robin hoods secret grave

[greenw]

I may have put this on before folks--if so sorry, I cant find it if I have!


The death of Robin Hood is a well known legend. He was treacherously bled to death by the wicked prioress of Kirklees nunnery, a small Cistercian house near Brighouse, West Yorkshire. The outlaw's gory and unheroic end is shrouded in mystery. Who was the evil nun and why did she commit so foul a murder? What was the role of Red Roger of Doncaster, who was present at the scene of crime? Was he a priest and also the prioress's lover? Who WAS the prioress? Was she Dame Elizabeth de Stainton, whose grave can still be seen at Kirklees, or was it Sister Mary Startin, who died of the Black Death in 1350?


All that is left of this medieval whodunit is a ruined grave, hidden in deep woodland, and the derelict priory gatehouse of Kirklees where Robin was so gruesomely done to death. Was the famous outlaw a vitim of thwarted passion,pagan sacrifice, bad nursing, accident, natural causes or - vampirism ? The entire area where this horrific drama took place is shrouded in ,according to one old book, " .....a mystery which local people only reluctantly tried to penetrate.The mystery was helped physically by the thick shroud of trees that surrounded the place and was sustained by local tales of prioresses and nuns and of the death of Robin Hood......."


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THE HAUNTING OF ROBIN HOOD’S GRAVE


"Terribilis Est Locus Iste" Dreadful is this place - Abbe Berenger Sauniere, Renne-le-Chateau.


"The Armytage family lived over the brow of the hill on a splendid site once occupied by Cistercian nuns. It was called Kirklees. There was more than an insularity which set the mansion apart. There was a mystery about it which local people only reluctantly tried to penetrate. The mystery was helped physically by the thick shroud of trees that surrounded the place and was sustained by local tales of ghosts of prioresses and nuns and or the death of Robin Hood whose grave is so imperturbably marked as lying within Kirklees grounds in spite of any facts which might suggest to the contrary. " THE LAND OF LOST CONTENT.


This would appear to be the first reported mention of ghostly activity around Robin Hood's Grave, but considering the history of Robin's death - cursed by a witch on his way to the nunnery, murdered by an apostate nun and cast into an unhallowed grave - it is hardly surprising that the site is reputed to have unquiet spirits hovering around. An elderly lady, Mrs Edith Ellis, witnessed silver arrows in the sky above Kirklees when visiting her old aunt at Hartshead in the early years of the last century. She also reports hearing Robin calling for Marian.


Another sighting was made by a tenant farmer of Kirklees in 1926. "One day," he recalls, " I was sitting on the grave shooting rabbits. As I was about to shoot I felt a tap on my shoulder, and my shotgun went off accidentally, removing two of my front teeth on its recoil. There was nobody to be seen at the time. On another occasion I was on my way home from the Three Nuns. As I was walking through the woods something fell out of a tree and knocked me to the ground. When I got up I could see the old gatehouse. In the window I could clearly see a man with a bow. My family always said it was the drink, but it was Robin Hood's ghost."


In 1963 guitarist Roger Williams took an unofficial stroll up to Robin's grave with a friend. About twenty yards from the grave he saw a white robed woman who suddenly seemed to glide towards the two men. What made Roger's hair stand on end was how silently she moved over the twigs and bracken. At about five yards from Roger the woman stopped and stared at him with "dark,mad eyes." Then she moved away and vanished. It was 2.30 p.m. on a bright,sunny day. Roger Williams saw the same apparition again in 1972, in full daylight, and again she stopped a few yards from him and his companion. This time Roger remembered a few more details. The woman was wearing a

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long white dress with a square neck and long sleeves which accords with the habit of a Cistercian nun. Again she looked at him angrily before moving off, but the eerie sequel to this experience was that Roger's house then experienced a series of strange noises and bangings. After this, Roger swore that "wild horses would not drag me up there again."


Mark Gibbons, one of the founder members of Gravewatch, had a similar experience

in 1998. With other members of the group he had gone up to try and find Robin's grave one moonlit night, but they had got lost. Suddenly Mark saw a white figure pointing in a certain direction - which turned out to be where the grave was situated. Mark also experienced a sensation of great evil and hatred.


Shortly after this a reporter Judith Broadbent, from the Dewsbury Reporter, and a photographer colleague, Sue Ellis were allowed to visit the gravesite by the owner. While wandering around she heard heavy footsteps behind her and she was pulled to the ground by invisible forces. She shouted "get away" and her friend came rushing to help her. Her camera had jammed while trying to photograph the grave. A week later Sue was taken seriously ill and was paralysed f from the neck downwards for two weeks. The two reporters later wrote this article up for Yorkshire Life magazine, much of its content being taken from Yorkshire Robin Hood Society literature, including the next sighting, which appeared in THE UNEXPLAINED magazine in 1992, prior to the publication of their article.


