Hi Jon,
About fifteen years ago the BBC ran a Christmas Eve radio programme, Ghosts from the Archives, a collection of recordings from the 1930s to 1960s.
There were some fascinating period accounts if you ignored the cheesy Radio 2 segues and I recorded the programme on tape. Here's one concerning a horse. You'll have to imagine the soft West Midlands vowels of the gent talking, before Metropolitan boroughs annexed the speech patterns of this island. The stories weren't dated but I'd estimate this recording to be pre-war and the incident some time earlier.
"I was travelling home from a country round in the village of [indistinct - Tystow?] in Warwickshire through these fields where the battle of Edgehill took place in an old type of two-wheeled cart with a strong mare, property of Mr Harrison of North End.
"We had passed through gated fields and arrived at the last gate but one to Radway village, about a mile from Radway. On arriving at the last gate before the main road I had to get down and open the gate for the horse to go through, which I did, and just as I was going to close the gate I saw coming in the distance what appeared like a grey horse which wished to go through the gate and I hesitated for a few moments and in that moment of hesitation instead of closing the gate it seemed to pass through round the gate post and gallop towards the Edgehills across the field.
"I let the gate go and walked to the cart expecting to mount it. In the meantime I'd heard my mare snorting and began to trot away. I found it had gone, hence I had to walk to the last gate about half a mile. When I arrived in Radway village I found a villager holding the mare and Mr Harrison still sat with the reins. I began to give him a lecture. I said, "What's this? I've walked a good part of three-quarters of a mile, what's the reason?" He said, " Well don't you know? It's that plagued ghost horse frightened the mare." It then dawned on me I'd let the ghost horse through the gate."
For more Edgehill strangeness, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/coventry/content/articles/2006/05/24/weird_edgehill_ghosts_feature.shtml
Happy New Year,
Colin Higgins
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Friends of mine have recalled similar instances from a farm on the slopes to the south of the Yorkshire village of Kirkby Overblow. This farmer routinely lets a mare of his out during the day in a field, and brings this horse in overnight; this is necessary partly to keep the horse used to being caught and partly because it is part thoroughbred and prone to getting cold.
Anyway, one evening he went down to the field and in the half-light, saw a horse over the far side of the field. Thinking it to be his mare, he addressed it in traditional Yorkshire tones: "Come here, you silly cow! Don't you know it's time to come in?"
At this point his horse, the one he reckoned he was shouting at, nudged him from behind; he turned, looked at his horse, then looked back to the far off horse which by then had vanished.
Next day the usual investigation for unknown animals was launched: fences all OK, complete lack of marks of a horse jumping into or out of the field, and no other horses in the field beyond that could have been mistaken for this one. To this day the appearance of this mystery nag remains a mystery; both the man and his wife have seen it, in much the same conditions, and no explanation has ever been found for it.
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