Thinking Sideways: Pluckley Ghosts

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of Thinking Sideways the podcast. I am Devin your host this week and every other third week, every other third week. It's every other week, every third week. Anyways, every other third week, wuld be six weeks. These two du faces are Joe and Steve Right and um. This week we're going to talk about out a mystery. It's a pretty interesting one and we're going a little off the rails. We're going boogie, going a little uggy boogie and you

know we're calling in a big old expert. Um. So this week we're going to talk about the Pluckily Ghosts, which is also the haunted village of Pluckily, or however you want to talk about it. Plucky and Kent Plucky and Kent, yes, in Kent in the UK. And this was a listeners suggestion by a listener named Chris. Thanks Chris, Thanks Chris. We're going to talk to you in a minute. Actually, and I will say that I said, with the thumping in the closet, is Joe, did you tie them up?

You're not. That's my ghost. Actually, I've been researching this one, and apparently my ghost here in my house, which my house is over ninety years old, I got a ghost, and so I think my ghost is feeling a little jealous. Yeah, it's not great. But I'll also say I had a little conversation with one of our mods on the mom team, and she said, I don't think you guys are going to do the Pluckily ghosts, but I would be even more in love with you if you did. And so

I say, you're welcome. That makes me happy that she's going to be happy. Yeah, you guys, ready to let's talk about talk there are reported to be well, I guess a quick overview of the case and then we'll talk about Pluckily and then we'll get into something else. This whole thing really started. They're about eighteen individual entities,

depending on where you go, some some say fifty. I mean, it's it really varies, but they're up to eighteen individual entities in Pluckly, as well as a mysterious mist and weird screaming in the nights in the forest. So that's kind of the mystery here is what's causing all of this phenomena and if it's real or not. And we didn't really want to do this by ourselves. So since Chris suggested this, it turns out he is kind of an expert at this stuff. He's got a pretty good

background in it. So on this story, on this story pretty close. Yeah even today actually looks kind of close, and we trust his judgment don't make us look like idiots, So we're gonna let him introduce himself. Okay, Well, I'm

Christopher Ripley. I'm an architect and author. I live in Kent in the UK, but I work all over And my background to this is that I used to live very nearby, and I went to high school in a town called Tenterdon, which is very very close to Bluckley, Um and being that I'm from originally from Ashford, which is lucky kind of on the way between Ashford and Tenterdon, and I've sort of traveled through it, visited it, dranking its pubs, and all sorts of things over the years.

So I've been there hundreds of times. If you couldn't tell. We talked to Chris by Skype, So apologies in advance for some of the quality of the interview, but we're talking for a while. We talked stuff a long time, got a lot of good stuff out of You're gonna get to hear most of that, but I'm going to give you a quick little rundown before that happens. Pluckily is part of the Ashford District of Kent in England. Kent is like the southeast part of the country by

the Channel. Yeah, the Channel, yep. If you don't know, I didn't know. Really, I don't know. I feel like I know a lot about the UK, and then I like look it up and I'm like, oh, I actually had no idea about Yeah, So Pluckily as a small village set up kind of along some lanes. I think it's kind of scattered actually all over the place. Yeah, I would say it's kind of like a big old,

like almost wagon wheel type. It's not an actual wagon wheel, but it's like a bunch of different offshoot lanes, yeah, that comprise it. And it's kind of just I think you kind of think you're out of it, and then suddenly you're still in it. And it's just kind of a defined little village. If you go to Google Maps and Google plu, you get this one corner of it. There's this one intersection where the Black Horse Pub is in the main church that's kind of like and a

few other things. But then there's this other part that's about a mile and a half south where the railroad station is. But it's like, you know, and there's a pub there and a railroad station, some houses and a few things like that, but it's like there's all this countryside in between, but they're kind of considered the same town, you know, and it's like, so it's a little confusing.

Chris did mention that he even thought that Plucky was kind of an ill defined It's kind of up up to anybody's judgment where it starts and where it ends to quote Joe, is it a white spot in the road, kind of actually several several white spots in the road. Yeah, there's and there's a there's a triangle too, because like over to the west of the Darrington Arms Pub, there's yet another pub, the Blacksmith's Arms Pub, which again it took me a while to find because I think it's over.

You think it's yeah, I think it's like this isn't in, it's way way outside. But now there's still more. Yeah, yeah, anyway, but maybe that's what attracts all the ghosts to this place. Maybe in fact there are no city limits. Yeah, there's nothing keeping them in. Pluckily, for reference, has a population of just over one thousand fifty people total, lip living and then the eight teen dead. So we're gonna cut in and out of this interview that we did with Chris.

Let's just go ahead and let him tell us what happened in Pluckly to kind of make it such a hotbed for activity. Yeah, it is. It used to be in the Guiness Book of Records. I believe it's not in there anymore, but it was the most haunted place in the UK. But taking your first point about the history, it has such a long history for such a small place.

It's quite weird really. I mean it's been a settlement um since before the Romans, so there's been people living there in the main part of the village since then. From then on, it sort of became like a feudal system, so it had a family was originally the arch Bishop of Canterbury, but then it became the family. The Deering family sort of inherited the village and all of the houses everything within the village which was basically part of

this family. And the deer In family, their sort of history starts I think sort of around the eleventh century and it sort of carries on all the way through to the twentieth century, mid twentieth century. And the deer In family themselves are kind of like, uh would have

been celebrities of their era. They were famous captains and lieutenants and members of parliament, so they were widely respected, they were widely known, and everybody in the village and everybody locally sort of within in the County of Kent and wider would have been aware of the deer In family. And of course, being that they were such a large family, lots of rumors, lots of gossip. You know, this isn't a twenty first century invention. You know, people talking about others.

