Forging a ghostly link.
Blacksmith Terry Martin and his wife Julie are wondering if the New Year will see them forge a closer link with their very own ghost. For Terry – one of the few remaining blacksmiths in Nottinghamshire, with a forge in an old mission chapel built in 1836 in Main Street, Newthorpe – has already had several encounters with things of a haunting kind.
In the past 25 years he reckons he has been haunted dozens of times. “Many times Julie and I have been sitting in the house, and we have heard the sound of someone hammering on the anvil,” he said. “When I’ve been to look, the place has been locked and barred and I’ve always found the hammer in a different place to where I left it.”
And the ghostly goings-on have not been confined to when he was not inside the forge. “I have been working there several times when the drilling machine has suddenly come on by iteself,” he said. “I don’t know how it happens when it is switched off at the time.”
Terry’s worst experience came last year when he suddenly had the sensation he was not alone. “I saw a misty figure of a man in a cloak,” he said, “and I heard a sound as though it was a man shuffling his feet along the floor. Often I have had the feeling there is someone there and it is enough to make your hair stand on end. My wife, who works at East Midlands Airport, will not go into the forge early in th emorning to get the car out. I can be inside when I hear the sound of rustling as though it is someone’s cloak, but I turn round and there is no one there.”
Nottingham Evening Post, 28th December 1985.