Headless Ghosts and Hob Hole Cures: A Victorian Visitor Explores Staithes

In 1889, the antiquarian journal Old Yorkshire published “A Ramble in North Yorkshire,” a vivid account of Staithes and the surrounding coast. Part travel writing, part folklore collection, and part social commentary, it captures how Victorian visitors viewed the village and its people.

Some of the descriptions are wonderfully observant. Others are deeply patronising by modern standards. The anonymous author was fascinated by what they saw as the “quaintness” and superstition of the fishing community, often interpreting local customs as signs of ignorance rather than resilience, tradition, and tight-knit co-operation.

Today, many of the stories mentioned in the article still survive in local memory — from Captain Cook’s famous shilling to the ghost of Cowbar Nab and the curing powers of Hob Hole at Runswick Bay.

The original text can be read below this commentary:

“A fishing station nestling between two high cliffs…”

The writer describes Staithes as:

“a fishing station nestling between two high cliffs, its many red-roofed, white-walled cottages dotted in romantic confusion upon the side of a steep hill overlooking the sea.”

Victorian visitors were often struck by the seemingly chaotic layout of the village. What they saw as “romantic confusion” was actually the result of centuries of informal building. Before stricter regulation arrived in the 19th century, villagers often built wherever space could be found on the steep hillside. This produced the maze of narrow passages, “nicks,” and yards that still characterises old Staithes today.

The comment that one might step “from the door of one house down the chimney of another” sounds exaggerated, but anyone who has climbed the maze of old paths of Staithes will recognise the feeling.

“An unmusical dialect”

The author calls the Staithes dialect “unmusical,” but also notices its strong Scandinavian influence.

Modern linguistic studies confirm that many Staithes fishing terms had direct Old Norse roots. Words such as skep (a basket), graithe (fishing gear), and skaning (shelling mussels) all connect the village to its Viking-age past. Older fishermen often claimed that Yorkshire and Norwegian crews could understand each other surprisingly well when meeting at sea.

Rather than being crude or isolated speech, the dialect preserved centuries of maritime history.

The Fishwives of Staithes

One of the most striking passages describes the women carrying fish creels from the boats:

“bare-headed, bare-legged, muscular, healthy women…”

Although the Victorian writer seems shocked by their appearance, the passage accidentally reveals just how physically demanding life was for Staithes women.

Fishwives carried huge baskets of fish and mussels, helped launch cobles through the surf, gathered bait from freezing rocks, managed households during long absences at sea, and often controlled the family finances as well. Laura Knight remembers trying to carry one of the women's baskets on her own head, and being frozen to the spot, unable to take a single step.

Their labour was essential to the survival of the fishing industry.

Captain Cook and the “Stolen” Shilling

The article repeats one of Staithes’ most famous legends — the story that young James Cook stole a shilling from the shop where he was apprenticed.

The villagers themselves strongly disagreed with this version. According to local tradition, Cook merely exchanged a bright “South Sea shilling” for one of his own dull coins, and was wrongly accused of theft.

The author seems amused by the debate, but the story mattered deeply to Staithes people. Cook was one of their own, and defending his honesty became part of local identity.

Interestingly, the article mentions that the counter and till from the original shop could still be seen in the village in 1889. Historical records suggest that parts of William Sanderson’s original shop were reused when “Captain Cook’s Cottage” on Church Street was built after coastal erosion threatened the earlier building. And I've read before that these materials were used by Reg when putting our museum together.

Whether Cook stole the coin or not, the incident supposedly pushed him toward Whitby and a maritime career — eventually leading to the first circumnavigation of the globe.

“Ignorance” and the Reckoning of Shares

The writer mocks the fishermen for carefully dividing earnings into shillings one by one, implying they could not properly calculate money.

In reality, the “reckoning” system was part of a highly ritualised fishing economy. Boats were jointly owned in complicated shares, and catches were divided among crews made up of relatives and neighbours. Publicly counting and distributing each coin ensured complete transparency and fairness.

What looked to outsiders like backwardness was actually a social system designed to maintain trust in an extremely dangerous and uncertain industry.

Luck, Witches, and the Sea

The article records several local superstitions:

• refusing to sail on Good Friday or Christmas Day,

• fearing to meet a woman while walking to the boat,

• burning a heart stuck with pins to break bad luck,

• and the belief that a fishing net dragged across the old cockfighting ground became unusable.

Many of these customs reflected the harsh realities of fishing life. A single storm or failed catch could destroy a family financially. In communities living so close to danger, rituals and taboos helped people feel they had some control over unpredictable events.

The “heart stuck with pins” ritual is especially well documented in local folklore. Later accounts usually describe a pigeon’s heart rather than a sheep’s, burned at midnight by the fishermen’s wives in silence to break a witch’s curse.

The Ghost of Cowbar Nab

One of the eeriest passages describes fishermen terrified of crossing near Cowbar after dark because of a “headless phantom of a woman.”

