Whitby and Wilkie Collins: Part 3 of Psychic Investigator Paul Fitz-George's Series

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In Part 1, Psychic Investigator Paul Fitz-George introduced us to haunted Whitby. In Part 2, he described its influence on Dracula author Bram Stoker. In Part 3 he continues his tour of “Whitby’s Fascination for the Literati or How Dracula Met the Jabberwocky” with how Whitby inspired author Wilkie Collins.

That might be all we could say about Collins and his association with Whitby, ‘not a ghost in sight!’ I hear you say, save for his fictional white lady.

However, as a result of the research I carried out for my book The Whitby Ghost Book (yes, it’s plug time), I was told by local people about two instances of white, wraith-like apparitions that appeared on the cliff across the road from the Royal Hotel and in the area between the cliff top and the beach below.

The first of these stories was told to me by a nice old chap who as a boy scout in 1905, was enjoying a campfire on the beach below the hotel with his fellow scouts. He recounted his experience to me in the following words.

‘It was in the evening and suddenly as we looked up to the cliff top, we saw a white misty figure – you couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman – floating down the face of the cliff. We ran over to the spot where we thought it would land, but it disappeared the instant before it reached the sand. There was no fog or mist about and to this day we just don’t know what it was’.

Extraordinary? Yes, but this was not a sighting by one person, it was a mass sighting by several scouts, and no explanation was ever found for what they actually saw.

The next sighting was in the early eighties, this time it was a couple out walking their dog at night in the same spot and they saw more-or-less the same white wraith slowly descend the cliff and vanish before it touched the beach below. As the wraith vanished the woman turned to her husband to discuss the apparition, only to find that he had vanished also! Well not vanished actually, she could see him doing an Olympic sprint down the far end of the beach, too scared to stay with her and doggie (brave fellow) and also too scared to ever talk about it again.