Spooky Stories Trail 👻

It's Spooky Season and we've been creeping around our sites looking for terrifying and terrific hidden treasures and tales 👀

We challenge you to tick them all off - if you dare! 

There's a bonus here from our Museum Store too... 

Castleford Museum – Witch Balls 🧙‍♀️

Made at Castleford’s glass factories, these most magical witch balls were historically hung in windows to ward off evil spirits, spells and witches. 

Are they doing a good job? Find them in the Museum and judge for yourself… 

 

Hint: they're hiding with the rest of our gorgeous local glasswork!

Wakefield Museum - Boa Constrictor 🐍

Picked by our Visitor Experience Assistants Jade and Kathryn, Waterton’s taxidermied boa constrictor snake watches you as you walk around around the room with his thin, slippery smile… 

Where has he slithered off to? 

Hint: he’s behind you...!

Pontefract Museum - The Green Man 🧝

This stony face belongs to a representation of the Green Man. Although more of a pagan figure, this stone comes from St John’s Priory, near Pontefract Castle.

The stone is probably from a lectern, which would have been at the end of the dining hall where scriptures would have been read to the silent Cluniac monks.

Can you find him?

Hint: you’ll have to look low down!

Pontefract Castle - Richard II 👑

King Richard II was imprisoned at Pontefract Castle by his cousin, who became Henry IV. 

Although in Shakespeare’s Richard III it says he was ‘hack’d to death’ in Pomfret’s ‘bloody prison’, he actually starved to death. Was it in protest or was he not fed? 

He was kept in the quarters above the Bakery at the Castle – can you find them? 

Sandal Castle - The Battle of Wakefield ⚔️

Did you know that the poem ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain’ to remember the colours of the rainbow is inspired by the Battle of Wakefield? 🌈

It happened on 30^th December 1460 on Wakefield Green below Sandal Castle. Richard of York (the 3rd Duke of York) was Edward IV and Richard III’s dad, and he was killed in the Battle of Wakefield. 

Can you imagine hiding out in the Castle during a battle?

Bonus: Spooky Stories from the Store - Dame Mary Bolles' Bedroom Door 👻

Dame Mary Bolles lived at Heath Old Hall in Wakefield in the 1660s. 

She asked for the door to the bedroom she died in to be sealed up and for nobody to ever enter. 

50 years later someone broke the seal! 

It’s claimed that this released her spirit, making the door ‘haunted’…