All these kind of rumors and legends and things that sort of sprouted up from sort of their families um doing and what whatever and then after the Fani to the family. There's been quite a number of sort of relatively sad and tragic events that have occurred from obviously the World War two and then sort of fires, suicides and all sorts of things. So a lot of that plays into the legend I think of the village. The village was did have the plague years ago and it

suffered quite badly. A lot of people died from that, so there's that sort of ties into the local myth. There's been a number of sort of suicides and hangings and uh sort of deaf and disease over over the years. There was the loofwater dropped a bomb on Little Chart Church, which although Little Chart was just outside the boundaries of Pluckily, it was still part of the Deering estate. So that happened in nineteen forty four. That was quite a tragic event.

And then there was also a meal that burnt down within the village around the similar sort of time. So, without getting into too many details, there has been a very long association with sort of tragic events, um deaths, even possible murders of suicides. I know another interesting fact which I'll explain a little later on there is there is this kind of mist that appears, and locally it is known that there is a lot of carp crashes

that happen just geographically because of the area. I know working for a company years ago that had an arm that did deliver and it delivered in Pluckily, and about two or three times every year they would have a car crash. All right, Okay, so we we also asked Chris um about this thing that happens. When you google Pluckily, there's a lot of talk about the Pluckly massacre, right, and I'm sure that if you've ever googled Pluckily or done any research on it, you've seen this talk about

this huge massacre that happened. And so we asked Chris is there any validity to the massacre or when did that happen or anything like that, And this is what he had to say. No, No, that that is a recent Facebook poax. And of course, you know it should be said that maybe there was a massacre, because massacres can be metaphorical. Yeah, there's that, or maybe the Pluckily high school soccer team, you know, I slaughtered some other team from a nearby village and they called the massacre.

I don't think that Pluckily is large enough to have a soccer team. Yeah, they have a soccer team member one. Yeah, like what twelve people to have a soccer team? They have a thousand people, they could have one, that's true. Okay, all right, okay, or you can have you could add like, I have no idea how many people are a soccer team. I made that. I just a bunch of guys running around. But it's like girls. Yeah, when people humans live humans. Okay, So I've were way off track here. Okay, So we

said that there were like eighteen an adolescent amount. That's um And so we asked Chris, you know, who are who are some of the more popular ones? What are the more reported sitings? And so here's what he said to us about that. Yeah. I think the most interesting one, which gets confused as being two different ghosts, is a lady which some people call the Gypsy Lady and other people call it the watercress Lady. That's the water Cressley be I know he could out in the middle of it.

Some have her, as I've spoken to people that swear blind that they've seen her, particularly back in the Deering Arms pub again, the Hunting Lodge as it was. The local legend is that she would pick watercress down by the river um and then sell it. There's a big obviously, I don't know if you know him too much about Kent, but it's called the Garden of England, and it produces a lot of produce often is sold locally and shipped up to London, or at least it used to be.

Traditionally a lot of fruit and vege comes from abroad now. So she would pick watercress in the sea, in the in the river, sell it locally to be shipped up and then she would spend all of her money drinking gin. Uh and she would yeah, and she she lived under the bridge supposedly, you know, she was a poor lady and she survived just enough to fund her drinking habit, by all of accounts. And she was in the Deering Arms pub one in drinking her gin. Supposedly she tripped

or and fell towards the fire. The spark came out of the fire and lit her an apron alive and then she just she just burned to death. That's that's that's the rumor. Yeah, that's that's the local legend. That's the one of all the ones probably life I've heard of people have spoke to me about. That's the one they've seen the most. And they usually see either sort of loitering around near the bridge going out of the village, or they've seen her actually sitting in the Deering Arms

pub drinking gin. And I know at least two people who swear blind that when they've seen her in the pub drinking, they just think it's a little old lady sit in the corner drink gin. That's crazy. So yeah, I don't know, Yeah, yeah, so are any other ones that are kind of interesting or you you know, have heard people talk about a lot. There's people get them sometimes confused. But there's a red lady and a white lady.

People have seen, um, the white lady quite a bit. Um. She was supposedly, I think a mistress of the deer In family. Um that was a local girl in Plucky and was sort of spurned. The red lady, I believe was a family member of the deer In family. Again, that was buried in the St. Nicolas Church. I always thought it was quite funny that the church St. Nicholas, you know, named after Santa Claus. But hey, um, I

have a question about the Red Lady. Now, I swear I saw somewhere that when she was buried, they put her in like several lead caskets or something something crazy like that. Is does that ring a bell? And is do you know anything about that? Yeah? That that's supposedly true. I believe there's been archaeological evidence to back that up. But there is a leadline coffin in this crypt and

nobody knows for sure why. Some say it was to preserve she's meant to be very very good looking to Some say it was meant to be an ass es and an air tight seal to to preserve her looks. Others say that she was riddled with the plague. So I don't know that makes sense. And then yeah, and then the other there's another couple that people see quite often. One is a highwayman that's near the Screaming Woods, which we can talk about in a second. Yeah, okay, okay,

and the highwoman. And the other one that gets confused with the hirewoman is is a coaching horses. And again I know at least one person who sent the coaching horses and thought it wasn't an actual coaching horses and to it literally evaporated in front of them. Yeah, the high woman is on his horse when you see him, right, Yeah, he is the highwayman looks near the near the Screaming woods.

