© Copyright 2008 COUNTY LIFE LTD, County House, 9 Checkpoint Court, Sadler Road, Lincoln LN6 3PW

Tel: 01522 527127 Fax: 01522 842000 email: | | |

Walking with ghosts

For more than nine years Margaret Whitby-Green has been escorting visitors around Lincoln’s historic haunts

Words: Natasha Miller

Welcome to the world of Margaret Whitby-Green, Lincoln’s premier ghost expert. Margaret hosts the four-times weekly ‘ghost walk’, ghost stories told against the backdrop of Lincoln’s historic haunts. It is a world dominated by legless spirits on the stairs, a faithful feline companion and the dangerous Fanny Duckmountain.

Margaret has been running the ghost walks for more than nine years, taking over the job when her son Jonathan moved away. She says: “The walk was started by the Nottingham Ghost Walks. My son took it over to promote it more but then he went to Leeds to live with his girlfriend. I thought to myself, I’ve put money into this; I don’t want to kill it.”

It was a tough choice though, as speaking to large groups was at first an alien concept for her, as she says: “I would never even do a party piece at a birthday party; I’d lock myself in the bathroom.

“I start the ghost walks at the cannons outside the castle so I have something to hold on to.”

Margaret grew up in Yorkshire with a rather unusual family, she said: “My father was interested in real life murders, and my uncle would go and photograph Jack the Ripper’s murder scenes.” She has always believed in ghosts, but only had her first ghost sighting when she moved to Lincoln in 1974.

“We moved into a fifteenth-century cottage and had lots of work to do, so we gutted it. We’d done so much to disturb the house, so when we’d finished we had acquired a man at the top of the stairs, and a cat. We’d stirred them up from somewhere. The man didn’t have any legs and the cat lay in front of the fire, doing cat-things. I wasn’t afraid of the floating man, but to the children he was terrifying. My eldest still remembers him with fear.

“We sold the man with that house, but the cat followed us.”

Of the hundreds of ghost stories Margaret tells every evening, one of them always stands out for her: “The most haunted place in Lincoln is an arch behind the cathedral, and if you’re walking through it, day or night, you might find someone grabbing your ankles and pulling you down. It’s happened to so many people, and they have the bruises to prove it.

“It’s a man in a buttoned up coat and a flying saucer shaped hat. He has been seen a few times.

“We’ve had someone on the ghost walk who has had his photo taken under it. When we looked at the screen on his camera he had an arm around him…

“…Just an arm.”

Margaret insists she isn’t out to convert people on the ghost walks, but sometimes it can happen without her help…

“We had one lad who had announced to everyone he didn’t believe in ghosts, and needed to see one first. This was fair enough. Then he got grabbed under the archway. I shrieked with laughter. He said to me ‘It had to be me didn’t it?’ and I told him it was only because he didn’t believe.”

For someone who has seen so many ghosts you would think she would be a nervous wreck, but Margaret is quite used to them. In her new house in Newport, Lincoln, they have acquired a ghost who plays with electricity.

She isn’t scary insists Margaret, just very dangerous: “We have lost two freezers full of food, because she pulls the plug out. The freezer is in a shed under lock and key, but she still manages it. We always make sure there is water in the kettle, because she likes to turn that on as well, but we have now changed the cooker to halogen and she hasn’t yet worked that out.”

Margaret thinks the ghost in her current house has the marvellous name of Fanny Duckmountain. She believes this because when Margaret and her husband, a policeman, were looking at the house, there was a covenant in the contract that said they must let Fanny bring her pigs into the garden.

It is this aspect of ghost stories that Margaret finds so fascinating: “It is nice when the facts of a story are ‘check up-able’. When someone rings me to tell me they have seen a ghost, I head straight for the archives to find out who it was.”

So what does Lincoln’s ghost guru think about the current influx of TV mediums?

She lowers her voice: “I think they are good entertainment, and are making lots of money, but I want to be true to myself.

I want to keep Lincoln’s secrets in Lincoln.”

The Lincoln Ghost Walks take place every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, setting off from the Tourist Information Bureau in Castle Hill at 7pm. Booking is not necessary but please turn up five to ten minutes before the start. Adults £4, children £2.