Sheffield is indeed a strange and haunting place – or should that be haunted place?
Much like York, a plethora of ghost stories and sightings come up in a casual Google search. A black dog with large eyes lopes around Bunting Nook, turning into mist if threatened. A maid haunts Ashdell Grove House after her policeman lover abandoned her and she completed suicide. People hear her pacing in corridors, while she moves items in the offices. A white lady drifts around the grounds of Beauchief Abbey – does she have any connection to the phantom monk seen in the area? (The Paranormal Database 2024)
According to local legends, Boggard Lane gets its unusual name from the boggards (or boggarts) that lived there. A phantom woodworker apparently haunts one of the houses on the lane.
But let’s cast the net a little wider and look at a range of stories from the Steel City. Water gods? Boggards? Spring-Heeled Jack? Ghosts? It’s got the lot…
Water Gods in the River Don
Dr David Clarke notes that in the medieval era, the river Don (then the Dun) had its own rhyme;
the shelving, slimy river Dun
(Clarke 2012)
each year a daughter or a son.
He further notes that the 19th-century historian Joseph Hunter thought the rhyme may have referred to sacrifices made to the water gods. Of course, given how polluted the Don became, it’s also possible that simply falling into the water was fatal.
Britpop band Pulp even fell under the sway of the legend. Talking about the river to the Guardian newspaper, guitarist Russell Senior confided that “me and Jarvis [Cocker] once went down the River Don in Sheffield, throwing money in the water to appease The Spirit” (Petridis 2012).
It’s not necessarily too far-fetched an idea. The name ‘Don’ comes from Dôn, although some think it comes from Danu, after the goddess of the same name (Clarke 2012). In Welsh legend, Dôn is the parent of Gwydion, Arianrhod, and Gilfaethwy. Peter Bartrum notes that while John Rhys assumes Dôn to be their mother, W.J. Gruffydd thought Dôn was their father (1993: 231).
Whatever the origin of the name, it does imply a connection between some form of water god/goddess and the river. And as we discovered in the discussion of the genius loci, sacrifices might be made to such a figure to keep them happy. While such sacrifices are usually metal weapons (which is why we know about them now, because we find them), there’s nothing to say they’d couldn’t take the form of humans…and apparently did in this slice of Sheffield folklore.
Clarke explains more about the history of the Don here.
A Pub in Two Counties
Before it became a city suburb, Gleadless was a small rural hamlet. Sheffield swallowed it up in 1921, and it lies three miles south-east of the city centre. Its name is originally Old English, and it could mean ‘forest clearings haunted by a kite’ or ‘bright clearing’ (Shearstone 1985). It’s also where you’ll find the Red Lion pub, and pubs are always a good location for folklore.
The Shire Brook stream runs through the Red Lion’s cellar. This stream once marked the border between Yorkshire and Derbyshire, meaning the pub then straddled the border. Different licensing laws applied to the two counties, with Derbyshire pubs able to serve until later in the evening.
According to legend, drinkers would move from the Yorkshire side of the pub to the Derbyshire side so they could keep drinking (Heywood and Barker 2015).
And speaking of pubs…
The Highwayman of Attercliffe Common
In 1792, highwayman Spence Broughton faced the death penalty for robbing the Sheffield and Rotherham mail. His body ended up in the gibbet on Attercliffe Common as a warning to others about the penalties for crime. While that isn’t so unusual, the fact that his body remained there for thirty-six years saw it pass into local legend (Smith 2018).
The tale also appeared in a rare broadside, now held by the British Library. Yet the broadside’s reason for telling the story is slightly different. It involves ghosts.
According to the broadside, Broughton’s ghostly double appeared to his mistress the night before the execution. He seemingly conjured a vision of his widow and three children for his mistress. The widow berated the mistress for ruining the family, before crying out for vengeance.
When the vision of the widow vanished, the spirit version of Broughton likewise condemned the mistress. He blamed her for his desertion of his family, before vanishing in a ball of flames. The mistress, known only as Miss S—- H—-, found the curtains dripping with blood.
Upon telling her landlady about the vision, her landlady likewise warned her to change her course in life. Miss S—- H—-‘s fate remains unknown, but according to legend, Broughton did repent his crimes, and the public softened towards him as a result. Perhaps the author of the broadside wanted to dramatise such a repentence!
Broughton’s time in the gibbet was memorialised in the Noose & Gibbet Inn in Attercliffe, which features a replica gibbet outside.
The Hillsborough Park Cinema Ghost
I came across the old Hillsborough Park Cinema a few times. The building was originally a cinema, a Star Bingo, a Netto supermarket, but is now a branch of Asda.
One poster, codeyes, told a chilling tale of a ghost in the building during its life as a bingo hall. (Note I’ve fixed the typos from the original post).
In 1969, I worked evenings at the Park Cinema […] One of my jobs at the end of the night was to go upstairs to the Circle ( which was no longer used) and turn out all the lights ( some of which were the old gaslights).
One evening as I was going into one of the upstairs corridors from the Main Circle to turn out the corridor lights I felt a rush of cold air and an overpowering smell of violets and the gas light on the wall blew out. I had a torch so apart from freaking a bit at the initial shock I “calmly” ran out.
The poster also notes a tale of a young woman who disappeared in the area (or was murdered). Female ghosts often conjure flowery scents (like the Grey Lady of the Assembly Rooms) so perhaps she didn’t go too far from the cinema.