Are you aware of what a highwayman was? I heard the story he got run through with a sword because he was being overtaken by a bunch of enemies and all that. Yeah, well they were basically that. I mean most hime women were just local thieves like Dick Turpin and like with the black bandana. You know, your money or your life was their catchphrase, and he basically, yeah, basically he had a run in and was murdered somewhere

near the Screaming Woods. Again local legend. There's not a lot to sort of substantiate that one at all, like most of these legends, but he's another one that with the coaching horses is sin you know, fairly frequently. I would say, Now there's just a circle back to the watercress lady. Um. I've also read that she burned to death on the bridge, maybe burned his death somewhere because she was drinking alcohol. She was trying to let a cigarette at the same time and it must have been

some high octaened alcohol because she spilled it on herself. Yeah. And I think that that was on the bridge because people say, and that's why you see her under the bridge, because that's where she died, or you see her sitting on the ledge of the bridge smoking a pipe. She really was my kind of lady man lesson about about smoking and drinking at the same time. I guess she probably figures at this point, like what's going again? Probably

not doesn't burn. Yeah. So there's also a lot of activity around the Black Horse in which Chris is familiar with. He's it's a pub now and then he said he told us a story about Halloween drinking there, but um, he didn't talk about paranormal activity there at all. But I will mention um that one of my favorite shows, Ghost Hunters inter National. I actually I liked Ghost Hunters like the early season's Ghost National is a little too stage for me. Yeah, a little a little too like

uh silly for me. I guess, um, you're like your ghost hunting serious. Well, I mean the for those of you who aren't familiar with the show, this is not

an actual plug for the show or anything. But they did at the least in the beginning of the Ghost Hunters series try to take a really similar to what we do, take a really skeptical approach to ghost hunting, where they would go in and literally try to like try anything they could think of to disprove or recreate any of the phenomena that people were experiencing, and then whatever was left over they would say was paranormal. But one of them was always like, but that doesn't mean

it's ghosts. It just means I can't explain it to you right now, which I appreciate anyway. This is a kind of spinoff iteration that the guys are a little more prone to believe in like anything that somebody tells them, And it's kind of it's a little different. But Ghost Tanner's International went to the Black Horse in and they said that it was haunted or at least that there

was some paranormal activity there. The two around like you know, like a thousand years right, It's yeah, it's an old building and so you can imagine that some weird things happened there. Yeah, you expect a little paranormal sounds. Yeah, the two main entities all called them are that are there are a little girl called Elizabeth, and then the baron, who's they always name as William, and um, you may not have figured guessed this, but they're pretty sure it

would have been William Dearing that unknown family name. Yeah, yeah, I And I'm not totally convinced about the proof that this show had to provide, though it is the most scientific investigation I have seen of the claims. Most times people just go and they're like, I feel a funny aura over here or something like that. Um, so they did.

They brought their tools and you know, did recording and things like that, and they their proof that they presented was some e m F activity and um electro magnetic field activity. The theory behind that is that if a ghost, if some some paranormal activity were manifesting, that it messes with the electro magnetic field in a given area, or that entities can mess with the electromagnetic field given that they are of kind of a different field. Does that

make sense? I mean, yeah, there's a lot of site. If this is something that interests you and you somehow don't know about e MS, go out and research that. It's it's it's kind of fascinating the science or pseudoscience depending on what school of fire in behind it. This kind of actually makes me wonder too, just as a scientific thing, is is it possible to tasee a ghost? I mean, God is not going to have any effect on it. Maybe you can taste them? According to Ghostbusters,

you can. Okay, you really, what do you think they were doing? That's good point. Yeah, actually that's a good point. It just has to be a kind of more sophisticated taser. Yeah, just don't cross the streams and your fine. So this investigation also got what I personally think. I've heard some very convincing e vps, and I will tell you what an e VP is in a second. I have heard some very convincing e vps in my life that leave me totally open minded to the fact that that might

be a real thing. This was not one of This was something totally different. An e v P is an electronic a voice phenomenon, which is basically, you like set a recorder, a tape recorder or a voice recorder of some kind on like on a table in a room where you think it's haunted, and you just have a conversation with nothing. You say, can you tell me your name. Can you tell me why you're so mad? Can you tell me about you know, if you know their name?

You say, like, can you tell me is your name William? Um? William? Why are you so mad all the time? You know? Why do you do this? Blah blah blah, basically just and then you leave a pause for an answer, and then you play the tape back and sometimes there will be what sounds like responses from voices static background noise. Yeah, like I said, I have heard a wide variety of

convincing or not. Is this similar to that that pseudoscience phenomenal where they use the white noise that the static on the TV and then when they play it back they hear voices in it or so that's but that's uh. And that's why I say I've seen a wide variety because the one that they actually well, the one that they used in this one, literally sounds like it's just static boosted up really loud, and there's like kind of a weird variance, so it sounds like maybe somebody's maybe

possibly saying something. So it's not as good as in that Kevin Bacon movie. Not as good, but I again I have heard so I mean not personally, I have not been there, but I've heard on TV people play back some e v P recordings that are it sounds like somebody's sitting right there talking and it's on TV.

