To be sure, the corner where the canal curls round toward the two tunnel portals at the foot of Harecastle Hill, with the banks rising on either side and the trees louring above, has a darkness about it, and back in the Nineteenth Century, the smoke of the foundries and steam engines can only have made the fogs more stygian; and in the wake of Christina Collins’ murder, whose body was found on June 27th 1839 in Rugeley, what better place to set a similar, if entirely bogus, story?
For it is bogus: If there ever had been a murder in the Harecastle Tunnel, it would, like the one in Rugeley, have been reported to the police, investigated, the killers caught and hanged, and the whole business recorded. No records exist. If there ever was a Kidsgrove Boggart, the mines for which it served as harbinger closed years ago: there are no disasters for it to warn of anymore.
But it is a wonderful ghost story; the vengeful spirit of an innocent young woman done to death by rapacious bargees, scaring the merry hell out of anyone importunate enough to wander out too late on a cold foggy night.
As I grew up, and attended Clough Hall School, practically on top of the tunnels, I met people that told me earnestly of someone they know who saw the headless spectre, and of the tale lost to the historians of the unwitting victim, the murderous bargee, of the mist rising from the canal, of the white equine phantom of Boat Horse Road.
Only recently did I stop and ask myself “What is the tale of the Boggart?” I had heard so many bits of the story, but no-one had ever told me the whole thing, so what was the whole thing? If no-one knew, why should I not write it myself? Certainly I would do no harm to what is maybe the most frightening English canal ghost story by re-telling it, even though I’m still sure that no ghost exists.