And that’s not the only story about the building.
On Cinematreasure.org, user horrorbabe explains… (Note I’ve fixed the typos from the original post).
God it was a spooky place upstairs; we often had encounters with the ghost that haunted it and he would often let us know he was there. Upstairs we had our canteen and toilets and every morning and evening we had to go down a passage pass the balcony entrance to open a fire door at the bottom of some fire escape stairs. Really scary! You always felt like someone was watching you but I was there for 5 years and could write a book on the experiences we had with Alfrid the ghost, a man dressed in a black suit wearing a large brimmed black hat.
People reported hearing a child’s screams after the store was closed. The story goes that a child fell to their death from a balcony (presumably during its life as a cinema). Yet there’s no obvious way to link a child, a man in black, and a missing woman.
If anyone has heard any other versions, please comment and let me know!
Sheffield’s Spring-Heeled Jack
Spring-Heeled Jack is a fascinating figure from Victorian England. Having terrorised London in the 1830s, Spring-Heeled Jack reappeared in April and May 1873 in Sheffield. In such Sheffield folklore, he’s also known as “the Park Ghost”. Mostly because sightings place him in the Park area of the city.
What’s really weird is that more sightings cluster around the Attercliffe area in the 1970s! Stories often describe his cloven feet, black cape, and red eyes, while his ability to jump 30 feet in the air appears in the London variants too (Wayland 2023).
In one story, two police officers chased a man who’d been travelling across the roofs in the Attercliffe area. The man walked up a wall and escaped across the rooftops. No one ever discovered the identity of the figure and Sheffield Arena now stands on the site.
Who knows if the 1970 reports are real? And if so…who was he? More importantly…will he be back?
Two Attercliffe ghosts?
I searched the British Newspaper Archives for mentions of such Sheffield folklore, but stumbled across another ghost story from the area in January 1910. William Cupid lived with his wife, three children and two brothers-in-law at 37 Candow Street in the Attercliffe area. They were “disturbed by a series of nerve-destroying incidents, by which, by a steady but sure progress, all the crockery and breakable things in the house have been completely demolished.”
Apparently, “the supernatural symptoms” vanished if anyone lit a match or candle. The family even called the police and when they entered, “fearing naught”, they saw “a number of plates smashed, a table turned over on its side, and a walking stick [that] walked.”
The family left the house, unwilling to tolerate the disturbances. But according to an article in Sheffield Evening Telegraph, the following day, they consented to “a little seance held in a neighbour’s house”. The clairvoyant claimed to see a man and a woman. Hearing the description, Cupid’s mother declared the figures to be her husband’s parents. The clairvoyant considered the matter closed, and given the Cupid family didn’t return, it’s difficult to know what to make of the story.
The Dark Side of Sheffield Folklore
All cities end up accumulating their own folklore. Ghost stories particularly crop up and get attached to specific areas. Sometimes they echo stories from other places, and other times they become so entirely dependent on the location that they could happen nowhere else.
True, the appearance of a Spring-Heeled Jack figure in Sheffield is more unusual than other stories, especially as late as the 1970s. The boggards and water gods are more common, appearing all over the British Isles in some form or another.
Just be careful if you visit the city and pass down Boggard Lane. Keep an eye out behind you if you roam around Attercliffe. And be careful if you walk along the Don. Who knows what greedy eyes may follow your progress?
Have you been to Sheffield?
References
Bartrum, Peter (1993), A Welsh Classical Dictionary: People in History and Legend up to about A.D. 1000, Cardiff: The National Library of Wales.
Clarke, David (2012), ‘Dark River and Sheffield Spooks’, Dr David Clarke: Folklore and Journalism, https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/2012/10/11/dark-river-and-sheffield-spooks/.
Heywood, Simon, and Barker, Damien (2015), South Yorkshire Folk Tales, Cheltenham: The History Press.
Paranormal Database (2024), ‘Sheffield Ghosts, Folklore and Forteana’, The Paranormal Database, https://www.paranormaldatabase.com/hotspots/sheffield.php.
Shearstone, Pauline (1985), Gleadless: From Village To Suburb, self-published.
Sheffield Evening Telegraph (1910), ‘Ghost Stalking: More Tales of Attercliffe’s Ogre’, Sheffield Evening Telegraph, January 12, p. 3.
Smith, Maddy (2018), ‘Spence Broughton: A Ghostly Highwayman’, British Library: Untold lives blog, https://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2018/07/spence-broughton-a-ghostly-highwayman.html.
Wayland, MJ (2023), ‘Spring-Heeled Jack Returns’, MJ Wayland, http://mjwayland.com/spring-heeled-jack-returns/.
Yorkshire Telegraph and Star (1910), ‘Attercliffe Ghost’, Yorkshire Telegraph and Star, January 10, p. 5.
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I’m a bit of a Victorian history nut and I love the urban legend of Spring-Heeled Jack. It’s one of the weirdest modern legends to have evolved. I’ve never heard of the Boggards of Boggard Lane – I’ll have to do some reading! Great post!
I really need to do a proper post on Spring-Heeled Jack!
you should sound fascinating as my dad used to tell us the story, he was born in Attercliffe in 1938 and tell us about the hoof devil that roamed that aria of Attercliffe , He said it was the evil spirit of the man that was hung there.
Have you read John Matthews’ book on Spring-heeled Jack?