So I can't vouch for if they've faked it or they probably have, but um, I will say that the e v P recording that they that this particular investigation caught at the black Horse End did not convince me. But it does also seem like a super spooky place. So you know, there's that. Let's get back to Chris. Hey, Chris, he's been kind of waiting for a little bit. Sorry. We asked if he could tell us if if he had ever had any firsthand experiences in Pluckly or any

anybody he knew had firsthand experiences. I mean, we already kind of heard that he knows some people that, like, you know, swear up and down that they've seen the Watercrest lady in the bar. Um. Although, well, the Watercrest lady is the one that hangs out in the bar. That's a different one right now. She's the one who hangs out in the bar drinking gin. She's the lady. Okay, But isn't that somebody else that hangs out at the Daring Arms or is that crist too. I can't keep

it all straight. There's pubs, and it seems like every one of them has a different Yeah, they all have a token ghost. So let's let Chris tell us about the experiences he had. He had three that he wanted to share with us. Okay, well I've had three different things. I'll start up with the least interesting. Work my way up. The least interesting was I had a girlfriend who was Earlie. Was a short relationship, but she was working as a barmaid in the Deering Arms and every Wednesday, I remember

this clearly, it was her job to lock up. And it was recently, I say recently he was. Back then they had just changed the law that you can stay open in a British pub if there's no objection up until midnight. Yeah, it used to always be eleven o'clock unless you lived, unless it was a city, and then a certain later anyway, on this Wednesday when she had to lock up. So the theory in Arms is quite a large part of It's like an old guesthouse. It's

got lots of rooms upstairs, it's got quite a few rooms. Downstairs, there's it looks like Norman bates Is parlor, you know, there's loads of stuffed animals. There's a big log fire, it's creepy. And this is the one where this lady with the gin is supposedly drinks in. So anyway, every Wednesday, and this went off for quite a few weeks, she would ask me to come in around sort of half ten eleven o'clock. She'd give me a drink cocacola or whatever, and she wanted me to wait with her to look

at that. Basically, so every Wednesday I used to go down there, and almost every Wednesday we would the locals will be gone home by now, they'll be drunk. So it would be about half a leven we're getting everything closed up, getting shut all the doors, turn all the lights off. And then around midnight when we left, every every single evening, we would walk out to our cars and there was this mist. And I touched on it earlier. This mist was always waist height. It was always really

really thick. I mean it looked like the Riller music video, you know, Michael Jackson. Yeah, And there was always this quiet stillness every time. So I think there's an environmental reason behind a lot of these legends. But that was my first sort of creepy experience was seeing this physical thick fog that was sort of waiste hike, And you know, I haven't seen anything like that anywhere else in this country other than yeah, that sounds kind of fun. Actually,

don't need to wear pants. That's the upside of the whole thing. Upside. Yeah, there's a silver line in every cloud or oh gosh, okay. Next one second experience, which was incredibly weird. Um was about ten years ago and me and my friend Anthony, we're driving back from our a party that had been in Tenterdon and we was using a short cut which sort of shortcut not right through the village but sort asserted to the side of

the village. And it's a well known shortcut that a lot of us use when we live in Ashford and we're commuting to Tenerton because there's sort of one road between ash and tens and often gets congested, but as kind of force of habit, kind of quickness, we would always take the short cut. It was a bit tristy and turning, but you know, you could put your foot down and we were going down this road. It was

about midnight. We were both completely sober. I will say that now I was driving and Anstey had to be up reasonably early because he had this thing to do with the cars in the morning. And we were driving down this road. And this road is a lane, so it's only a single carriage. I mean, it's very very small. If you have if you met another car, you'd have to slow right down. And either side of the lane is just filled open open fields for miles, complete darkness

apart from the moonlight. And as this couple man and a woman walking sort of down this lane, uh, sort of towards us, facing us, and they look like the best way of describing them was they look like have you seen the movie Beetle Juice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well you know at the end with Alec Bording and Gina Davis doing that marriage thing and they're sort of slow. Bill just got the spell on them and they're sort of getting decrepit and falling apart. Remember that it become

all gault looking. Yeah, for this couple of walking there, their faces are like that. It looks like they've got a heavy makeup on and they were wearing these old fashioned costumes that are all torn and dusty, and I look like something at the sort of seventeenth century. And I turned to Anthony and I'm quite you know, I'm just I've been at a party or I'm doing a good mood. I'm like, dude, look at these two. I mean, they must have won the best fancy dress costume ever.

It wasn't. No, it was sort of it was winter, but it wasn't. It wasn't hall aween. So I said to answering, you know they they must have won some kind of fancy dress costume. I don't know how the hell they're walking in the middle of nowhere like this, dressed like that. And he turned to me and he was like, dude, like that, that's just terrifying. I just think that is the most scariest thing I've ever seen. And I was like, no, it's just two people in costumes.

I mean, you know, it's it's it's I think it was a Saturday night or on Friday night or something. There's one way that's just if you step on the gas and drive through them. You either run them over or you pass right through them like they're like they're a mess. Well, well, the thing is just in case they were real, and because you know anthon these sensitivities, I turned the car around sound and drove back again. So we went past them and I saw slowed down

looking at them, and they didn't look at us. They just carried on walking and they looked like literally like two people pull in fancy dress. We drove past them slightly around the corner. I turned the car around, I came back and they had gone huh. And to this day we still argue over it. He says that ghosts. I said that they probably just jumped in a ditch, or they were scared that you were something You were scared or something, or they were scared they were maybe