This was almost certainly the ghost of Hannah Grundy. In 1808, she was reportedly killed when a falling rock from the cliff struck and decapitated her while she sat near the shore.

Stories claimed her ghost wandered the cliffs carrying her head in a basket. The fear of ghosts was so widespread that fishermen sometimes preferred to sleep at Port Mulgrave rather than walk home past the cemetery after nightfall.

Hob Hole and the “Kin Cough”

The article also records the famous cure associated with Hob Hole at Runswick Bay.

Mothers brought children suffering from whooping cough (“kin cough”) to the cave and recited:

“Hob, Hob, Hob! My bairn’s got t’kin cough: Tak’t off; tak’t off.”

Even into the 20th century, some families still believed in Hob Hole’s healing powers.

Fossil Snakes and St. Hilda

The writer finishes with ammonites found in the local shale cliffs, connecting them to the legend of Hilda of Whitby.

According to medieval tradition, St. Hilda rid the area of snakes by turning them into stone — an imaginative explanation for the spiral ammonite fossils so common along the Yorkshire coast.

These fossils were sometimes carved with snake heads and sold as “petrified serpents” to visitors.

Reading Victorian Accounts Today

“A Ramble in North Yorkshire” tells us as much about Victorian attitudes as it does about Staithes itself.

The author admired the village’s dramatic scenery and colourful customs, but often treated local people as relics of an older, stranger England. Yet beneath the condescension, the article preserves invaluable details about dialect, folklore, fishing customs, and everyday life that might otherwise have been lost.

For modern readers, it offers both a fascinating historical source and a reminder that every generation interprets communities through its own assumptions and prejudices.

A Ramble in North Yorkshire - the full text

WHAT has become of all the legends, the superstitions, and the strange tales that entered so closely into the life of our fathers? Have they faded away, like Alastor's vision, leaving behind nothing but a subtle influence in poem and song; or, like Celt before Saxon, have they sought shelter in the mountains, the rocks, and the marshes? A ramble along the coast or in some secluded spot whence commerce is but dimly seen and indirectly felt, will often lay bare their haunts.

Take our own county, for instance, with its streams, its valleys, and its mountains, at no very distant past the abode of pixie, or fairy, or sprite, or ghost, or goblin, that Teutonic imagination loved to clothe with all the strength of weird realism. Scarce a village which has not its legend, and scarce a legend in which Teutonic or Roman elements cannot be traced.

A fruitful field for legends and quaint customs may be found in the neighbourhood of Staithes, on the north-east coast of Yorkshire. Staithes is a fishing station nestling between two high cliffs, its many red-roofed, white-walled cottages dotted in romantic confusion upon the side of a steep hill overlooking the sea. Indeed some are built into the hill, so that to step from the door of one house down the chimney of another seems easy. Streets there are none. Every path is painfully crooked and ill paved, and for a stranger to descend through the village after nightfall is difficult and even dangerous.

And the people! Well, they are a strong, bony race, speaking an unmusical dialect, which draws force from many an old Danish word and turn of expression. Yonder, upon a tawny beach, rock-bound and sea-girt, is a familiar group- brown-faced men, in blue worsted jerseys, sou'-westers, pilot cloth trousers, and high boots, unloading a trawler and putting the fish into creels, which those bare-headed, bare-legged, muscular, healthy women, carry to the curing or packing sheds.

It was among the fathers of these very men that Captain Cook, the circumnavigator, started life. The little shop on the southern beach, where Cook was apprenticed to a grocer and draper, has long ago been swept away by the But part of the counter at which he served, and the till from which he stole the shilling, may still be seen at one of the village stores.

By-the-bye, the good folks of Staithes deny that their illustrious townsman was ever guilty of theft. Their version is that Cook exchanged a bright, new sea shilling for an ordinary dull one, and being unable to prove his innocence to his master's satisfaction, ran away to Whitby and became a sailor. Probable as this version is, there hangs an air of suspicion about the way in which it is told; so that, after all, something may be urged in favour of the better-known story that upon the theft of a coin depended the first circumnavigation of the world.

How wonderfully ignorant many of these fishermen are even in this nineteenth century, the mother of School Boards and the nurse of Mechanics' Institutes! Who now would expect to find living a body of men to whom the current coin of the realm is a puzzle. Yet at Staithes, where, say, seven men share the ownership of a fishing boat and have to divide, say, £14, it is often the custom to change the money into shilling pieces and dole them out one at a time. The greatest scholar has been seen to call the men around him, and place before each in turn one shilling, making the equality of distribution doubly sure by repeating the words-

Here's one for you and one for thee;

Here's another for thee and another for you.

