Fitz
speaker
397 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Fitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
On the Baxter Gate side, the other three houses in the terrace all have two windows per floor, but the Ripley House only has one and a half.
The other three houses have a front door on the ground floor on the right-hand side, but the Ripley house has three-quarters of a bricked-up door frame that looks like someone has taken a giant cutting implement and sliced away the last section of the building.
The right-hand windows on the first and second floors are bricked up too, but the halves of the frames remain, cut straight down the middle, just like the door. Walking around to the other side of the building on Victoria Square, the original brickwork that makes up most of the house trails off in a raggedy edge at the further side.
The soft, rounded brown and pink brickwork ending abruptly and jarringly with patches of bright square and obviously newer red brick filling in the gaps and forming what appears to be a replacement wall ending the run of terraces at the corner of the street. But what on earth would have caused anyone to chop off a whole section of their house?
Well, according to James J. Brown, author of the original Ghost Walk of Whitby, it was all down to a particularly bothersome ghost. Brown tells of how the scientifically-minded Dr Ripley encountered quite the problem when, in 1870, his house began to be haunted by a ghost who would appear at one of the windows overlooking Brunswick Street.
And if it wasn't bad enough just dealing with the dichotomy of having a spectre he didn't believe could exist haunting him, the ghost made things ten times worse by leaning out of the window and terrifying folk in the street by grimacing at them.
The apparition's appearance at the window became so frequent that word got about the town and people started to gather outside the window to gawk, which just seemed to make the haunting worse. The ghost would almost appear to wait until it had attracted sufficient attention and then promptly disappear, drawing gasps of astonishment and horror from the assembled onlookers.
Eventually, large crowds would wait outside the house, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Phantom, and the whole debacle just became too much for Dr Ripley. Now, in the 19th century, it wouldn't have been unusual to call in a priest to resolve a problem such as this. But Ripley's issue was that if he called in help to exercise the spirit, it would mean admitting its existence.
Maybe he truly couldn't reconcile the apparition with his staunch views on science. Or maybe he couldn't face more gossip and speculation after the debacle with Flint Jack. But, whatever his reasons, Dr. Ripley decided to deal with the ghost once and for all, by pulling down the part of his house where it was seen. So, does this tie in with what we can see of the building on the ground today?
Well, yes. The story states that the ghost appeared at the window overlooking Baxter Gate, which would indeed be the end of the house where we can see that a chunk has been ripped off and rebuilt in obviously different materials, leaving two half windows and three quarters of a doorframe behind. Did Dr Ripley really tear down bits of his house because of a grimacing ghost?
Or is that just a convenient story to explain the odd appearance of the house he used to live in?
Andrew White, in his A History of Whitby, writes of the legend that it was a whole house at the corner of Baxtergate that was pulled down to put an end to the appearances of a ghost that had crowds gathering in the garden to catch a glimpse of it, and that the materials of this demolished house were reused to build a series of smaller ones. But what of the oddly truncated house we can see today?
For all we know, they could both be true. Maybe the terraced row of houses standing today were built of the reused materials from the original haunted house, and that haunting just transferred to the new buildings, leading to one owner taking the same drastic measures all over again.
We may never know, but ask the ghost tour guides of Whitby, and they will tell you that those weird half-windows are the result of a man of science ending the reign of a frightful phantom who liked to terrify the onlookers of Brunswick Street.
We'll return to this street, packed as it is with the historical buildings, before too long, to dive into the history and hauntings of a 16th century building just across the road. But first, I want to take you a little further down the narrow street of Baxtergate to hear more about Whitby's history of smuggling.
And nothing brings to mind this checkered past more than a tiny squat little building on Baxter Gate, tucked away between a muddle of bigger buildings from a muddle of historical periods. Some tall and square with sash windows and four floors, some ornately decorated premises in Victorian red brick, others the modern, long and low buildings we're used to seeing on high streets around the country.
Even an 18th century chapel is thrown into the mix. But I would bet that the oldest building on this street is the quaint little place known as the Old Smuggler, or these days, the Smuggler's Café.
The Saltersgate Inn is actually just outside Whitby, in the wild and epically beautiful landscape of the Yorkshire Moors. Of course, once smuggled goods had been clandestinely ferried away from the harbour, that wasn't the end of their journey.
because it wasn't just Whitby folk who wanted to partake of the black market luxuries, and there was wealth to be made at neighbouring towns inland, such as the market town of Pickering. We've heard in previous episodes how isolated Whitby was from the rest of the country, due to being surrounded by extensive rolling moorland, which could be difficult and dangerous to traverse.
So, roadside inns where weary travellers could find food, shelter and rested horses were crucial, which, since 1648, is exactly what the Saltersgate Inn did. But those same coaching inns could also serve as a very handy staging post for smugglers, if the landlord could be persuaded to participate, of course.
Showing 121–140 of 397 · page 7 of 20
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