they just weren't sure about your intentions. And yeah, exactly, But to this day, I don't know why those two people were walking in down that road at that hour, dressed like they were in the middle of nowhere, walking too God those where Yeah, that's a weird one. And then the third weird one, which I still can't um, I still can't explain, And you're welcome to laugh at me on this one if you haven't already been laughing all the way through this going along, Well, the third

one is um. We were me and my father. This was about up I think this was sort of uh now, sort of mid nineties, late nineties. We were driving back from the city of Brighton and this again, this was almost the exact same stretch of roads, sort of two miles down it. We were driving back towards Ashford and this creature ran out in front of us and we

slammed the brakes on. This was nighttime again, um, probably about winter, but probably about seven or eight o'clock in the evening, and it was yeah, it was remember being very very cold outside and would stand the brakes on and it was what looked to me as a panther. And I looked at him and I said, always in the same thing here And we were just both staring at this thing that was staring at us. Stare standing

in the middle of the road. And then he flashed his lights and within a second the thing just darted off into the forest, which was literally to the side of the roads. It was black, um, its eyes sort of shoe as we as we as our sort of headlights lit the thing up, and it was long. It

was very close to the ground. I mean, I've grown up with dogs as to this day, I've still got different sort of dogs, and I know people that have got sort of large dogs without the stations and greyhounds and things like that, So I know what it isn't and what it isn't. But this thing, I don't know what it was. The bosest thing I could tell you that it looked like was a panther, but as quick as I saw it, that stood there for one or

two seconds then dotted off. I don't know. Well, hasn't there been in the UK for god a couple of decades now, a lot of talk of sightings of large cats. This that seems like something that I've read quite a few times. Yeah, well, and for context, right means itself

officially there are not large cats. They're just you know, for clarification, right, although there are actually there's people around here that have large cats in their own private that you can some people can't privately own large cats, but officially they're up in Scotland, there's some native sort of bobcats longer had things that are quite rare. But officially what happened, I mean, you could do a whole episode on big cats in the UK, because it's a huge

phenomena over here. But officially what happened was in the seventies they brought a Laura out banning people from owning them unless they had a license, which meant had to get a big pen and a big sanctuary to store their animals in, because I think in the sixties some of the pop stars had things like leopards and tigers and things in their houses, and it became this giant fad to have exotic animals. I mean, going back to

the Victorian times. I mean, I know one of my ancestors out a pet monkey, you know, So it was the rules were the rules were very very you know, lacks. But in the seventies they brought it's very hard ruling and then a lot of people that did have these big, large animals, they either donated them to zoos and circuses or and we know this for a fact, some of the people did let their animals just go into the wild.

That's not unheard of forty years on, right, I mean, yeah, I don't know how long these things live for, but probably not an additional forty years, but you know, I could be well, if there's more than one, though, they can propagate unheard of you could. I still think it's weird that you would have seen a creature like that. That's a little weird, super weird, and it just happened to be on the outskirts bluckly well, of course it was.

Uh So, one thing that Chris didn't really talk about yet but we wanted to ask him about was the Screaming Woods, because you'll see a lot about the Screaming Woods and he kind of just glassed right over it. So we asked him to talk more about the Screaming Woods. The Screaming Woods, there's not a there's not a huge amount of information on them. Inasmuch as there was supposedly

a suicide that happened in the Screaming Woods. There's also I haven't seen anywhere online, I haven't seen anywhere in any textbooks, but locals have told me that there was back in the sort of the Tutor era, that was a number of hangings in the woods when the local courts in Ashford or attended to maybe got overrun with people that have done bad the deeds and had to be hung, that they did use the screaming wooks to hang some of these people, sort of you know, thieves

and murderers and things. Um, So I don't know if that's strictly true, but that's that's kind of the legend that some of the locals have told me. On that one. I also heard a story of a guy who fell into a clay like a pit of clay bricks or something like that. You heard that the brick works one, Yeah, I heard of that one. Wasn't that also in the woods? Yeah?

There wasn't in the woods. That was in a mason's yard that sort of almost adjacent to the woods where they were making in bricks and pots and different things out of clay. Supposedly a young apprentice was working and a wall of clay pots and a news clay fell onto him and killed him. Um. It's one of these ones that there's no sort of substantiation anywhere in any of the text books or any of the history books. That seems to be sort of word of mouth and

things that found their way on the internet. You know that. Actually that brings up a question for me, which is, of all of these ghosts that are there, how many of them are based on things that are just local stories and legends versus you know, do you do you have? Is it like a fifty fifty. These ones we know

are real events, These ones we don't. Do you have a sense on that probably, I'd say half because a lot of the things that happened to the Daring family, being that they were quite a grandiose family, a lot of the events that happened in their lives through the generations because they lived in the village for so long, is actually quite well documented. Things like mistresses, uh, you know, the the partner dying, illegitimate children. You know, the fire

for example, the windmill burning down, stuff like that. There's quite a lot of those things that you can find facts on in the history books in as as much as their factual written at the time by by someone that's recording it. Where you know, it's like all history, whether it's atually true or not, you don't really know. But a lot of those local legends, a lot of those ghosts could be spawned from things that were happening because of this very famous family that we're living there.

