MYSTERY OF THE WOMAN OF OXBOW LAKE

When Andrea and I moved to Shropshire in 1989 we were the proud owners of a black Jaguar, a black cat, and an Albino golden Retriever. The car might have been a bit of an overdraft-hungry wreck but when we reclined its big leather seats it became a large double-bed, room for the dog and the cat in the footwell.

In those days petrol was less than 40p a litre and it was our greatest weekend pleasure to head off into the wilds of Shropshire and slide with oil-slick precision down the nameless byways and country lanes of this fabled county.

 We’d take beer and sandwiches and camp overnight, in our Jaguar, outside hamlets and ancient settlements with curious names like Loppington, English Frankton and Clive …

One summer’s evening we arrived at a crossroads with a derelict three-storey Victorian mansion on the top of a hill to left. The crossroads, however, were nameless and marked only by the roots of an upturned tree, the four litre engine purred like a panther at rest as we tried to decide which road to follow. The dog was as happy as the day had been long, panting out of the rear window. The cat was asleep on the back shelf.

Andrea smiled and said: “You choose.”

Behind us was the way home, to the left was the road back to Ellesmere and rural civilization, if we took a right we’d head off into Wales, so, I chose to take the overgrown narrow lane ahead. It looked like night had already fallen down there.

Andrea looked at me: “It looks a bit scary!”

I smiled back: “That’s why we’re going.”

She laughed as I slipped the car into ‘drive’. The dog lay down as we moved slowly into the darkness.

***

We’d gone less than half a mile when our dog noticed something. He didn’t make a big thing of it, just cocked his ear and began to pant a little more heavily. The cat had moved from the window shelf onto Andrea’s lap.

Andrea and I were musing about the eeriness of this early evening darkness, yet the other roads I could have picked were still basking in the sunset.

Then something rushed by in the bushes. It seemed as big as a horse.

There is a geist that follows travelers in the darkness you know and once she is on your shoulder you lose the power to predict the future and to forget your own past. The female geist can make the wheels fall off everything from a travelling man’s wagon to a salesman’s Mondeo if she is so minded. 

Hoof beats fell away into the distance. The dog was still tense.

Well, it’s said too in the world of the traveler, that everything is revealed to he who travels slowly. And sure enough as we sailed slowly around the next bend, she was there as tall as a ship on top of a black gelding. Her black hair was cascading around like an eruption, and she appeared to scream as she yanked the horse’s head to the left. The animal reared twenty feet in the air and pawed the darkness as if it was boxing shadows.

           It all happened in abject silence until the moment this startling figure laughed triumphantly like a warning bell and looked directly at me. Birds fled the treetops as she crashed the horse into the undergrowth. Once she was no longer there, there wasn’t even a snapped branch to show where she had gone.

****

Chastened, we continued on down the lane with our ghost-hunterly antenna as tuned and as sensitive as the skin inside an old fashioned telephone.

           Eventually we came upon an oxbow lake, a tranche of water cut off from the meandering of a nearby river. Good idea or bad we decided to stay here, the animals could have their freedom and the crescent shaped lake looked romantic shimmering as it did in the newly arrived moonlight.

****

According to the moon now it was about 3am. Andrea was sleeping on the thick leather seats of the Jag the dog by her side, the cat was off incising dragon flies and moths. 

The power of the night stirred up a kind of awe inside me. I listened for noises in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, the heavens danced with silent shooting stars but the air around me fluttered with tiny wings. Bats were tumbling in this teeming silence.   Nights like this were for dreaming and planning and worrying about nothing.  

… then I saw something out of the corner of my eye, a blade slicing through the forest.  Our cat abandoned its ballet of death and vanished, the dog began a long low growl.  Whatever it was was coming towards us, the dog slunk to my side, I let my hand rest on his head as he cocked his ears and narrowed his eyes.  This wasn’t a car or a station wagon.  

The night seemed to go out as this thing crashed through the forest, everything fell silent, the   sky emptied of stars and became so dark it was as if we’d fallen inside death itself. Irrationally I began to fear that this thing manifesting before my eyes was actually the geist.  Perhaps she  had mistaken us for true travelers, not just eccentric tourists.

Even the forest   was swallowed by the blackness and the air bristled with a sense of   revenge … it’s said that the geist is like a broken memory skipping through an obsessional list of needs and desires and here she was – now – speeding towards us like a ghost train. Thank God Andrea was still sleeping.  

The transformation that took place before my eyes was terrifying. The blackness slowly metamorphosised as this monolith of dark sucked in all the night and all the sap from the trees in a grand re-manifestation of single-minded revenge.

She was as tall as a ship on the back of that black gelding, her boots were long, to her knees, her blouse was sticking to her just about everywhere as she rasped for breath, I could make out it was  coagulated blood from the wide open gash down the side of her face.

She rode that gelding like it was kicking down waves as it reared high above me and my dog and boxed the air. She held the horse in that position for so long it became impossible. And she never once took her eyes off mine, not once. She was burrowing inside me, reading me until my head felt like it was exploding. The geist was sifting through my mind, overturning my very existence to see if I was the one she was hunting down.

I think in those few moments one wrong thought inside my head might have brought about my death … or worse. 

 The gelding flailed hooves as giant as clubs as the women leaned forward in the saddle moving her face closer to mine, I could see the snapped veins inside the gaping wound which had almost split her face in two. Her jaw was loose, swinging held on only by dry sinew. She drew closer to me.

Then she was gone and the stars came back into the sky.

****

The next morning we could hear a steam train off in the distance, see the steam too cutting through the plains. It was so early the birds were still rising, field mice were chattering.

Ah, this really is England but after I told Andrea what happened in the early hours, she thought it prudent to collect our animals and be on our way. 

We packed up quickly and set off back up the lane to Ellesmere and what we felt was safety. It was strange because the overgrown lane was still dark although the day was glowing all around us. As we reached the crossroads with the roots of the upturned tree I saw the derelict mansion again. I stopped and looked trying to read its atmosphere from a distance, I knew right away it was a monument to tragedy, abandoned because memories inside it were to strong for anyone to live with.  It was a ghost towering on the hill, dead eyes in the upper ruins of rooms filled by the whistling of the wind by day and by agonised memory in the night. Time stood still inside its broken wings.  

I said nothing to Andrea and we drove on.  

I’ve never been back to that part of Shropshire although we’ve travelled extensively in the county, it really is a beautiful place to explore. But part of me wants to discover the story behind the tall horse rider and the abandoned house on the hill.

Perhaps one day soon we will return.

#GHOSTS #HUNTERS #SHROPSHIRE #SUPERNATURAL #JAGUAR #COUNTRYSIDE