Is this sheer ignorance; is it custom; or has it anything to do with reverence for the coin which brought Cook so much luck? If it is ignorance, and superstition is the handmaid of ignorance, then superstition among the fisher folk of Staithes should be not one, but a bevy of maidens. And an amusing bevy it is, too. What man ever saw the Staithes fisher put out to sea on Sundays, Christmas Days, or Good Fridays; and who is the old sailor among them who does not think himself ill-fated to meet a woman just on leaving the house to launch his boat? Let the first person he meets be a male, and he starts with a light heart and a sense of secure fortune; but let that same person be a woman-even his own sweetheart-and back home he goes like a whipped hound.

Do the boats return without fish? Then some charm or spell has been working. An antidote must be had. There are middle-aged men living who have seen the antidote applied. A sheep's heart is taken, stuck all over with pins, and then burned in a huge bonfire on the beach, the spell-bound fishermen carousing and dancing around. Thus the charm is broken.

But no sticking of pins, no sacrifice of sheep's heart can disenchant the net which some malicious wag has dragged over the cockpit, or hollow at the rear of the village where cock-fights took place. So desecrated, the net cannot be used for fishing until at least one season has elapsed. And-remember this all who visit this charming locality-you are no friend, but foe, if you enter a room where Staithes fishermen are drinking their "shipping pots" or "crew-changing cups," and do not drink to the dregs the proffered glass.

Bold and fearless upon the sea, on land these fishers fall an easy prey to shadowy and imaginative dreads. To say that many have faith in ghosts were to accuse of no unusual folly, for boggart-hunting is still a favourite pastime in most of our rural parishes. In spiritual manifestations they put unshaken confidence, and woe betide the unlucky wights who have to pass the churchyard at nightfall, or to cross the diminutive wooden bridge at the foot of Colburn Nab, where stalks the headless phantom of a woman, killed half a century ago by falling cliffs. Go alone they will not, but each huddled close to the other, will not dare to speak until the object of terror is passed. Then away they scamper, shouting and whistling as if His Majesty of the Dark Kingdom was riding hard at their heels.

Among the women there linger a few of those medical charms of which nearly every English housewife keeps a specimen or two. Roasted mouse, buried beef, bread and butter given by a virgin, and hairy worm necklaces are among these fairy cures.

An interesting example is that of the spirit Hob, who was and is by some-supposed to live at Runswick. Runswick, by the way, stands south of Staithes, upon one of those fine but treacherous cliffs which, two hundred years ago, slipped into the sea, and carried with them a whole village.

Here, on the southern arm of a magnificent bay, is a cavern, once a hundred feet deep, but now considerably shortened by diggers who burrow the earth for jet This is none other than the famous Hob Hole, whither Cleveland mothers brought children who had the whooping-cough. Standing at the mouth of the cave with the sick child in her arms, the mother would invoke the spirit thus :-

Hob, Hob, Hob !

My bairn's got t'kin cough :

Tak't off; tak't off.

Even yet there are mothers who hold that Hob has the cure of "kin cough."

From Staithes north to Skinningrove is an easy walk along the firm, fine sweep of sand which hems the blue waters of the sea. Bright birds, butterflies, curious shells, and stones abound; while the geologist's attention is drawn to the craggy cliff-tops of oolite sandstone, with croppings of ironstone and steep terraces of shale and diluvium.

From the shale deposits may be picked many specimens of ammonites, which, with the nearness to Whitby, recall the legend of St. Hilda, whose abbey has adorned this cliff-line for over twelve centuries. In those early days, when the monastery of St. Peter was founded at Whitby, Cleveland, says the chronicle, was infested with snakes, which, through the prayers of "Holy Hilda" - patroness of Caedmon-were changed into stones. After this pretty fashion would ancient scientific investigators explain the origin of ammonites or "fossil snakes."

Skinningrove is a half-fishing, half-mining village, picturesquely placed at the sea end of a deep valley. Hence was shipped to the Tees the first cargo of oolite ironstone to be tested and rejected for a time as worthless quarry rubbish.

Here, too, is cherished the history of that seaman which, Sir Thomas Chaloner tells us, was caught in 1563 by certain fishers, who held him " many weeks in an olde house, giving him fish to eate, for all other fare he refused. Instead of voyce he shreaked, and showed himself courteous to such as flocked farre and neare to visit him; faire maydes were wellcomest to his harbour, whome he woulde beholde with a very earnest countenance, as if his phlegmaticke breast had been touched with a spark of love." This amorous seaman escaped at last, yet not as one that would "un-mannerly depart without taking of his leave," for, "from the mydle upwards he raised his shoulders often above the waves, and makinge signese of acknowledgeing his good entertainment to such as beheld him on the shore, as they interpreted yt."

Many years after, say the old villagers, this man came back and haunted the beach with much horrible groaning, heard for miles in the mainland when the winds were hushed and the sea rested unmoved as a standing pool. Then it was that no fisherman dare put forth though "thyrste of gain do drive him on, houlding an opinion that the sea, as a greedy beaste, raging for hunger, desyres to be satisfyed with men's carcases." This graceful legend was invented, no doubt, to account for the calling of the sea along a little fresh-water creek which turns and twists in the valley until lost in the waves of the German Ocean.