And so in the town of Barckley, I assume you know some of the people they're their partisans of a particular ghost or another. I mean, people argue about which ghost is better or which ghost is more likely to be real based on the number of sightings that kind of thing. Well, there are always seems to be the village. In the village, I don't want to talk about it, or they don't think anything it's true at all, they've

never said anything. They think it's all rubbish. And then the other usually the ones that are in the pubs, I will I will say as well, yeah, are the ones that know all the legends. They've seen all of them, they know all of them, you know. And it's people like me that's kind of an outsider because I don't live in the village. It's people like me that sort of picking through and looking at what people are saying

and trying to put it all together. But you know, it is it definitely a fifty fifty split when it comes to actual people that lived there. Now, all right, So the three things we kind of have to tackle are the mist the ghosts, and the screaming woods. So that's the theory section. Yeah, those are kind of the I guess we have to talk about theories about what those might be, right, So it will be theory section. But first I think we should probably take a little

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of energy. I don't know if you know that. Okay, did you guys hear that thump? What? I think it was a ghost? It was your cat? Oh no, wait a minute, hint in my cord. Okay, all right, so let's first let's talk about the missed. There it was again the missed, which is weird? Is not so weird? That just depends on local meteorological conditions. It does. And actually I found a agriculture journel. Did I say that word weird? Agriculture? Agricultural Agricultural Journal. That Yeah, that was

from eighty three, so pretty new. Yeah, that's that's fresh off the press. Yeah uh, and it actually outlined what that missed meant, like apparently that missed serves to predict the weather for the next couple of days. But it's been around. I mean, I think it's just a normal phenomena. Well missed and fog are created when a cold front encounters a warm air front, and as long as one of them is laden with moisture, it's it's likely that

it will create a fox. Based on the geography the area, it can funnel it into places and go and low and behold there near the channel. So there's going to be cold, they're coming out of there, that's going to be moist So it makes total sense why get missed all the time. And I will say I do understand it's pretty It is kind of creepy if you're you know, coming out and it's this waste hime missed just constantly, Like that's pretty creepy. And I don't have a good

I'm not a meteorologist. I don't understand whether well enough to understand if there's a reason for specifically placed missed like the pressure actually assumption. I mean I've been a miss like where it's like, you know, kind of like you know, knee high like that. Yeah, yeah, I've been. I've never been exactly a waste high. Well, for me, it's not the the exact height, it's the frequency with

which the mist appears at that height. Although on the other hand, I will say that if it is every night that it's at that same height, I would just presume that it's some kind of geographical impact on geographical Yeah, geographical impact on the way that missed settles into that area. Well, and you know, I'm pretty sure that I know why. Nobody and pluckly has been able to scientifically prove that

it is just a difference in air temperature. Because at night, when you hold the one thermometer up in the air above your head, you can read it, but the one that you stick down in the mist, you can't read because it's in the mist, so they can't figure it out. Your clutch gum both in your hot level hands. That doesn't help either. True. True, So I mean missed, No, the mist is this is not the only place where this kind of stuff happens. Actually, I get missed at

my house. Sometimes it's usually not waste time, but you know, when you get it, mostly just because you don't clean those Yeah, I mean outside, that's his burning bitter it. Okay, well what about Okay, so much for the mist what about the screaming woods. But by the way, I like the screaming woods. I like the sound of it. I like the screaming woods too, not the deering woods of screaming woods. I have a theory about what's going on in the screaming woods. Yeah, foxes, well, vixens, female foxes.

Have you heard them call? Oh? Yeah, they have a really disturbing it literally sounds like screaming. Ya, literally sounds like screaming. And yes, what there are lots of down in buckets. Yeah, of foxes there you go. Okay, that settles that for the screaming woods. Well, no, that doesn't settle it for the screaming woods, because the foxes are not the only thing. There are a lot of things

that it can be. In the modern era. I really have a feeling that it is locals screwing with tourists and drunken tour is having a heyday in the woods, and high school kids and all kinds of stuff. Yeah. One thing I will say is weird, is I have I watched a couple documentaries of people walking through Plucky Woods at night. Documentaries they're technically documents documentaries or is it ghost slash spook slash haunted, Hunters, slash Finders, slash

investigators TV shows? No, mostly just like people with like cameras. Okay, so not the guys with the reality crew following them. I mean I watched the one right. Oh, I tried to watch a bunch of them. I watched the Ghost Tenner National and then I just watched a bunch of footage that people individuals had just uploaded. And I will say, yeah, yeah, YouTube stuff. And I will say one thing I did notice about Pluckily is it does seem like the birds

sing really late there. Like birds don't usually sing in the middle of the night. It's kind of weird. But there are birds singing in the middle of the night. So I don't really know what's going on there. That could have been weird. It could have been shot in the afternoon, but they did not use your camera's people can't You can't easily manipulate, yeah, your video to make

it look like it's super creepy and dark. How many TV shows have we watched where they're out at night but you can tell it's daylight, but they've turned the blue up really high. It's very obvious. So I will say that's a bit. It's just the consistency with which that happens is kind of odd. But um, you know, there's I don't think there's anything paranormal about birds singing

in the middle of the night necessarily. Yeah, one phenomena that I want to talk about a little bit as a phenomena of people shooting video while holding their their camera vertical instead of in portrait mode, instead of in in landscape mode. I think that's an entire different episode it is, But I just want to talk about how annoying I find out. Yeah, you know, I think it is a that's an episode in Yeah, okay, okay, okay, So before war next week, we'll talk about that. Listen.

I have friends who were confused by the fact that they went from portrait to landscape back to portrait while shooting a continuous video with their phone and it didn't auto rotate when they played it back. People. It's it's mind bottling to some Oh, yeah, that is my Yeah. Uh so do you want to know there anything more? Do you want to talk about the Well, I'm done

with the woods. I know they've been talked about. They talked about other stands of woods that have been chopped down, but the screaming woods is still there, correct, Yes, the only Okay. So I actually I have a question about the woods that I didn't think to ask at the time when we were doing the interview, and I didn't really see it anywhere in my reading before the modern era. At what frequency were these screams heard in the woods? Was just an hourly, a nightly, a monthly or a year.

