Ghosts of the A1 Great North Road: What Is Recorded

The A1 follows much of the old Great North Road between London and Edinburgh. Online it is billed as a road where masked highwaymen still ride beside cars. The catalogued reports are fewer, smaller and more varied than that. This page sets out what can be traced and what cannot.

What the record actually shows

The oldest dated story comes from Newark in Nottinghamshire. The Paranormal Database, a long-running catalogue of British folklore, records that around 1935 lorry drivers passing a bend near the town at night reported two dimly lit figures. A few months earlier two men had died there when their vehicles collided. The figures are said to have stopped appearing once the road was widened and a hedge cleared. The entry is marked as a historical record but names no driver.

A second story comes from Scrooby, on the old line of the Great North Road north of Retford. In 1952 a man walking home is said to have seen a figure go into a small cottage. He heard screams and saw two people run out, one with a head wound. He fled, lost his way in the dark and came back to the same spot to find no cottage there. Tellers link the scene to the murder of a gatekeeper and his wife by John Spencer in 1779. We have not checked the 1779 case against court records.

Two more entries are thinner. Near Stamford in Lincolnshire, a farmer called Old Parker, said to have taken his own life about three hundred years ago, is supposed to appear as a dancing skeleton at a crossroads on the A1 towards Peterborough. The entry gives no date for any sighting. North of Peterborough, a reader told the database that in 1995 he and his wife were overtaking a lorry at 70mph when a woman in 1950s clothes ran in front of the car to the central reservation. They did not hit her.

None of these is a highwayman. The highwayman ghosts in the catalogue sit in inns and village lanes, not on the trunk road itself.

The history behind the legend

The road’s history is real and well documented. The stretch between Wadesmill in Hertfordshire and Stilton became one of England’s first turnpikes under an Act of 1663. In the coaching age a fast coach could reach York from London in about twenty hours, and inns such as the George at Stamford and the Bell at Stilton served the traffic. The railways ended it. The last London to Newcastle coach ran in 1842.

Highway robbery was real too. John Nevison is said to have ridden from Gad’s Hill in Kent to York in a single day in 1676 to build an alibi for a robbery. He was hanged at York on 4 May 1684. The novelist William Harrison Ainsworth later gave the ride to Dick Turpin in Rookwood (1834), and the Turpin version is the one people remember. Historians doubt Turpin ever made it. Our page on the ghost of Dick Turpin covers that legend.

How to read it

A road with this past invites a highwayman ghost, and the story writes itself. The record does not supply one. What it holds are ordinary road-ghost reports of the kind found on busy routes everywhere, a vanishing pedestrian, figures at a crash site, a building that is not there.

The Newark account is the most interesting because it carries its own explanation. The figures were tied to one bend, and they stopped when the bend was rebuilt. That fits a hazard that drivers talked about as much as a haunting. All of these accounts are anecdotal and unverified. If you have a dated first-hand account or a printed source for a highwayman on the A1, we would like to add it.

Sources

• The Paranormal Database, Nottinghamshire (entries #16810 Newark A1 and #8425 Scrooby Great North Road) — folklore catalogue
• The Paranormal Database, Lincolnshire (entry #16812 Old Parker, Stamford) — folklore catalogue
• The Paranormal Database, Cambridgeshire (entry #10174 A1 north of Peterborough) — folklore catalogue
• Wikipedia, Great North Road (Great Britain) — 1663 turnpike, coaching inns, last coaches
• Wikipedia, John Nevison — the 1676 ride, execution in 1684, Ainsworth’s Rookwood