31 Days of Hallowe’en Tales: Day 28 - The White Lady of Old Whitegate Lane

31 Days of Hallowe’en Tales: Day 28 – The White Lady of Old Whitegate Lane

by Zowie Swan October 28, 2023
- 0 views
- 0

On the 28th Day of our Halloween Tales inspired by local folklore, we learn about a terrible act of desperation by a young woman that has left her soul roaming the area of Whitegate Drive.

In the days of Blackpool’s infancy, when the town was barely more than a coastal hamlet in the Hundred of Amounderness, there was an extensive parcel of common land that stretched all the way from Thornton in the north to Lytham in the south. Great gates accessing this land lay along it’s borders and each was given a name to denote it.

At this time, much of the landscape was still laid to meadow and pasture, after all Fylde is the Saxon word for field. It was a desolate and lonely place, with the sea-bitten coast and the sand blown dunes to the west and the deadly marshes, mosslands and murky-watered dykes in the east. The scant cottages that huddled against the storms of the Irish Sea were late-medieval long-houses, simply constructed using clay carved from the cliffs themselves and cobbles taken straight from the brine bleached beach.

After the Commons Act was passed, the land was divided and portioned off to those who would lay claim to it, and plots were allocated to local landowners. The gates of the old common remained in memory for some time and the names for these gates prevailed even longer still. There was Mary’s Gate, the Milking Gate and the still familiar Starr Gate and Squire’s Gate, which was named after Squire Clifton.

These old gates were useful landmarks to the local population and Mary’s Gate in particular is connected to a tragic tale of infanticide that gave birth to a terrible haunting.

No one knows what became of the mother, but it wasn’t long until passers-by began to be terrified by an apparition of a woman in white.

In the late 1700s there was a young servant girl who lived at Fair’s Farm, which was on the west side of what is now Whitegate Drive. She was pregnant with an illegitimate child and on giving birth alone in secrecy, choked the new-born infant to death in fear of discovery. It is said that she took the baby to Mary’s Gate and buried the body at midnight, near the site of an old lime kiln.

No one knows what became of the mother, but it wasn’t long until passers-by began to be terrified by an apparition of a woman in white. She was seen to float across the gate, perhaps searching for the grave of the child, before disappearing into the surrounding fields. Sometimes she rushed violently at pedestrians, rattling the ghostly chains of her earthly sins.

The old Reverend Thomas Bryer and his wife were walking home one night to their parsonage, when the hour approached midnight. With the Witching Hour upon them, they began to feel the atmosphere change as they neared Mary’s Gate. Suddenly, they saw a solemn funeral procession, with a coffin draped in a white shroud carried by four tall, gaunt men. However, it is also said, that this was merely an optical illusion created by two escaped mares, one grey and one black. A couple of night mares indeed!

It is sometimes suggested, that Old Whitegate Lane, now Whitegate Drive, is called thus for being haunted by the White Woman of Mary’s Gate. The history of its name may have been lost to time, but the remnants remain for those who care to look hard enough.