I think it's an occasional kind of thing, Okay, which that's why I wanted to know, Devon or you understanding, Okay, I kind of had the same idea, which is why I'm inclined to though Devon always says it's fox it's this time to agree that it's Foxes. Yeah. I think that it was happening like every day. I think the locals would have cut the woods down a long time ago. Sure, yeah, m yeah, probably more Yea burned him, yeah, with pitchforks. So then the last one is ghosts. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

we got all these ghosts. We got the care I like the aage. Yeah, the carriage is cool, that's pretty cool. Yeah, I'd like to see that. That would be damn creepy to run across that one, for sure. Yeah. Or a highwayman, I mean, you know anything that's out of place that you just see. It's kind of like, what but it's creepy. The colonel, I'm not so sure about the how you recognize that it was a colonel or not explain what the colinl is? Again? The colonel was the one that

hung himself, right, Um that was afterwards? Yeah, yeah, yeah, So I don't have a good theory for what the ghosts could be except one. But it's not going to make a lot of people happy. Well there's okay, there's two theories. Actually, I guess I should I should be Well, there's two mantes. I mean there there is a possibility that they are real, and that's end of that theory. Right, If they're real, then they're real. There's there needs no explanation.

But if they're not real, why aren't they real? And one is actually Chris talked about this a little bit, and we're just going to play a really quick clip of his in a minute. But it could all be a Victorian lie. Yeah, So let's listen to Chris talk about this for a second and then we can keep talking about it. But the interesting thing um in regards to the Victorian society was it was around that time when they had a train station built in the village

and not not every village has a train station. I mean that's quite rare, you know, as it goes for villages in Kent. And this train station was connected to London.

So there is this idea that Victorian society, within the newspaper and periodicals at the time, picked up on this local legend, picked up on the different things that were happening, kind of like sensationalized a lot of stuff in the Victorian era, and then that sort of intrigued visitors to come down from London and they could just come straight down on the trend. So it kind of seems that there's an explosion and a lot of this stuff around that time. Well you know, you know it might be

a Scooby Doo conspiracy. You know, I would have got away with them, damn meddling kids. If you look at the Deerings. Well, if you look at the deering Arm and the Deerings, um when there was a census done, there were so many different sort of trades and stores and outlets and things within the village trying to make a living. I mean, no less the watercress lady, for heaven's sakes, um. So there may have been at a village conspiracy, all the people selling and making stuff to

bring wealthy Londoners down, you know. So, I mean, that's pretty that's pretty solid. My my, my problem with this is that it's it's easy to say that that's what they were doing because that was what their obsession was. But I feel like some of this was happening before and and I'll be very honest as usual, I don't believe in this. I think that there's a lot of

very simple answers going on. And I mean, because if if this place was such a thin spot, such a magnet for people who died under bad circumstances to to materialize again or showback up as a ghost, why well, I mean, what makes it such a special place. It's like that that when we talk to Gosh, this was way back in the beginning that the dog Bridge the bridge where they like people said, well, that was a thin spot. But yet nobody ever says what makes these

things what they are? It's just oh, well, I don't know, it must be a thin spot. Well, you know, we don't understand that stuff, so hey, who said it? It's not I mean, didn't you watch Fringe. Yes, there was no real explanation for why there were those certain thin spots. But but thin spots is a total made up term. Mean, it's like somebody said, there's a bunch of stuff going

on here, I don't know why. I'm just gonna say it's a thin spot, and we all follow that like it just I think a thin spot is a is a term for it's like a placeholder to term, right, because they think there are a lot of people who are genuinely trying to do scientific research into paranormal stuff, right, and we obviously don't understand, Like nobody knows what happens after death, nobody knows if ghosts are real, like, like genuinely knows, right, there are people who believe deeply, but

because we don't know, we don't have good evidence to back that up. We don't know what a thin spot might be, right, so I think it's that kind of placeholder term where it's like, it's what we are referring to as a thin spot until we can figure out what it is, because they don't know. And I know that like skives you out like you hate it when somebody says, like, here's an explanation, but I don't know why.

But it's a similar thing with you know, before quantum physics was really kind of expanded, you know, let's see, let's look at it this way too. It could be that the actual concentration of ghosts, assuming that they're real, which I'm not, come down one side or the other. It could be the concentration of the number of ghosts

and plucky are actually no greater than anywhere else. But it could be because let's not forget people who have been living in the same village for centuries, so pretty much most of the people in that village share a lot of jeans, and so there might be if you're a certain person who's a receiver that which is said, you can receive thoughts from other people, you'll probably be

more likely to see the ghosts. Also, alternately, since it is such a close knit group of people and it's a smaller community, people may be more likely to actually talk about and believe the people who are talking about their experiences. Right, I mean, if you are living in Portland, it's a cultural it's not a cultural taboo anymore. Well yeah, I mean it's not even just a taboo like Okay, So I guess to frame it like, we're we live in Portland. It's not like huge, but it's not tiny. Right.

