the legend is true, was a grudge that would end in murder.

One account suggests that concern for the pedlar’s safety was already growing by the time the fair ended. The landlord of the Bull’s Head in Eyam is said to have arranged for a companion to escort him as far as Stoney Middleton. Whether this happened or not is impossible to prove, but it demonstrates how deeply rooted the story became in local memory.

So, the pedlar reached Stoney Middleton and took lodgings at the Moon Inn which was then located on a different site from the present building. This little factoid is important, so just keep it in mind.

What happened next exists somewhere between historical record and folklore.

According to the traditional account, his enemies followed him to the inn. There, in one of the outbuildings, they attacked and murdered him. The landlord allegedly turned a blind eye to the crime, perhaps unwilling to interfere or perhaps fearful of the consequences. Once dead, the pedlar’s body was loaded onto a horse and carried away under cover of darkness. His killers disposed of the corpse in nearby Carlswark Cavern, a cave system in Middleton Dale. There the body remained hidden for around twenty years.

The murderers were never successfully prosecuted and, if the story is accurate, escaped justice altogether. – not unlike the Winnets Pass murderers. Can I just point out that the Peaks are a lot less lawless these days and with the amount of prowling around the countryside in the dark looking for ghosts that I do, I am eternally grateful that the Derbyshire rozzers have upped their game a bit these days.

Anyway… The discovery of the remains is itself wrapped in competing traditions.

One version claims the body was found by a man prospecting for lead. Another speaks of prophetic dreams that revealed the location. A Victorian account tells of a shoe discovered near the cave entrance, while a particularly grisly variation claims floodwaters washed a human foot, still wearing a shoe, from the cavern. Whatever the truth, there is at least some documentary evidence suggesting that human remains were indeed discovered in a cave.

The Eyam parish register records that in March 1773 a “corpse and other human bones” were found in a cavern in Eyam Dale by someone searching for lead. Many local historians believe this may represent the historical foundation beneath the legend. The remains were reportedly identified through distinctive silver shoe buckles remembered by local people. In one of those strange details that folklore never forgets, a local bell-ringer named Matthew Hall is said to have taken the buckles for himself, while the bones were eventually buried in Eyam churchyard. And there the story might have ended.

Except it didn’t.

People began seeing him.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Carlswark Cavern developed a reputation as a place to avoid after dark. Local accounts described sightings of a ghostly figure believed to be the murdered pedlar. Horses reportedly became nervous when passing the cavern entrance, refusing to proceed or shying violently at seemingly empty air. Such stories were once common throughout Britain, with animals often regarded as more sensitive to spirits than human beings.

But the haunting was not confined to the cavern. Over time the pedlar’s ghost also became associated with the Moon Inn itself.

Patrons and locals spoke of an uneasy presence within the building and the story became one of Derbyshire’s best-known village ghost legends. An interesting complication arises here – remember I told you to keep a little factoid in mind earlier? – The present Moon Inn stands on a different site from the original eighteenth-century inn where the murder allegedly occurred. The licence and name transferred during the nineteenth century, meaning the building associated with the haunting is not actually the building where the crime supposedly took place. This has not prevented the ghost from making the move in local folklore. Perhaps, as one writer dryly observed, the spirit transferred with the licence.

The tale gained national attention in 2007 when the television programme Most Haunted investigated Stoney Middleton. The team visited the Moon Inn, Eyam churchyard and Carlswark Cavern in search of evidence connected to the murdered pedlar. During their investigation, medium David Wells claimed to sense the presence of the victim and asserted that the pedlar still haunted both the pub and the cave. As with all paranormal television, opinions remain divided, but the programme introduced the legend to a new audience.

The great frustration for historians is that the story sits in an uncomfortable middle ground. We possess enough evidence to suggest that a body was discovered in a cave in the eighteenth century. We have longstanding local traditions connecting those remains to a murdered Scottish pedlar. Yet the surviving records are insufficient to prove the full story beyond doubt. The names of the killers are unknown. The identity of the victim remains uncertain. The details have become tangled with two centuries of retelling.

And this, dear reader, is why the story survives.

A solved crime belongs to history. An unsolved one belongs to folklore.

Standing outside the Moon Inn today, with Middleton Dale rising steeply above the village and Carlswark Cavern hidden among the limestone scars of the hillside, it is not difficult to understand why the story took root. The Peak District has always been a landscape where history and legend overlap. Lead miners vanished underground. Highwaymen stalked lonely roads. Lovers leapt from cliffs. Villagers survived plague.

And somewhere in the midst of all that, if the old stories are to be believed, a Scottish pedlar arrived to sell his wares and never made the journey home.

Whether his spirit still walks the dale is another question entirely.

But more than two hundred years after his death, people are still telling his story.

Further Reading

Thomas E. Cowen, History of the Village of Stoney Middleton (1910)

Eyam Parish Registers, 1768–1812

Bernard Bird, Perambulations of Barney the Irishman (1854)

Clarence Daniel, A Peakland Portfolio

Stoney Middleton Heritage Centre and Community Group archives

Local investigations featured on Most Haunted: Midsummer Murders (2007)

Sources:

Stoney Middleton Heritage Centre and Community Group;

Moon Inn historical notes;

Eyam Parish Register references;

Local folklore collections and historical summaries.

My childhood brushes with ghost lore

Despite writing about supernatural folklore, I rarely think about my childhood brushes with ghostly stories. I thought I might rectify that here—by reflecting on two examples of ghost lore I was exposed to in my youth.

