This was Sandicroftgeo's first cache which has been reinstated it will be a series of caches based on The Ghosts of Leigh.
THE GREY LADY OF ASTLEY - TAKEN FROM CYRIL WARDS GHOSTS OF LEIGH
If you make your way to Hall House and cross the canal there, walk along the tow path towards Astley, and keep your eye on the fields and houses on your left as you go, then you are following the path trod by the best known of Bedford's ghosts. She has been seen around the grounds of Astley Hospital.
She has been seen on the land between the old Leigh Grammar School and the canal. She has been seen gliding her way across Marsland Green towards the home of her lamented boyfriend not far from the “Bowling Green” at Green Lane Island. Wherever she is seen, she is described as “searching”. “She looked as though she was looking for some one,” said a surprised and disbelieving navvy, who met her one day as he and his mate were working near the canal not far from Sandersons Croft. ('Don't tell anyone I have told you,' he added 'my mates will think I've gone mad.') “I was sitting in the car”, said another spotter, “waiting for my wife who had been visiting a relative in Astley, when, there she was. I thought it was a nurse — some of them wear peculiar uniforms — but she was just sliding along gazing about her.
I told my wife when she came out and she said “It's the grey lady — come on let's get out”. Two other spotters were employed by a well known Astley firm of sub soil surveyors, the last men in the world to believe in ghosts. They were sober and working on a rig in the Butts area. One of them told his mother who had not heard the story of Astley's Grey Lady, the mother told a friend, the friend told me. Who was she? The likeliest candidate is Anne, second daughter of one of the Morts of Dam House, as Astley Hospital was once known.
The Morts were a protestant, landowning, influential family and well liked in the area. She died when she was eighteen. Until recently there was a small group of cottages near Hall House, and in one of these cottages lived the family of the Speakmans. They were Catholics and had a fine upstanding and lusty son of twenty years. No doubt they worked on the land owned by the Morts. You can guess the rest. Anne and James Speakman fell in love. She braved father's wrath and met her lover on the paths that skirted the land that was moss — near today's East Lancashire Road — and the cultivated part near today's Manchester Road.
The swirling mists of the moss, and the rough hummocks of the surface pits near Marsland Green provided suitable cover. Anne's father could not stomach his daughter meeting this man, however good his name might be. He realised that to forbid the meetings would make his daughter find another way. He therefore arranged a price with James's father. It was a dear one, and was to prove a tragic one. The Speakmans were to move, quietly, and in secrecy, to another part of the Mort empire, across the moss in distant Lymm.
James was kept in the dark until the last moment. Anne went one evening to meet James only to find the cottage empty, and the neighbours uncertain of the Speakmans' whereabouts. She pined for her lover. Every night she waited by the cottage. She walked the fields — she tramped the rough but familiar paths she had wandered along with James in happier times. When she found out the truth, she became distraught. Father found that he had a daughter who was wasting away, whose mind was going, who was a very sick girl.
Before he could get James back, she had fallen into a trance from which she never recovered. James and Anne's father, followed her remains to the churchyard along the paths the lovers had trod, past the cottages near Hall Houses and along the streets of Bedford. Today Anne walks the same paths. She sits beside the cottages now in ruins. She searches and seeks for her lover. Her body moves from side to side as she looks for him. Her spirit is not at rest.