A Ghost Story - Spot Loggins Well

Control Room

Do you remember a program called Most Haunted ? It doesn't matter if you don't, its basically a television program where a group of reporters with a couple of psychic mediums go looking for ghosts in haunted locations and see what they can capture on camera for the television punters. Its good fun, and occasionally a little scary, and easy to watch - people love to be spooked and are fascinated by ghosts.

Anyway, I was a bit bored one weekend and came up with a variation on the theme and my ' idea ' for want of a better word was to do the same but for radio. I was going to write to Radio Four with my brainwave and earn my fame and fortune……..well not quite, it more seemed like a fun idea, and who knows.
The set-up was very simple. I would take a tape recorder to a haunted location and see what I could capture on audio tape, sell it to Radio Four, or give it to them if they wouldn't buy it as a demo tape, and never have to work again ! The main draw to be honest is that it sounded both interesting and good fun, and had the potential to be successful in my opinion.

I had the perfect place.

Ok, so a location. I had to choose somewhere that was allegedly haunted, and accessible, and a place that was ok with me visiting them overnight.
Spot Loggins Well in the beautiful Vale of Evesham village of Bretforton, about three miles outside Evesham itself and famous for the ancient Fleece Inn pub with its original witches circles.
Spot Loggins Well is an old water well, about four hundred years old its said, locally well known to be haunted by a lady who committed suicide there about two hundred years ago, and its down a long dark lonely path going across the asparagus fields of a farm. The well itself is a traditional looking water well with an old natural Cotswold stone circular wall just over waist height, with the archetypal gable-ended cottage style roof over the well from which dangled a rope with a heavy wooden oak bucket on the end of it for drawing the water.
Standing alone Spot Loggins Well certainly looked the part, way down a long country path, shrouded in the mist of a cold late evening in February. It looked mournful, lonely and sad…………..and it sure looked haunted. I had my perfect location for this radio show. Spot Loggins Well in Bretforton, in the Vale of Evesham. Visit it yourself, and you'll see what I mean. Mind you, when you see what happened to me down there you wont want to go anywhere near the place believe me.
So, on one February late evening, in the dark and rather menacing ice cold air I took a walk to the well, armed with my audio tape recorder, a good bright torch, a flask of hot vegetable soup and wrapped up nice and warm in heavy clothes, including a thick woolly hat. It was bitter cold, and very spooky down that forbidding path but I was prepared and ready and thought if I could just capture half this ghoulish atmosphere on tape Radio Four would rip my arm off with a lucrative deal.
As I approached the well I could hear and feel the ice crunching under my feet, and I pointed my bright yellow conical torch beam in the general direction of the old place, which seemed to stare back at me. The beam penetrated the ice cold but there was an underlay of mist in the air which shrouded the well. In the darkness and the loneliness I felt a chill run straight through me, really made me catch my breath and shiver, and to be honest I felt afraid. I did. Afraid. Scared. Blimey, almost panic stricken even !
When I got to the well, I had a look around it and it certainly was an old place and looked like it could tell a tale or two, but I was now so cold I poured myself a mug of piping home-made thick vegetable soup from my flask, wonderful, I could feel it travel all the way down like a stream of lava flow, warming me right through.
I had decided that I was going to ad-lib what I said, much more natural than reading a script, and hence more credible to the punters. I'd have my soup and just record a few lines about how I was feeling, and if I managed to convey anywhere near how scared I felt inside the listeners would be hooked. So I had my soup and felt much better, then lay my torch of the well wall, switched the record button on my audio tape recorder and away I went, describing and setting the scene, trying to get across to the potential listeners the nastiness and menace of the place and how scared I felt, how spooky it really was here at the well. It wasn't difficult !
I finished off my introduction with words to the effect that I would now wait in darkness by the well, and see what I got, and with that I switched the torch off and was engulfed in blackness and coldness with it. Then I waited and did what it said on the tin, I waited and saw what I got from this notoriously haunted local site, enveloped in a thick, cold oily blackness.
For fifteen minutes I stood there by the well, too cold to sit down and it took a further ten minutes before I plucked up the courage to peer over the edge of the well, into the void. I walked slowly up to the wall, bearing in mind my torch was now off and I peered into the well. It felt like standing on the edge of a cliff on a really windy day, my heart was pounding and I was really scared, but I was here to make an entertaining and scary tape, and I held my nerve and just stood looking into the chasm, panic and fear rising up in my stomach. I just about had myself under control.
Then I noticed two little red spots floating in the darkness. Two tiny red orbs just floating like specs of dust do in front of your eyes, but it was pitch dark so the orbs must have some kind of energy or life themselves. Then they stopped moving. I frozen to the spot in terror, absolutely rooted and couldn't run away if I wanted to.
Then I realised that they were not orbs but two little red piggy eyes, and they were staring at me out of the darkness. I couldn't make out any shape to go with them, just two eyes, staring at me and full of hatred and anger.
Somehow I found a little strength, I reached and switched the tape recorder on, and grabbed my torch and managed to break through the paralysis to switch that on too, and pointed the beam into the abyss of the well, aiming it at the eyes.
I could see now, but couldn't speak so the tape recording simply didn't happen, as far as I remember anyway. But I could see and I'll never forget what I saw.
Around the red eyes I could see the outline of a body, a womans body in the clothes of an early Victorian paupers dress, and then I could see in shadow form the rest of her face. Her long piled-up, gray-brown hair was dripping wet and very bedgraggled like great spiders crawling all over her face, and her colour was the colour of the long since dead, a deathly ashen gray colour, but it was the eyes that kept staring at me and locked on to mine like a heat-seeking missile following a fighter jet.
I looked back into those eyes and the look changed from hatred to pleading. This poor long dead woman was begging me to help her, I could literally feel her sadness and sorrow. I kept looking, and then I could move and held out a hand to her.
She reached out to me, a shrivelled arm reaching out of the black iciness………..I felt the touch of her freezing cold hand as it took mine, the eyes still locked on to me………and then…………………………..
NEWS REPORT ON THE DAY : DEATH OF A MAN AT SPOT LOGGINS WELL IN THE VILLAGE OF BRETFORTON, NEAR EVESHAM.
THE BODY OF A MAN WAS DRAGGED FROM THE WELL THIS MORNING, AND IT IS THOUGHT HE SLIPPED IN TO THE WELL-KNOWN LOCAL WELL BY ACCIDENT WHILE MAKING SOME KIND OF RECORDING. THE TAPE RECORDER WAS STILL RUNNING AND WAS TAKEN BY THE POLICE.
A TORCH WAS STILL ON IN THE WATER WHEN THE POLICE ARRIVED, AND A FLASK OF SOUP WAS ALSO FOUND NEARBY.
THE POLICE ARE NOT TREATING THE DEATH AS SUSPICIOUS.
CAUSE OF DEATH : DROWNING.
VERDICT : MISADVENTURE.