Before I begin, I should point out that children’s folklore is just as vital and dynamic a phenomenon as its adult equivalent. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book (1999) is one example of a text that documents the folkloric creativity of children (as opposed to their passive receptivity). The book shows that wherever children come together, they form what folklorists call “folk groups.” The only criteria for the existence of such a group is that “two or more people. . . share something in common—language, occupation, religion, residence”; that they “share ‘traditions'”; and that they have the opportunity to meet face to face.

The Grey Lady

I’ll start with my childhood experience of belonging to a large “folk group” at my prep school, Tockington Manor, in South Gloucestershire. Every child in the school belonged to this folk group, because everyone, at some point, learned about the Grey Lady who haunted the manor’s halls. The boarders at the school were terrified of this lady: they said she wandered the manor at night—the spirit of a nurse who’d fallen from a skylight when the building served as a hospital during the First World War. I don’t remember much about this nighttime revenant, but she’s clearly a variant of a folkloric figure found at boarding schools everywhere: the Grey, White, Black, or Brown Lady.

In my school, older students, already initiated into the ghostly mystery, passed on stories about the drab-colored lady to the younger children, who did the same for the incoming class. I can only assume that telling stories about the Grey Lady allowed us to share anxieties in a fixed, personified form, which helped us adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. It also mythologized the building’s space, especially for boarders—those who couldn’t leave. Separated from their family homes, they created bonds and associations through the emotions that ghost stories evoke.

The story of the Grey Lady may have been one of the most memorable aspects of our folk group. But one story doesn’t create a culture. We also played games like marbles and conkers and had a shared language (words like cave—Latin for “beware”—were used to signal that a teacher was coming). Sometimes we sneaked out of school to gather in an old stone quarry, a place now dense with ivy-covered trees. The aura of this place—which we called simply “Quarry”—will forever remind me of the childhood capacity to create mythological worlds in spaces dominated by adults.

The Yellow Lady

Another example of supernatural storytelling from my childhood occurred during a trip to a Catholic boys’ camp in the summer of 1991. There too the sharing of ghostly legends created belonging among the boys. Despite sharing a tent with my brother, a cousin, and members of my cousin’s family, I felt unsettled in my new surroundings, and I remember how powerfully the nighttime telling of ghost stories allowed us to bond through fear. 

The only story I remember clearly (because it terrified me) was inspired by a local landmark. Visible from the camp was a house that glowed an eerie yellow at night. The sight of this building alone would be enough to inspire a haunted house tale. But in our case, the color became detached from the building, and we gave it to a supernatural figure who roamed the grounds at night. Apparently, a mysterious revenant called the Yellow Lady haunted that house, and she visited the meadow where we slept. Pricking up her disturbingly large ears to listen for wakeful boys, the Yellow Lady prowled the rows of tents, determined to steal a child. 

Although I remember thinking at the time that the Yellow Lady must have been a ghost, she differs in one important way from the Grey Lady mentioned earlier. While the latter was merely a scary presence that never interacted with students, the Yellow Lady was relational, embodying the discipline of the adult world (“no talking after lights out”). Her eerie color and super-sensory abilities—a result of her inhumanly large ears—suggest that she was a kind of supernatural bogeywoman, perhaps even close to a fairy.

The extreme effectiveness of this Yellow Lady legend meant that all of us had trouble sleeping that night. The next day we rushed to mass, hoping to find protection in proximity to a sacred ritual. The impulse was in keeping with much ghost lore, where holy symbols ward off supernatural threats.

Interestingly, while researching “Yellow Lady” stories (to see how commonplace they are), I came across a blog post in which the writer talks about a Yellow Lady story he learned at a camp run by monks. He then turns the tale into a literary short story—an embellishment, perhaps, of a fragmentary tale like mine. It seems to me that the writer’s camp may even have been the one I attended. Either that or the Yellow Lady haunts a number of such camps.

Haunted houses and witch houses

Besides my encounters with the Grey and Yellow Ladies, the only other ghost lore I can remember from my childhood are stories about haunted houses. These were always abandoned homes in the neighborhood, their shattered windows revealing darkness inside, the absence of family life. Repeating things we’d heard or inventing stories on the spot, we called these houses “haunted” or the former resort of “witches”—words that described the rupture in our sense of what a family home should look like. One of these houses sat at the corner of Charborough Road and Dunkeld Avenue in Filton, Bristol (I can still picture its dilapidated state). Another was on a road branching off from Charborough Road: they said that if you looked into its broken, upstairs window, you might see a witch looking back. (The latter is a vague memory that may even have been my own thought.)

Considering all this lore, it seems to me that ghosts fill the gaps where social meaning decays, whether through separation from home, abandonment of a home, or maladjustment in a place that’s not yet fully home. When I consider these crucial functions, I understand why empirical approaches to ghostly “phenomena” bore me: they arguably fail to understand ghosts at all.

Read about more ghost lore here.

#HappyGoodFriday !🐰🥚✝️
On Good Friday in old England: bake hot cross buns—they never mould & protect your home from fire & ills.

Skip with long ropes for luck & harvests. 🥐

No digging iron tools in the earth! ⛏️

Hang the bread for protection. 🥐✝️
#EnglishFolklore

To protect someone from evil magic, an English wise woman or cunning man would create a "witch bottle," which contained the person's urine, hair, and nail clippings along with other ingredients. Spells would get sucked into the bottle rather than harm their victim.

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Jack in the Green is an English folk custom, part of the May Day festival. A person is covered in a framework of green foliage, and then marches in a procession with musicians. It began in the 18th century, though some folklorists connect it with earlier imagery (such as the Green Man).

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