This was when vampires entered the arena, introduced to the increasing enigmatic situation by a Bishop of the Holy Grail Church and patron of the Yorkshire Robin Hood Society. In 1992 the Bishop and two colleagues, attempted an exorcism at Kirklees. This had come about as a result of the Yorkshire Robin Hood Society asking for the site to be blessed by the local vicar. Unfortunately permission to perform such a ceremony had been unequivocally refused to both clergymen. The Bishop, however, was made of sterner stuff than the local pastor ! He was renowned for his involvement in the notorious Highgate Vampire affair in the nineteen seventies and it occurred to him that vampires might be behind the legend of Robin being bled to death and this needed urgent spiritual intervention - and he was the man for the job, with or without official sanction ! Suffice to say that on his clandestine visit to the grave the bishop came across the body of a blood drained goat, diabolical rune signs of the priory gatehouse, fingr width holes in the ground round the grave - suggesting vampiric activity - and was confronted by a darkly clad woman who turned into a hag with red staring eyes.


A further sighting by another nocturnal visitor proved a terrifying experience when she saw two figures hovering in the trees surrounding the grave, who she took to be the evil prioress and her paramour Red Roger of Doncaster. " I felt, and saw, what I can only describe streams of evil pouring out of the trees towards me" the witness stated. A lady from Nottingham, who visited the grave in the summer of 2000, experienced a psychic communication with Robin at the graveside, as did Robin Hood expert John de Locksley of the London Robin Hood Club, who also boldly battled through the giant ferns, murderous brambles and other lethal obstacles of the Kirklees rain forest to stand by his hero's grave one wild,wet October night the same year !


It is true that Robin's grave was excavated in an amateurish way by a Victorian Armytage (who was reputed to be in his cups at the time) and the ground beneath found to be undisturbed, but the many historical documents naming Kirklees as Robin's final resting place cannot be ignored. The fact is, his bones could lie anywhere on that hillside, while a gravestone resembling the original one drawn by Dr Johnstone, is to be found in nearby Hartshead churchyard - to where it may have been moved during the Civil War.






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Many visitors to the grave have recorded their experiences for posterity, including the following quote from a Victorian tourist :

"I had the strangest emotions when I first stood over the grave of this old forest hero. I stood there and had no words, nor can I find any now to tell what my feelings were. Bravehearted Robin ! Thou hast found a fit resting place in this glorious park, among these solemn yews and silent trees ."A hundred years later it is a different story:


"There it was, looming out of the dark, a massive, broken edifice, a huge ship of stone, wrecked in the everglades of Kirklees. Fallen pillars and twisted railings were were all that remained on Yorkshire's buried treasure. We had found Robin Hood's Grave."

MARK GIBBONS, SECRETS OF THE GRAVE.


Maybe the last word should be with Victorian poet, George Searle Phillips, a friend of the Brontes, who visited the grave in 1848, and wrote an epic poem, a small section of which is printed below :




Tread lightly o'er the earth and speak no word

Till the Great Spirit doth unloose your tongues

For where those yew trees nod their funereal plumes

Upon the highest platform of the hill,

Lies gentle Robin Hood, his mighty heart

All muffled up in dust and his bright eyes

Quenched in eternal darkness. Never more

Shall the woods echo to his bugle horn,

Or his unerring arrow strike the deer

Swift flying, till it hits the bloody grass.


Update of Exorcism 2005


Robin Hood's Ghost finally laid to Rest Two renowned psychic researchers from London, David Farrant, President of

the British Psychic and Occult Society, and Gareth Medway, distinguished author of Lure of the Sinister, have hastened north in order to rescue two distressed damsels, members of the Yorkshire Robin Hood Society.

Un-merry maidens Catherine Fearnley and Barbara Green have for some time now been coming under attack, from malevolent forces that are said to lurk around the famous outlaw's grave at Kirklees in West Yorkshire. These sinister influences, said to be the ghost of the prioress who murdered Robin and then turned into a vampire, have in the past been successful in undermining the legend of Robin Hood of Yorkshire, and Robin's Grave has been left in a derelict condition, rotting away in the deep, dark mysterious woods of the Kirklees estate near Brighouse.

Barbara and Catherine have tried to bring Robin out from under his dusty cloak of secrecy and to restore his grave to its former glory, but to no avail. Their efforts have been thwarted by forces beyond their control, some of them of a supernatural origin.

Enter Sir Gareth and Sir David, who came galloping to the rescue armed with their magical accoutrements and other occult equipment, and staged a full-scale exorcism at Robin's Grave after dark, to banish the evil forces said to lurk there, and to free the spirit of Robin Hood and the wicked prioress from their torments.

Their lengthy ritual, following an arduous secret trek to the grave last night, was based on ancient esoteric tradition known only to a few, and was completely successful in that the powers of darkness at the grave have now been fully dispersed.