Ghosts and Legends of the British Coalfields: Knockers, Pit-Ghosts, Dark Folklore Britain's Mines

A blue flame that pushes a coal-tub through the dark. A goblin who cuts the ropes and laughs. Birds whose cry means a man will not come up alive. Welcome to the haunted world of the British miner. For three centuries, hundreds of thousands of men and boys went down into the dark to hew the coal that built a nation. They worked in a world of constant danger - of gas, water, fire and fall - and out of that danger they wove one of the richest bodies of folklore in Britain. They believed in spirits who laboured beside them and spirits who killed them; they read omens in birds and lights and dreams; and when the pit took their own, they buried them with song and remembered them for generations. In Ghosts and Legends of the British Coalfields, you will descend into the lore of the mines. From the honest, wage-earning Bluecap of the northern pits to the Cornish Knockers who sailed to America, from the great disasters that scarred whole valleys to the quiet ghosts of the worked-out dark, this collection gathers the genuine folklore, the true history, and the hauntings of Britain's mining communities. Drawing on Victorian mining records, the folklore of the coalfields, and the documented history of the pits, this book grounds every legend and every haunting in real places and real people - and honours the miners and their dead with the respect they are owed. Descend into the dark and discover: - The Bluecap and Cutty Soams: the wage-earning spirit and the malicious bogle of the northern pits.- The Knockers of the Tin: Cornwall's mine spirits and the Tommyknockers who crossed the Atlantic.- The Disasters That Scarred the Valleys: Hartley, Trimdon Grange, Senghenydd and Gresford, and the songs that carry their memory.- The Silent Collieries: the ghosts of a vanished industry and the villages it left behind. > Take up your lamp, and go down into the dark.