And you go and you sit down at a bar and there's this guy that you don't really know, and he starts talking about ghosts versus you live in a place you know everybody, you know most of the people, you've respect for them and their intelligence, you've known them their whole life. And they start telling you about how they saw a ghost. You're probably going to give it at least a little bit more pause. There's gonna be a little bit more credit there than some random like

Joe off the streett random dude off the street. Yeah, that's true because I know people. I I know at least one person that I know who used to work on a bar that I used to frequent who said there was a ghost there, and other people said there was a ghost there, and she told me a couple of stories that were truly kind of hanky. I can think of an explanation orchieth for them, but they were

still kind of creepy as hell. And that's that's my problem with this is I feel like somebody told the story once and other people are are retelling the story in their own version because something that they noticed after the fact made them think that that thing wasn't there before and now it's there. But I mean, one of those one of those silly ghost finder ghost facer shows that I was watching the guy was in this place and he's and he's talking into the camera, and it was.

And this is how I feel about most people who say they have the encounters, because I don't find it to be genuine. I'm not saying that people are lying this guy. I do is I watched him and he's talking into the camera and then he does this this really dramatic pause and he points, oh my gosh, did

you see it? It was there? And he runs over and he's he's giving this such a dead pan, trying to sound sincere I saw this thing happened here, And from the accountings that I've read, like the thing that he described wasn't in any of the lore, so he was literally making guano up on the spot. It was in this isn't Plucky was in one of the churches.

And so that's that's why I have such a difficulty, because you watch these things, you're like, it's it seems very clear that this is being made up for entertainment, and I feel like a lot of times the entertainment value has gained so much steam, but it's gone on so long that the joke and the gag stopped two hundred years ago, and everybody else is just telling the same thing, thinking that it was meant to be real.

Well I don't think, yeah, I don't think that. Probably Pluckily does not have actually did not have until fairly recently, and more than this fair share of ghost stories because every place you go to the somebody will say, oh, yeah, there's a ghost and not necessarily taking it to crypto seriously.

But then there was a BBC personality named Desmond Carrington, you guys may have heard of, who did both radio and TV for the BBC, and apparently he was like being interviewed for an article for TV Times, which is kind of like the version of the TV guys sometime in the nineteen fifties, and he was sort of from east, from Kent, and I don't know how the topic came up, but he decided to like be you know, Pluckily already had a ghost story or two, and he decided to

just make up a bunch more honest and and and just basically that's what he did. He made up a lot of these characters on the spot. And and that's one way they might have made their way sort of into the popular conte They were written record before that, yeah, they were not. I don't think there was much of a written record really of Pluckley's ghost. There was sort of a vague fireside tradition, you know, that kind of

thing that somebody else wrote a book. A guy named Francis sanders In published a book called Pluckley Was My Playground, which I think sold about two copies. And I mean, I I don't know how many people are really interested in hearing about somebody's childhood and Pluckily, I know I'm not. But apparently he recounted some of these stories too. But I looked for a copy online of Plucky Was My Playground, couldn't find one. So it was not even find out

exactly how many ghost he talked about. Yeah, I mean, I think it's it's an interesting story. I don't know, I don't know really where I fall. I feel like I fall more in the believing camp than than Steve for sure. All the time. Yeah I am, I am holding down the entire camp on this other side. Yeah, but I also am not willing to totally discredit what people say they've said and experienced. So I think it's an interesting one. I think it's worth a stop on

our trip over to the UK sometime in the future. Yeah, like five years, so that I would be sooner than that, I'm sure. Actually, I just saw some great different rates. Okay, let's go and we'll go in the off season. So do you guys have anything else you want to contribute to this? I know, I think I've probably said my piece and more. Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, enough said Steve. Steve's the worst one. Last little thing. Chris has podcast. Actually it's two podcasts and they are relevant

to your interests. So we're gonna let him tell you about them real quick. So I host a co host the podcast scare Zone, which you can be found a scar Zone dot com. It's a podcast about Halloween Horror Knights, which is a Halloween themed event that happens at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida and in Hollywood, California. I also write about that and do a lot of the history behind Universal Studios. You can look me up on Amazon.

It's Christopher Ripley and I've got five books at the moment, and I'm working on my six at the moment, and then now we're going to wrap up. So if you want to if you live in plug if you are a ghosts plucky and you want to tell us your story and are able to operate a computer and mobile device or something, or you can just you know, think it really hard at us. I guess you could actually just come over here and piece a visit. But if you're an angry ghost, visit Devon, not me. No visit Steve.

I'm not going to understand their accent. That's okay. Uh. You can. You can communicate to us via our email address. That email address is Thinking Sideways podcast at gmail dot com. If you want to see some of the links to some of the research we did, um you can find that online on our website. Which is Thinking Sideways podcast

dot com. On that you can also find links to our merch stores if you won't and also, um, on the sidebar, there's an episode list, which is a fully inclusive list of every single episode that we have done, every two hundred plus episodes that we've done. So if you're wondering, if you're if you're thinking that you might write to to suggest something, Hey, maybe we've already done it. Yeah, it's possible. That's the best place to go. It is. I actually use it all the time when people suggests,

although I will say, um, hopping over. We do have a Facebook and on the group, one of our moths did a really cool thing and put a note that also wasn't all inclusive list of our episodes, so you can find that there. Um, we've got a group and a page, so you can like the page and follow the group. Right, that's how joined the group. Yeah, do those two things. You can find us on Twitter. We're

thinking Sideways. We've got to subreddit as well for those of you who are redditors, and that is just thinking Sideways. All that having been said, I think I'm just gonna I don't poof on out of here. The ghost, I've been spirited away. I'm just gonna say bye bye, guys,